Child Poverty and No Recourse to Public Funds

Neil Coyle Excerpts

Wednesday 11th June 2025 Westminster Hall

[Olivia Blake (Sheffield Hallam) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered child poverty and no recourse to public funds.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Dr Huq. I refer the House to my declaration in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests, on the help I receive from the Refugee, Asylum and Migration Policy Project and as co-chair of the all-party parliamentary group on migration.

I would like to start by paying tribute to the organisations in my constituency and across Yorkshire that work tirelessly to help migrant families, including South Yorkshire Refugee Law and Justice and City of Sanctuary Sheffield, and the organisations that provided me with valuable evidence and research ahead of this debate, including the no recourse to public funds partnership, Praxis, COMPAS—the University of Oxford’s Centre on Migration, Policy and Society—and the Institute for Public Policy Research.

Given the spending review today, the recent announcement on the immigration White Paper and the pending child poverty strategy, this debate could not be more timely. According to recent research by the IPPR, there are an estimated 1.5 million children in the UK living in poverty in families with migrant parents, accounting for more than a third of all children in poverty. Children in families with migrant parents are also more likely to be in very deep poverty, amounting to 21% of migrant children, compared with 8% of other children.

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation found that since 2019, there has been a 92% increase in the number of migrant households experiencing destitution. Despite those shocking statistics, the no recourse to public funds policy—which amounts to a blanket ban on access to the social safety net for the majority of migrants in the UK—remains largely absent from conversations about poverty and inequality.

No recourse to public funds is a condition tied to various immigration pathways: those without status, those seeking asylum, those with “British citizen: children” status, and children in families who have not secured EU settled status. It prohibits millions of people from receiving benefits, including universal credit, child benefit and personal independence payment, and from accessing social housing. The policy disproportionately impacts women, people of colour, low-income households with dependent children where family relationships have broken down, including victims of domestic abuse, and those with disabilities and long-term health conditions.

Research by the Women’s Budget Group found that the risk of living in poverty for migrant women with dependent children is particularly high, as they are more likely to be dependent on their partner both for their right to be in the UK and financially, as their ability to work is often restricted by labour market barriers, access to childcare and NRPF conditions. A study by Citizens Advice found that more than 80% of its clients who sought advice on no recourse to public funds and non-EU migrants’ access to benefits were from ethnic minority backgrounds.

Part of the reason that this policy remains absent from the wider conversations about poverty is the information gap. The Home Office does not collect data on how many children are currently impacted by NRPF in the UK, although I hope the upcoming transition to Atlas will allow the relevant data to be released soon. Estimates suggest that at the end of 2024, there were approximately 3.6 million people with no recourse to public funds conditions.

[Neil Coyle (Bermondsey and Old Southwark) (Lab)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this debate. Does she agree that the Home Office should not just be collecting and publishing data more regularly but should participate fully in the child poverty review, to ensure that this issue is resolved in the way it needs to be?

[Olivia Blake]

That is absolutely right. I will come on to the review later in my comments, but I thank my hon. Friend for putting that on the record.

The IPPR and Praxis estimate that around 722,000 children are affected by NRPF restrictions, of whom 382,000 are living in poverty. The NRPF partnership found that around three quarters of children subject to NRPF are likely to become permanent residents or British citizens. Also, migrant parents with NPRF conditions do not get the same help with their childcare costs, including the extended entitlement for working parents and universal credit support. That creates a double penalty. Without that support, many migrant parents, especially single mothers, are limited in their ability to work, while simultaneously being excluded from accessing income top-up from the social security system if their earnings fall short.

--- Later in debate ---

[Olivia Blake]

I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention. That statistic makes a stark point. He also makes a strong point about why the Government should consider these issues in the upcoming child poverty strategy.

We know that growing up in poverty has terrible short-term and long-term consequences, and there is mounting evidence to show the wide-reaching impact of poverty, particularly on migrant children. Children in affected households experience food insecurity, overcrowded housing, barriers to education, and serious mental and physical health risks. Poverty can also impact children’s opportunities to develop their social skills and build meaningful relationships during critical formative years. Therefore, I question the line of argument that says that these restrictions are in place to promote integration.

In their joint inquiry on the impact of immigration policy on poverty, the APPG on migration, of which I am a co-chair, and the APPG on poverty and inequality found that the no recourse to public funds policy is a huge contributor to deep poverty, child poverty, isolation and vulnerability. I am grateful for the ministerial response to our letter about the inquiry, but I urge Ministers to look at some of the findings in the report. Perhaps they could follow up on that point in writing. The findings are unsurprising, given that the widening of the policy was introduced by the former Government, as part of the hostile environment, with the very intention to make life more difficult for migrants in the UK. However, destitution by design policies are not just inhumane, but ineffective and very costly, with local authorities often having to foot the bill.

Councils provide essential safety net support to safeguard the welfare of families who have no recourse to public funds and are at risk of homelessness or destitution. That often leads to local authorities providing long-term support for households, with the average period of support lasting more than 600 days for families with children, and longer for adults with care needs. That places enormous pressure on already stretched local authorities, which receive no compensation or direct funding to support families with NRPF.

The NRPF Network found that, from within the 78 local authorities that supplied information for 2023-24, 1,563 households were being supported by the end of March 2024, at an average annual cost of £21,700 per household and a total annual cost of £33.9 million. In 2023-24, Sheffield city council spent at least £1.2 million supporting people with no recourse to public funds, and it did not get any compensation for that. COMPAS estimates that the number of families receiving local authority support in England and Wales has risen by over 150% since 2012-13, with local authority costs rising by almost £230%.

Despite statutory obligations under section 17 of the Children Act 1989, support for migrant families from local authorities remains very inconsistent. Many families remain locked out of local authority support as the threshold for accessing it is highly conditional, and there can be robust gatekeeping from local authorities—as they try to protect their budgets, I am sure. There is therefore an urgent need to standardise section 17, and to clarify guidelines on financial and housing assistance to ensure consistent support across local authorities.

[Neil Coyle]

Is my hon. Friend also aware that London councils spend about £46 million on providing emergency support to families affected by this condition? It makes a mockery of the claim that the policy is about no recourse to public funds, which is clearly a misnomer when such significant levels of public funds are being used.

[Olivia Blake]

I am pleased that my hon. Friend has made that point, because London Councils itself has previously described this issue as a

“direct cost shunt resulting from central government policy.”

The Local Government Association continues to call for this ambiguity to be resolved so that councils can support families affected by NRPF, many of whom it says are at risk of extreme hardship. This is not the edge of poverty; this is deep poverty.

That leads me on to another important point: legal aid. Certain visa holders can submit a change of conditions application to the Home Office to have NRPF conditions lifted, but the application process is complex and often requires legal advice to navigate and complete successfully. The process itself has been found to be unlawful in the High Court on numerous occasions, most recently because of lengthy delays in how decisions are being processed. There is an urgent need to address the long-term sustainability and accessibility of the legal aid system for immigration cases. In South Yorkshire, two out of five legal aid firms have stopped delivering legal aid immigration services entirely, and there was a gap between provision and need of nearly 9,000 cases across Yorkshire in 2023-24. This means that many migrants are being prevented from exercising their legal rights to apply for leave to remain, to change or renew their status, or to lift no recourse to public funds conditions.

In that context, I am concerned about the proposal in the Government’s recent immigration White Paper to extend the qualifying period for British citizenship to 10 years. That will lock more families into prolonged no recourse to public funds status and will inevitably pile more pressure on local authorities to pick up the pieces. We know that high visa costs and constant uncertainty prevent parents from planning long term, and the requirement to reapply for visas also heightens the risk of falling out of legal status. The IPPR found that 82% of migrants who borrowed money for visa renewals were in significant debt. I am also concerned that this short-sighted move undermines integration and creates an ever-growing population of second-class residents.

In a survey of its clients, Praxis found that three in four migrants feel that being on the 10-year route prevents them from feeling that they belong in the UK, despite most having lived here for over a decade. With a consultation on the immigration White Paper expected in the summer, will the Government consider the wide-reaching consequences that extending the qualifying period will have for migrant children, in particular? Has an assessment been made of the number of children and families who are likely to be pushed into poverty as a result of the White Paper’s proposed reforms?

Finally, I will end on the child poverty strategy. I welcome the Minister’s recognition of the distinct challenges faced by migrant children living in poverty and the confirmation that the strategy will include all children across the UK, including migrant children. However, this commitment must be matched by the Home Office’s meaningful involvement in the strategy’s development. The delay in publishing the strategy presents a valuable opportunity, as we now have the chance to turn the page on the hostile environment policy and work towards a strategy that genuinely encompasses all children. The strategy will fall short if it excludes this significant cohort.

Targeted action will be necessary for this group of children, as many levers that might help to lift other children out of poverty will have no impact on them. Given that, can the Minister say more about the cross-departmental work to provide solutions that specifically address this cohort? The lack of systemic data and official figures on the numbers affected by NRPF makes this particularly challenging. How can we deal with the distinct challenges faced by migrant children without knowing how many are affected?

I would be grateful if the Minister could tell us when the Government will provide accurate and up-to-date information on how many families and children are directly restricted by NRPF and how many British-born children are affected by this policy. The Child Poverty Action Group, the UK’s leading child poverty charity, has called for NRPF to be abolished for families with children, and the Work and Pensions Committee recommended in its 2022 inquiry that no family with children should be subject to NRPF conditions for more than five years.

--- Later in debate ---

[Kirsty Blackman]

I would be quite happy with that. I have no issue with it. I think that no recourse to public funds should not apply to anyone. I especially do not think that it should apply to any family with children under five. So many issues are created by no recourse to public funds.

Obviously, there are eligibility criteria for other social security funds. You cannot get universal credit if you are earning a hundred grand a year. Eligibility conditions are in place, and in some cases those conditions make a huge amount of sense, but if a family is here and has not been here very long, why should they not be able to claim PIP if they are working and need a bit of extra support in order to work? Personally, I do not see a problem with that, but then I think that migration is a good thing. I am not standing up in the main Chamber telling my constituents and the general public that migration is terrible and we need to stamp down on it.

Aberdeen is a significantly better city thanks to the number of people who have come from different countries to live in it. I love the education that my children are getting about how different cultures work, because of the number of people in Aberdeen who have different backgrounds. I think that is a good thing that we need. We need migration. Scotland has a very different landscape. We are in favour of migration to Scotland, particularly for some jobs. For the economic growth that the Government are striving for, we need migration in Scotland.

To return particularly to NRPF and child poverty, as I said, if we cannot get rid of no recourse to public funds entirely, getting rid of the situation in which families with children under five are subject to no recourse to public funds would be a good step forward.

As the hon. Member for Sheffield Hallam stated, there is a significant issue around the numbers. I do not have much faith that the Government will be able to produce any numbers on how many people have no recourse to public funds. I have asked a string of written parliamentary questions about this issue in the past. The previous Government were very clear that they had no idea how many times they had stamped “no recourse to public funds” on somebody’s visa. Trying to find out that information may be incredibly difficult. The No Recourse North East Partnership really struggled to identify the number of people in Aberdeen who needed our help and support, or who could potentially fall into a situation of poverty if they were, for example, made redundant or homeless, or had similar issues. We would like to know the number who could potentially be in that situation, and whose children could be in extreme levels of poverty as a result.

[Neil Coyle]

Is the hon. Member aware that the Work and Pensions Committee looked at this issue in a previous Session and put the figure at, I think, about 125,000 families with dependants? But the question is: why would the SNP policy be for children under five only, when the Work and Pensions Committee has already suggested that anyone with dependants should not be subject to no recourse?

[Kirsty Blackman]

As I said, I do not think that anybody should be subject to no recourse, but I looked at children under five as a first step, because those years are key. If it is going to be anybody with dependants of any age, I am equally happy with that. I am speaking in this debate as a Back Bencher about the issues that I have seen, rather than advancing the SNP policy. I should maybe have been clearer about that at the beginning, but this is about what things look like in my constituency and the concerns that have been raised with me.

I have heard doctors and health professionals talk about issues with rickets and malnutrition. Those are issues that we have not seen since 50 or 60 years ago, when people did not have access to good quality food. Food banks should not have to fill the gaps when we have a responsibility to all the children, everywhere, on these islands.

My other concern is about the dependency on other individuals that no recourse to public funds creates for families. If they cannot get support from the state, they may rely on friends to lend them money, support from religious communities, immoral lenders, or taking part in sex work to get money to provide food for their children. I have seen situations in which people who are being supported by religious communities are in relationships with significant domestic abuse and domestic violence, but cannot separate from their abusive partner, because they know that they will lose the support of the Church, and that is the only thing ensuring that their children are fed. I do not think that is an appropriate situation for the UK Government to force families into.

I wrote to the previous UK Government about that issue in relation to an individual constituent who was divorced from her partner. She was not able to have any relationship with her family, who lived in an African country, because they were so angry about her divorce and had threatened significant violence against her. I had written to the Home Office, suggesting that there was a real problem and that the children needed to be fed and supported. The Home Office said to me, “If she has such a problem with the situation, she can go home.” That was the only response it could think of. We have a responsibility to that woman and those children to provide them with a level of protection, because they are living here and it was not safe for the woman to go back to the country that she had been born in.

I agree that the length of time it takes for decisions to be made is a real problem. We have just had a visa approved for somebody whose case we have been helping with since July 2024, and that is a short period of time compared with some of them. One chap who has just had his visa approved has three children who have been struggling with no recourse to public funds. Thankfully, the school has stepped in and given them free school meals to ensure they are fed—but again there is no consistency in the decision making on free school meals, partly because we do not know which children it is who have no recourse to public funds, whose parents are not currently able to bring in an income and are not getting state support either. If there was more understanding about which children were in those categories, schools would be better placed to provide support.