22
Examination of witnesses
Eva Barnsley, Jacqueline Broadhead, Carole Littlechild and Clare Williams.
Q23 The Chair: Good morning, everyone. Welcome to the House of Lords Justice and Home Affairs Committee and one of our evidence sessions in our inquiry into family reunion. Welcome to our witnesses: Eva Barnsley, from London Councils; Jacqui Broadhead, director of the Global Exchange on Migration and Diversity at the Centre on Migration Policy and Society at Oxford; Carole Littlechild, chair of Nagalro, Children's Guardians, Family Court Advisers and Independent Social Workers; and Clare Williams, online, children's services manager at Hertfordshire County Council. Most of us have questions for you, and I ask colleagues to please indicate if you want to ask supplementaries; you all know the timing we try to work to.
I would like to start with the first question to set a bit of context. Local authorities have statutory duties to co-operate with third-party organisations in providing services to children in need. Can you tell us what agencies they mostly work with?
Eva Barnsley: I have a list here from boroughs I have been in contact with about this question. It is important to say that they have to co-operate with other local authorities often, as well as with certain VCS groups like Action for Children, and a range of community groups, particularly for children with disabilities. You also have City Connections and Age UK, which provide support and intervention for young carers. The Race Equality Foundation and other groups also provide training for facilitators. Other key agencies include schools, children's centres and nurseries.
Some of the local charities that families could not do without consist of local food banks, baby banks and so on for family members, but, again, the range of organisations and services is very broad. In completing a child and family assessment and intervention, the local authority will include all agencies involved with the family: namely, education, so schools; and various health bodies, such as GPs, health visitors and mental health departments. Then you have the police, if necessary, who may know the family, and a multi-agency agreement on how best to support the family. Other witnesses here today may have more to add on this point.
The Chair: It is a pretty long list, and “co-operate” does suggest both sides working together, which we will come on to.
Clare Williams: I would say all the agencies Eva has mentioned, and add just a few. Community navigators, for example, who have been working in our local area, have been incredibly important. Virtual School and the Red Cross have been particularly helpful, and our adult services department, as well as our fire and rescue service, have provided a range of volunteers who have also been very supportive. We have taken a whole-council approach to supporting families under the different schemes and we utilise expertise from a range of services.
The Chair: Thank you.
Jacqueline Broadhead: I would just add two specific agencies that I think are important for this group. The first is providers of immigration advice and information, and the second is ESOL provision, translation and interpretation providers.
The Chair: Absolutely, when you can find them. Carole, do you want to add to the list?
Carole Littlechild: This is not an area Nagalro is directly involved in, so I would pass on that question.
Q24 Lord Ricketts: Thank you very much to all witnesses for coming in. Again, as part of setting the context for those of us not as familiar with the territory as you are, I wonder if you could talk to us a bit about what is involved in welcoming an unaccompanied child as opposed to a child with an accompanying adult. Could you perhaps describe some of the additional services that are inevitably required, a sense of how much more difficult and complex it is to receive an unaccompanied child than one accompanied by parents or other supporters?
Could we start with Ms Williams, from the perspective of a county council, and then Ms Barnsley, from the London boroughs, and from partner organisations?
Clare Williams: There is obviously a slight difference, such as the Homes for Ukraine system, and I am sure someone else will come to this later if I do not cover it, but for unaccompanied children who arrive either spontaneously in Hertfordshire or are transferred via the National Transfer Scheme, the key difference compared to supporting children with family is that we would accommodate those children under Section 20 of the Children Act. The provision of accommodation involves a range of other statutory duties, but the first thing we would want to do is obviously find a placement for them, which is challenging in current times. Ideally, we would want to find a placement that matches the needs of the child, so one of the primary things we would do would be to initiate an assessment of need and identify the particular needs of individual children, looking at a range of issues.
We would also be thinking about recognising the likelihood that they have experienced trauma either on their journey from their country of origin or from their experiences within their country of origin, and we would want to consider safeguarding issues in relation to trafficking or modern slavery risks as well. We will consider what additional support might be required, including language support and education support.
Also within this context is what we would consider in the assessment; how we can keep that child connected with any family members who might be living in the UK, or in their families from their country of origin, because we recognise the importance of keeping those family links where possible or developing those family links if they are not identified at an early stage of the assessment. Following the assessment, we would then go on to provide a range of support and try to build on those links.
Lord Ricketts: Thank you very much. Ms Barnsley, looking across the London boroughs, as you do, I am also interested in whether you see large variations in the way individual councils conduct their responsibilities here.
Eva Barnsley: Yes, and I would just like to build on what was said, which was really helpful. Obviously, when a UASC arrives, the local authority responsibility is enormous because it becomes a corporate parent and so, as was already said, it is about accommodating and supporting them financially and helping them to meet all their needs. For UASC, the responsibility of the local authority continues until the young person is 25 years old, when they leave care legislation, but clearly, for a child with a family or adult relatives, the involvement may end much sooner once the family is established.
Focusing on London in particular, there are a large number of unaccompanied asylum seeker children. Under the national transfer scheme, the threshold for the number of UASC who can be in a borough has just been increased from 0.07% to 0.1%, but still there are a number of boroughs that are close to that new threshold and definitely over the previous threshold of 0.07%. In London, supporting unaccompanied children is a particular focus. Although support varies with different voluntary and community sector groups and different areas getting involved, and so on, it has been good when boroughs have been able to work together to make sure that they provide quite consistent support to this vulnerable cohort. We have definitely seen that, because, as has already been mentioned, there is different support in place for unaccompanied children arriving under different schemes like Homes for Ukraine; London borough councils have been able to work together to establish what exactly is required to support them fully.
The mental health needs of unaccompanied young people can also clearly result from the stresses of circumstances they fled from, such as violence, bereavement, exploitation and experiences during their journey to the UK. The trauma young people face is in addition to experiences of loss and separation from a family, so it is important to recognise those additional challenges in supporting unaccompanied asylum seeker children who have been through trauma. Some boroughs have said there has been difficulty in finding foster carers who can meet the UASC needs and understand their trauma, and stakeholders have sometimes raised concerns about the lack of support for young people placed in semi-independent placement. So it is obviously really important to make sure that support is thorough and holistic for these children in particular.
Lord Ricketts: Ms Littlechild, any particular thoughts from partner organisations, as it were?
Carole Littlechild: There have been several references to trauma, and it is encouraging to see that being considered, but it is a word that has taken hold recently, and people do not necessarily understand what we are talking about. It refers to complex trauma, not a one-off event, which I think Eva has rather rapidly indicated. In order to understand it, you need to know that the traumatic memory is frozen, so children cannot process things. They cannot think through things, so their behaviours are quite difficult to manage, and that is where the difficulty with finding foster carers who can understand that and manage to parent these children comes in.
One of our worries in Nagalro and partner organisations we work with, such as the Equal Justice for Migrant Children, Article 39 and so on, is that there are a lot of children coming in who are bypassing the system of the local authority because they are being scooped up by the Home Office, which looks through the prism of immigration and not at the best interests of the child, not understanding trauma, not giving time to assess it. There are no safeguards, because the safeguards we are talking about when it comes to these children and families are not binding or enforceable.
They are given only 14 days by the Home Office to get legal advice, for example, and it is even less, just seven days, if they are in detention for seven days. That is absolutely no time at all for any assessment to be done of the needs of these children. They may be disabled, they may have all kinds of other issues, but that cannot be looked at, and many of them are being placed in hotels or bed and breakfast, with no safeguards at all, some as young as 11. A statistic provided by ECPAT—End Child Prostitution in Asian Tourism—in August is that 1,606 children who arrived alone in England between July 2021 and June 2022 were placed in hotels by the Home Office, some of them as young as 11, and 45 of those children went missing.
The safeguards should be there. We have the childcare legislation to support these children. My colleagues have referred to it, and at its best it is brilliant, but there is a great welter of bypassing it. In fact, the Home Office recently advertised specifically for independent social workers to work for them and to do age assessments. We may come on to that later, because there is a big problem with age assessments for these children.
Lord Ricketts: Thank you very much indeed. Ms Broadhead, do you want to add anything?
Jacqueline Broadhead: Yes, I would add the point about immigration advice, not for obvious reasons of central function but for other types of support for children in care, which can sometimes mean that it goes unnoticed. If we think about the corporate parenting principles that Eva mentioned, the core question is essentially, "Would this be good enough for my child?", as well as effectively making decisions about the type of information that is provided from the moment of arrival, the options for unaccompanied asylum seeker children through to access to immigration advice in particular.
We know that in some areas there are droughts and deserts of immigration advice, but the question is how the local authority and foster carers, for example, provide access through to high-quality immigration advice that will mean that those children have the best chance of receiving independent, high-quality advice. An understanding of the difference between what happens up to 17 and a half years old and what happens afterwards, and the difference in provision that will be available when you are considered a child and afterwards, is not always well understood by social workers.
There are examples of good practice. I would point to some of the work that has been done by the Greater Manchester Immigration Aid Unit, collaborating with the local authority to embed immigration advice early in the process. I would just say that because it is not a core function of the way social services work for other cases, sometimes there can be a gap in the way local authorities view working with this cohort. In my view, good-quality, independent immigration advice is a gateway to everything else that we are talking about.
Q25 Baroness Primarolo: Thank you very much indeed for that information, I think we will want to pick up the Home Office points that Carole raised a bit later in the questions.
Eva, given the importance of what you said, quite rightly, about being a corporate parent meaning treating a child as you would treat your own—the best practice—and the complex assessment that is necessary, could you comment specifically on how you think the National Transfer Scheme has impacted on local authorities, particularly the London boroughs?
Secondly, could you comment on your experience since that transfer scheme became mandatory on all local authorities and whether it has helped, or whether, for example, it is cutting across the importance of the assessment of the child’s or the family's needs? Given the London borough focus, could you answer that question first, because the London boroughs commented on this scheme? Secondly, could Clare add further comments?
Eva Barnsley: Absolutely. We have talked about the importance of providing support for this vulnerable cohort, and clearly the National Transfer Scheme has been very important for making sure that no local authority receives too many unaccompanied children they cannot provide the necessary support for.
Talking first about the mandation, I have spoken to a number of boroughs about this, and local authorities have said that since mandation the National Transfer Scheme has been better and faster. London councils welcomed the decision to mandate the National Transfer Scheme last year. Most London local authorities have been finding placements and moving the children within five working days of referral, but receiving local authorities, particularly outside London, can still be hesitant sometimes, which can delay transfers.
Again, this can clearly be challenging for the child, because delays can impact their ability to get settled in a particular area. However, the increased pace of referrals has been noticeable, and the threshold changing to 0.1%, as I mentioned, means that far more London local authorities are now below that threshold and will receive more unaccompanied asylum seeker children.
I will touch on a number of points about the National Transfer Scheme and on the challenges that local authorities face in providing this group with the support they need. One local authority said that the large number of unaccompanied minors can be quite demanding on social teams in having to share referrals across the other teams. The issue of age assessments has already been raised today, but age assessments can require even more work and staff with expertise.
Additional pressures and impacts that boroughs are facing in relation to the National Transfer Scheme (NTS) which I think are worth mentioning are delays with decisions on asylum claims. Boroughs have raised strong concerns about the increased pressures on local authorities as a result of very lengthy decisions, particularly for former UASC care leavers. A letter was recently sent about this, so the Home Office is making efforts to reduce the backlog of decisions on asylum claims, which is clearly positive.
There are also general funding challenges. On 24 August, the Government announced an additional £6,000 for three months for children transferred within five days via the NTS to local authorities. This is welcome, but local authorities have asked about funding beyond this point to help with exceptional pressures, because there are a large number coming through and boroughs also face additional cost pressures supporting UASC through the funding that is provided.
I just want to reiterate, particularly for former UASC care leavers who still require a lot of support, that the funding that goes to local authorities to support these individuals greatly decreases when they turn 18. There is also a time limit of 28 days for the “Merton age assessment” in the finance regulations. When boroughs have to conduct age assessments, if the local authority takes longer than 28 days, the funding stops. This time frame continues to be unrealistic, particularly when local authorities have contingency hotels and multiple requests for age assessments.
Furthermore, with the changes a few weeks ago, the Government reiterated that Ukrainian unaccompanied minors who go into care will not be counted towards a local authority's UASC NTS threshold, despite calls for local authorities to count them in because there are similar pressures.
Those are just some of the key points and pressures around the NTS that I wanted to highlight
Baroness Primarolo: Clare, I want to hear what your experience was, as perhaps Hertfordshire is slightly different. Then I will come back to the time pressure problem and the relationship with the Home Office.
Clare Williams: Hertfordshire's experience is that prior to the National Transfer Scheme we had our own eastern region transfer scheme. We had a system of transfer between local authorities from those like Thurrock, which had a higher than average spontaneous arrival group transferring out to local authorities like Hertfordshire, which had less frequent spontaneous arrivals. Hertfordshire is a very large authority, so we can have a high number of children before we reach the threshold. We had embedded services and supports for unaccompanied minors because we already had quite a large group of young people, meaning that we were able to put those resources together to provide comprehensive support to children. In that sense, the National Transfer Scheme coming online did not actually change things very much for Hertfordshire, because we were already used to the processes of transfer and age assessment, et cetera—all the things that Eva has mentioned.
On the question about the difference that it being mandatory has made, the biggest difference has not been to do with it becoming mandatory. It is actually to do with the increase in the number of asylum seeking children arriving in the UK, which has increased the number of children who are transferred into Hertfordshire. The biggest challenge for Hertfordshire, I suppose, is finding suitable and appropriate placements for children, which again is not an issue linked solely to these children being unaccompanied minors but an issue of the provision of placements generally for any looked after child.
However, we have done some work, particularly with children who transferred from some London boroughs or who have been placed in London following their arrival into the UK, where we can, in some cases, make arrangements to take over their placement, which prevents a child from actually moving, which in turn reduces some of the challenges that child experiences, so that can be a positive option. Often it is the child's preference, because they arrived in that area or they have been placed in a particular area and started to build up links, so that can be a kind of positive way forward.
The knock-on effect for our social work teams is obviously the increase in distance for social workers visiting those children in order to make links with the supporting agencies in the child's local area, where there is likely to be a difference to the supports and services that we already have in place in Hertfordshire. It is generally not good practice for children to be placed a long way from the local authority that is supporting them, but there are pros and cons to those situations.
Baroness Primarolo: First, I want to drill down on this question of time frame under the mandatory transfer scheme and ask about the problems that are therefore thrown up as a result of time pressures and how you get good decision-making on the assessment.
Secondly, we have heard how Hertfordshire, the London boroughs and other examples in the country, core cities, were already co-operating. So if local authorities were already co-operating, apart from time pressure what does the mandatory scheme bring that was not already working within the constraints of the system?
The Chair: Jacqui, perhaps you would like to deal with all that, and maybe say something about who benefits from these time limits.
Jacqueline Broadhead: I would defer to practitioners on the time limits. Just on the NTS and the point of it, although certain areas had been running schemes, in some areas they were working better than others, and in other areas they were not really functional at all.
Predominantly, this scheme is about the regional inequalities that existed in the system. The idea was that this would be more equitable across all local authorities, alongside asylum dispersal foundation more generally as a move to more equitable provision, but there are some issues with that. The first is capacity. You are moving from local authorities that perhaps have a lot of experience working in these areas and relatively high caseloads that in some instances may have specialist teams, although a lot of local authorities have moved away from that model, which might be something we want to consider. That means that you will have local authorities that are less experienced.
Eva mentioned the funding. An issue across a lot of schemes, including UASC, is that it is generally per capita funding, so it is for the individual child. From a commissioning point of view, for a local authority that is not necessarily conducive to commissioning capacity building or support to develop services, training for social workers or more strategic understanding of how you want to build capacity. There have been some attempts to do that previously—you might want to take a look at some projects in the Controlling Migration Fund, for example—but generally speaking, the main risk of the NTS from a policy perspective is that it is bringing more local authorities into this system, or increasing their numbers, but not necessarily increasing the attention on good practice or good decision-making. Those are some of the challenges that are particular to this group.
Baroness Primarolo: We are beginning to move into some of the other questions, but the obvious question is: does it provide a framework for the best decisions to be made, given the corporate parent responsibilities? I think the answer at the moment is, "Well, it depends", and we need to drill down into that.
Carole Littlechild: I could make one comment on that, but I think what we are skirting around is the prolonged paucity of money for local authorities, which has been developing over a number of years, and it is becoming a bit of a perfect storm when they are on their uppers anyway, with a huge amount of turnover of social workers because the work is just so stressful and overwhelming. I am not just talking about unaccompanied children, but this is an add-on and a very vulnerable group who, as Eva said, have all the problems, stresses and traumas that our resident children have, but with extra—really horrific additional traumas and fears to add on to that.
At their best, local authorities are wonderful. I have worked for a number of them over the years and I have huge respect for many colleagues, but it is a treacherous place to work in many places, because it is impossible to meet the needs of these children properly with the resources that are available. It is good to have systems and new policies in to try to help these children so that they are not all gathering in Kent, having come off the boats or whatever, but it does not work unless they are given resources to support them.
As far as I understand it, they are not getting anything like the resources needed to help them. That is separate from the fact that huge numbers of families and children are bypassing everything to do with the local authorities, and all the safeguarding processes and our legislation that could and should support these children. I do not know the figures, but there seem to be a huge number and they can be bypassed if the Home Office intervenes, which I gather it is doing increasingly.
Q26 The Chair: I was struck by your reference to the Home Office recruiting more social workers because, particularly with the initial interviews and so on, they do not give much of an impression of understanding the things that you are talking about and the experiences and so on that a child has been through and how the child is affected in being able to tell the story. Perhaps I should leave that hanging.
There are two questions I wanted to ask from comments that have been made. One is about foster carers' experience. Would I be right in thinking that because this cohort of children will be there for some time, foster carers can gather experience but are not available for another placement, so you are having to recruit, train and inform new people all the time?
The other question is about other family members in the UK and the attempt to ensure that there is contact between the child and the family member, who is presumably not necessarily a very close family member, which I imagine must raise all sorts of safeguarding issues. Achieving the contact is important, but it is not that easy or straightforward to do. Am I overegging it?
Carole Littlechild: No, I do not think you are. The whole issue of contact and having commitment to children remaining in contact with their families is a very big issue for local authorities to manage. The more they are moved away from any connections, the more difficult that becomes and, actually, a video link with the one person you might know in this country is not the same as having a cuddle. A child can end up feeling more lonely and isolated when the screen has gone down than before they started.
It is a big area and needs a lot of attention. I am sounding very negative, but, in the wider field, I hope for, and look for, a coming together of the two perspectives—we will come to this in later questions—because the Home Office has an important job to do, and the local authorities in my view have a vital job to do, but with the courts, which we will come on to, a lot can be done to marry those together in a more constructive, child-based, child-friendly way.
The Chair: We will come to that, because we are moving on to the legal situation.
Q27 Baroness Shackleton of Belgravia: This is not a legal question at all; it is a practical question. What I am hearing from you is that the local authority is child sensitive and constructive but underfunded, and the Home Office is—my words, not yours—brutal and probably does not understand the situation of the children they are having to interview, and it will import some people to help it in that respect. What are the numbers for those who get transferred from the local authority into the immigration process and then get rebooted back from where they come from? Does it actually do anything about this immigration issue and put them on the boat back home, or is this just a formality and really a function to get the right pieces of paper out?
Carole Littlechild: I am afraid I cannot give you the figures, because I do not know what they are. I do know that the Nationality and Borders Act 2022 that has come in brings the Rwanda scheme into this question. Of course, we do not know whether that will be picked up now with the political change today, but it was thought that young men would be sent there, and now apparently women and children will also be sent there because the Home Office wants to avoid breaching gender equality rules. Only unaccompanied children will be excluded from that scheme, so that is where the age assessment becomes absolutely critical, and there are considerable worries about that. I do not know whether you want me to talk about that now or in the next question.
Baroness Shackleton of Belgravia: I just do not see the point in referring to immigration if nobody ever does anything about it. You might as well stay with the local authority, because you will get a duplication of expense; you will get the local authority employing more qualified social workers and then the immigration, which is two sets of costs when you cannot afford one.
Carole Littlechild: Yes, quite. The social workers for the Home Office, as I understand it, are specifically for these contentious, as I would put it, age assessments. That is what they are recruited to do.
The Chair: It was interim, last time I heard about it.
Q28 Lord Dholakia: My question relates very much to the previous ones and the perspective of the local authorities and their partners. What is involved in welcoming a resettled family? What support do they need and for how long will this continue?
Clare Williams: I can start from my experience and the two schemes that we have been supporting families with most recently, which are the Afghan scheme and Homes for Ukraine. It is worth talking about them together because there are differences, and the differences in potential outcomes are crucial for both communities.
One of the biggest challenges for Afghan families placed in bridging hotels is that we already know that it is not good for children to grow up living in hotels. We have known that for a long time. Previously when local councils were unable to house families who were homeless, they were placed in hotels for a period of time, and a lot of research done at the time recognised the impact that has on children and their parents.
We are seeing very similar types of presentations for children and their parents. There is an increase in domestic abuse between couples and within different families, and there is an increase in mental health concerns for both children and their parents—[Connection lost.]—from local communities because the hotels are generally not in integrated communities, certainly in Hertfordshire. They are on the edges of motorways and things like that, so in some cases the children have had to be bussed to school, for instance. There are real limitations on children's ability to live normal lives if they are living in hotels. When you have a group of families living in those kinds of conditions over a longer period, that sometimes brings in some kind of institutionalisation, including institutionalisation of the services that are set up to support them.
I know it is a long way round, but basically we provide quite a holistic package of support in Hertfordshire from a range of different agencies, and the support would be different if families were supported to live in affordable accommodation. Hertfordshire is a good example of where we do not have much affordable accommodation for any families, so it is a real challenge to find affordable accommodation for families to live, so that they can start to integrate properly into communities for employment purposes, so that children can get settled in local schools, and can start to make decisions about their own lives and their own choices. That is the biggest challenge with the families being placed in hotels at the moment.
The difference with Homes for Ukraine is the support. The package of support is, again, quite comprehensive. When families come from war-torn areas, they will have the similar experience of trauma that we talked about earlier, and in that sense it would be good if the schemes were more integrated and run by the same central government departments, because there is difference in the rules and the criteria for funding. The different methodologies under which we can access support are different, which makes it very difficult then to develop a bespoke mental health package, for instance, for families.
In addition, obviously with Homes for Ukraine, some families have been living with their host for six months, so there is a growing risk that a good proportion of those families could be homeless at the end of that period. Obviously there is a lot of work going on. We are trying to work very closely with hosts and the local community to provide more hosting arrangements for families, but ultimately there is the real challenge that certainly a proportion will enter the homeless population, and then we will face the same difficulties that we are facing with our Afghan families and our families who are homeless for other reasons. There is no affordable accommodation for them in Hertfordshire.
Lord Dholakia: Thank you. I have a supplementary question in relation to the Mandate Resettlement Scheme, under which only 11 refugees were taken in 2019. Compare this to when the Ukraine crisis blew up and over 100,000 families were prepared to sponsor. Is this something to do with culture, or is it much more than that?
Clare Williams: That is a difficult question for me to answer. I can speculate, but that would be my personal opinion, and I just do not know the answer to that.
Jacqueline Broadhead: Really, the big change in resettlement in the UK was the Syrian VPRS Scheme in 2015. Prior to that, there was the mandate scheme and the gateway scheme, but, as you said, these had very low numbers and were not well established, and there was not a very strong pathway. It was a political decision to establish the Syrian VPRS, but that established a new function for local authorities, and a lot of learning can be taken from a scheme that resettled 20,000 in the five years from 2015 to 2020. The successor to that scheme was due to be the UKRS, which would have been a global scheme and in some ways would have replicated some of the work of the mandate and gateway, but the Home Office changed tack and decided on the more bespoke schemes that Clare mentioned, the ARAP Scheme and the ACRS, the Afghan Citizens Resettlement Scheme.
Subsequently, I would point to two other major schemes that are not protection schemes and not resettlement schemes but are important visa based schemes and share some similarities. Clare mentioned the first, the Homes for Ukraine community sponsorship scheme, which is based on a visa system. Importantly, it is not a resettlement scheme; it is a visa scheme.
Secondly, the Hong Kong BNO visa, which provided local authorities with integration funding, the first time in many years that a non-resettlement scheme has come with any type of integration funding. Zooming out, we can see a couple of things with this. Clare made the point that there are lots of separate schemes now rather than this more global scheme, which, I believe, was the initial intention when the Home Office launched the UKRS, but there is also this difference between refugee resettlement schemes and the visa schemes. They function very differently, which has impacts for local authorities.
Thirdly, this is a piecemeal bespoke approach that attracts funding per refugee arriving, and each has different rules. Obviously all the Home Office-run schemes are UK wide, but the DLUHC-based schemes are devolved, which adds an extra layer of complexity, particularly when we are looking at learning and sharing from these schemes. As far as I know, evaluations have been done of the Syrian VPRS, but I do not think they have been published to date, so the opportunities for learning from those schemes in order to embed that into these new schemes for local authorities is not quite as strong as they could be.
The Chair: The Home Office policy says that it is often "in the child's best interest to remain in the region, where they are more likely to be reunited with their family". I am not taking issue with that, but I wonder whether that happens in practice. It seems to me to be a layer that just may not be achieved. Do you have any impression of this?
Jacqueline Broadhead: For the type of schemes that we are talking about, the vast majority of refugees tend to remain in the countries surrounding the conflict. For those schemes, with the exception of ARAP, people who are selected for resettlement are assessed in region and identified as being one of the priority groups for the scheme, and are then resettled based on that assessment. That assessment is done by the UNHCR, IOM for health, and the Home Office for security and other questions. The local authority does not have any say in that.
The Chair: You do not have any impression that children are coming up against problems here because they are getting the answer, "You'd be better off back in your original region".
Jacqueline Broadhead: It would depend on the route that we are talking about. If we are talking about resettlement, these are by and large people who have made an application, have been successful, have arrived in the UK and have received support from the local authority. If we are talking about unaccompanied asylum seeker children and in-country asylum arrivals, the messages might be slightly different. It is also important to note that, for those groups, none of the support that we are talking about for resettled refugees is available. It is available only through the resettlement route.
Carole Littlechild: We have a two-tier system for these families. One is if they come through the recognised route that we are comfortable and happy with. The other is if they come by what we regard as illegal means, and if they are doing that they are likely to be more traumatised, they are not eligible for a great deal and they are the ones who go straight through with the Home Office.
The Chair: That is the recent legislation.
Carole Littlechild: Yes. The question, "How long", is quite a complicated one to answer. A lot, but not all, of the children are in their teens, and the processes for trying to get them established are very complicated, because they come not understanding. Families come not understanding our laws and our customs at all. They may be at complete variance with ours, and we are not attuned well to that. There are children who are coming from some countries where it is quite common to marry at the age of 12, for example. There will be practices that we regard in this country as illegal which are common practice in other countries. They will not understand that.
When you are looking at how long they need, how long is a piece of string? Certainly many of these children will need help from their 18th birthday, beyond the legally recognised age of a child. It is not a magic step into adulthood and emotional security. They may look older, they may behave so in certain ways, but in other ways they may be stuck at an earlier stage and need a lot of support. Eva said that technically—I do not think she used the word “technically”, to be fair—they could be supported until they are 25. Local authorities are not involving themselves, as I understand it, beyond the 18th birthday.
The Chair: It is my lack of discipline that has allowed us to spend a disproportionate amount of time on the first questions. I had better try and keep us going. It is all my fault.
Q29 Baroness Pidding: Can I just start by recognising and thanking our local authorities for the work they do in this challenging area? My question has been partly answered already by Clare and Jacqueline: that is, that local authorities and their partners are involved in the implementation of recent bespoke immigration schemes. What lessons do local authorities and their partners learn from these schemes?
Eva Barnsley: I would like to build on what has been said with the helpful explanation of the different schemes. There is a lot we can learn. Definitely one thing that has already been raised is the fact that there are different funding arrangements and entitlements and different support in place across these different schemes, which creates a lot of challenges for local authorities and the individuals arriving under these schemes.
I will go into that in a bit more detail later, but one of the key things we can learn from these bespoke schemes is points about housing. It has already been mentioned that these schemes have highlighted issues with the lack of affordable accommodation, particularly family-sized accommodation, for some of these cohorts, and we also need to think about what will happen in the future. We will continue to have arrivals from Ukraine under Homes for Ukraine and the Ukraine family visa scheme, we are continuing to see arrivals under the Afghan resettlement schemes, and asylum seekers continue to arrive who will eventually achieve refugee status and need housing, so we need to be thinking about particular housing initiatives for refugees and, in particular, about acquisition schemes, for example, and actually building more supply to meet this need.
Obviously there are housing challenges not just for refugees and asylum seekers, but for the broader population. One local authority flagged up how the Homes for Ukraine scheme has demonstrated that there are other ways in which we can support those fleeing to the UK, for example by mobilising sponsorship, and we can learn from that. Again, talking about the differences between various schemes, with ARAP and ACRS there is a housing fund to help bridge the gap between the benefit cap, LHA rates and the cost of rent to help people to secure accommodation.
There are challenges even when you have this housing fund, but there is definitely learning that you can take from that. These same challenges, this gap in funding, when people are entitled to benefits once they come over on these various schemes and routes, applies to others, but they do not necessarily have that money to bridge the gap, so you will continue to see increased homelessness presentations if that funding is not provided.
There are a lot of challenges around housing, such as these groups getting approval from landlords, so this can help with things like incentive payments. As I have said, we will continue to see homelessness presentations. We are already seeing a number under Homes for Ukraine and the family visa scheme, and these will continue to grow as we reach the six-month point of the Homes for Ukraine sponsorship scheme and the sponsorship arrangements come to an end.
We can also learn from the various integration and funding support packages that have been provided under these different schemes. For example, with Homes for Ukraine, there is £10,500, and with the Afghan resettlement schemes just over £20,000 per person is provided. It is important to see what is being done with that funding in providing services and being able to join up services to provide holistic support for individuals.
Even though when asylum seekers arrive they are moved into dispersed accommodation and hotels, the contract is with the Home Office to provide wraparound support—in London, there is a provider, Clearsprings—but local authorities often still step in to provide it. So we need to think about the kind of funding that is provided in other places and see if we can apply that to some of the other individuals arriving, because the fact of the matter is that local authorities are still providing support. If you provide clear integration packages, they can make sure that asylum seekers have that kind of holistic joined-up support in place.
There have clearly been quite a lot of conversations around this. The Government have their asylum dispersal consultation process going on at the moment, and they have said that they will be undertaking a burdens assessment to try to capture some of those additional costs for asylum seekers, so we are already starting to see how we can learn from what has been done in other spaces and apply that elsewhere.
With these different schemes, as I have said, there are different entitlements for people coming over. It is worth noting that they have been provided with access to benefits and employment under Homes for Ukraine, the family visa scheme, ARAP and ACRS, and it is important to take learning from this as well. Clearly, a lot of people come into this country with no recourse to public funds. That has a massive cost impact on local authorities, and the NRPF network has done a lot of research on that cost for London local authorities in particular, so we can also think about the different entitlements across these schemes and the impact that has on areas.
Baroness Pidding: Thank you, Eva. Clare or Jacqueline, do you have anything to add?
Clare Williams: I would not add anything to what Eva just said. She has comprehensively covered most of the issues, and I would have said very similar things about the issues she has raised.
Jacqueline Broadhead: I would add only that for each of these schemes, local authorities have mobilised well, by and large, but they have been on a crisis footing each time and it feels like this is now becoming a core function of local government, so it should be resourced in that way rather than it feeling like a scramble each time a new scheme is established. That means establishing teams within local authorities that have this as a dedicated function and improving commissioning, ideally across schemes so again you are not commissioning services solely for smaller groups for each scheme. There are also economies of scale when it comes to regional commissioning, for example at strategic migration partnership level, and we have not necessarily seen enough regional collaboration in this area.
There has also not necessarily been enough learning from the different approaches taken in the devolved Administrations and the way we can perhaps see different models developing. To give a couple of examples, there is no UK-wide integration strategy, and there is no integration strategy for England. That means that by and large our focus, and the focus of local authorities, is on arrivals rather than longer-term outcomes, so where is that shift that can happen? In Scotland, the New Scots strategy sets out some of the ways you might want to do that, and that could be a model to look at.
Looking at initial orientation, there has been some interesting work in Northern Ireland. The system works differently there. The Executive has worked with the regions and the Red Cross to make initial orientation sign-up to services much quicker, so that the focus can then move over to outcomes. In Wales, the Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act also provides more impetus for longer-term work on community cohesion and integration, rather than focusing solely on the first few months after arrival.
Again, individual funding provided piecemeal focuses on the initial moment of arrival, which it is really important, but if we want people to build lives here over the long term, if we want to focus on things like integration outcomes, employment outcomes, et cetera, a longer-term horizon is needed. At the moment, it feels like we are still on a very reactive footing for most of this work, rather than being able to think over the longer term.
Carole Littlechild: Just talking about the difference between the immediate term and the longer term, we do not have any data. There is no proper follow-up to know what is happening to these children over time. That is a really problematic absence, because it would help to inform us about how to move forward and plan.
Eva Barnsley: Obviously data to follow up on children is really important across a lot of these different schemes in general, but there are also issues in data collection for a lot of arrivals. With Homes for Ukraine, for example, there is the Foundry, which is like a local authority portal where you can get information on arrivals. The same is not there for family visa scheme arrivals, so you cannot know who has arrived in your local authority area under that scheme and see what is happening, and there is no funding attached to that cohort to provide support. Again, there is no consistency in collecting data on Hong Kong BNO visa arrivals and for a lot of different groups, so there is a lot to be said for data collection in this area as a whole to make sure that we can follow up with these individuals.
The Chair: Thank you, that is really useful. Still on resources, David Blunkett.
Q30 Lord Blunkett: Chair, you will be relieved to hear that we have done my question to death. We have covered the existing landscape. In the last couple of questions we started to cover very clearly what might need to be done now, so I will just make one observation, which is that I think we should approach Richard Harrington fairly quickly to ask why the Ukrainian unaccompanied children are treated separately.
Secondly, I do not know which of you would like to touch on this, but a comment has just been made about greater regional co-ordination. We have to ask this question, by the way, because it is the way committees work. If I do not ask and there is no answer, it will not appear in the final report, which is one of the quirks of the way we do things. Should we be encouraging the setting up of joint specialist teams across local authority boundaries, because the expertise does not exist, the resource is limited, and the smaller authorities clearly do not have the capacity?
The Chair: As regards Richard Harrington, I think we will have to see who is in what position.
Lord Blunkett: I doubt he will change.
The Chair: Well, he has left, hasn’t he? He said that his job is done.
Lord Blunkett: I had not noticed that. He thinks it is done?
The Chair: Yes, that was yesterday.
Lord Blunkett: Oh dear, oh dear.
The Chair: Yes, exactly. There will be a backstory to that.
Lord Blunkett: Do not minute that I did not know that.
Baroness Shackleton of Belgravia: David, from what I heard, you will be excused, because I think it was on Twitter.
The Chair: I do not do that.
Baroness Shackleton of Belgravia: I do not, but I heard people talking about it last night.
The Chair: Coming back to wider teams, we started by asking about co-operation but working across authorities. Would anyone like to comment on that?
Jacqueline Broadhead: I am happy to comment on the role. On the idea of joint commissioning and using the strategic migration partnerships more, particularly from an integration perspective, there is quite wide variance, as there is in all this work, in how much the strategic migration partnerships do and their ambition, and the extent to which they are predominantly sharing information from the Home Office and acting as a kind of convenor of local authorities right through to already doing joint commissioning work for resettlement programmes. They do not necessarily include integration in their mandate, and that could be an interesting shift.
Also, some of the more successful strategic migration partnerships have attracted external funding, meaning that they are not solely funded by the Home Office and are therefore not limited in what they can do solely to what is set out in their contract with the Home Office. Using that infrastructure feels the most useful, given that it is fully comprehensive across the UK. Sometimes the discussion is more around devolution areas and whether, for example, metro mayors or others could take more of a lead on this area. The limitations with that, as with a lot of these things, is that they do not have the coverage across all the UK and do not necessarily have the resources and expertise in place. My suggestion would probably be around the strategic migration partnerships, while acknowledging the limitations of these in some areas.
Carole Littlechild: The idea of joint partnerships is an excellent one, and I would be thrilled if we could see it extended to the family courts and the immigration courts so that they worked collaboratively together. There has been work on this for a number of years, led by the Equal Justice for Migrant Children group, which is made up of a number of different professionals—paediatricians, lawyers and social workers—the idea being for everybody to be an equal partner rather than the Home Office in the lead as a sort of superior one, albeit a very important one, and on a level so that they are working collaboratively together and focusing very much on the children's legislation, which has the best interests of the children as its core business.
The Chair: We will come back to the legal system after the next question, which continues on community relations and integration.
Q31 Baroness Chakrabarti: I am just wondering about the effect of all this on community relations and on the eventual integration of the young people and families who will eventually stay, particularly the various practical and immigration law constraints, be it on housing, finding places in school, not being allowed to work for older people. I am just wondering what everything you have been talking about holistically does, positively or not so positively, for integration and community relations, particularly given the comparisons that you have made consistently with the special case of Ukrainians as opposed to other asylum-seeking people.
Jacqueline Broadhead: There are definitely huge constraints in relation to the focus on arrival rather than outcomes. That is not a strong focus in most of this work. It is slightly different for UASC arrivals because of the corporate parenting responsibilities. There are gaps in what is happening there, but by and large the local authorities are applying the same social work principles, although obviously with variation. In my view, one of the major gaps, as I said, is in immigration advice and information that is adequate, early and proper, in dual and triple planning for the likely outcomes for those young people, in honest conversations about them, and in the high numbers of young people who go missing through that system. Those are the main concerns.
If we move outside UASC into more general work with families, probably the better practice is through the resettlement schemes because of the funding that is in place. It is generally fairly piecemeal, but there is some integration work. Understanding the way community placements change cohesion and interaction will be an interesting outcome of the Homes for Ukraine programme. We know that the regional profile for Homes for Ukraine is completely different from any other resettlement programme; it is much more focused on London and the south-east. This is because people have put themselves forward rather than local authorities finding accommodation.
More generally from the research base, we know that the earlier interventions can be made, the better, in some instances. We know, for example, that day-one interventions on employment are much more likely to be successful than waiting a long time through the arrival scheme. Spontaneous arrivals have to wait until a decision has been made, so that is an impediment to integration. We know that the fact that the UK is consistent in deciding that children should go straight into school and not have separate provisions is a strength of the UK system and something that should be consistently maintained, because schools and workplaces are some of the most successful sites of integration, community cohesion, et cetera.
Finally, nearly all this work is on powers and is discretionary, and with the current state of local government finances, unless there are specific pots that have been bid into by local authorities—in which case you have the issue of which local authorities are choosing and have the capacity to bid into those pots—there is not a lot to support the type of softer outcomes around community cohesion that we know are so beneficial. We know, from all the work and public opinion on migration, that how people feel about integration in their local area is vital to how they feel about migration generally. There are no real statutory duties for local authorities and no real funding to support it.
Q32 Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws: I want to ask our experts to help me with the whole business of the private sector’s role now in the provision of so much—in the recent scandal in foster care and the ways in which people were making a lot of money out of very poor provision, and the way in which we have profitable private companies providing accommodation that is frequently inadequate. In the period of Covid, we found people being moved out of accommodation like flats into cheap hotels because it was going to save money. Do the experts have any experience of how privatisation impacts on some of the provisions, particularly around resources?
The Chair: A reference has already been made to Clearsprings as one of the private companies that should be providing wraparound support, and a question mark over that.
Carole Littlechild: Yes, there are two different questions on the go here. As far as the community is concerned, we really need to try to change the narrative, because apart from the special case with public sympathy towards Ukrainian families, migrants are generally presented in society as other and different and a threat to jobs, school places, health, whatever, even to the point of being regarded as, this awful word, spongers. There is a very negative narrative that goes with a lot of very traumatised and troubled people who are seeking our support.
One of the things that would be great for us to move towards is thinking about inclusion as opposed to exclusion, which is about a just society where human rights are protected, and if we can do anything to change that narrative in our general populace, that is very important. Baroness Kennedy, can you remind me what your question was?
Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws: It was really about the private sector.
Carole Littlechild: Yes, that is right. One of the big problems we have is that on 9 September 2021 the Government brought in a new regulation for children in care. Any child in care, from their 16th birthday, could be moved from a stable foster placement to what they choose to call semi-independent living, which is unregulated, so they cease to have any oversight. They do not have reviews, so they do not have independent reviewing officers to track </
