Child Poverty and No Recourse to Public Funds

Debate between Neil Coyle and Olivia Blake

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.