Polly Glynn and Maria Stephens.

Q37 Chair: Welcome to today’s meeting of the Joint Committee on Human Rights. We are a cross-party committee and a Joint Committee, which means that we have members from both the House of Commons and the House of Lords. The evidence that we are taking this afternoon, which will be in two sessions, is part of our committee's ongoing inquiry into the human rights of asylum seekers. This afternoon’s session will look at human rights concerns about asylum support and issues related to accommodation, the provision of legal and financial support, the right to work and the impact of asylum support on local communities. In our first session, we will question a lawyer and a representative from a campaign group on the support available for asylum seekers. In our second session, we will hear from representatives of local authorities from the south coast of England to Glasgow, taking in the north-east of England, on the challenges and impacts for local communities.

I start by welcoming and introducing our first panel. Our first witness is Polly Glynn, a public law and human rights specialist. We are delighted to have her with us today. Our second witness is Maria Stephens, who is head of campaigns at Refugee Action.

I will take the Chair’s privilege by asking the first couple of questions, starting with a general one. What government support is available to asylum seekers in the United Kingdom, and in what sort of circumstances do they have a right to receive support?

Maria Stephens: Different types of support are available to people seeking asylum. Section 95 support—both housing and subsistence payments—is what people receive, and it is offered to people while they are waiting for the outcome of their application.

Section 4 support is what people receive if their application is rejected but they are unable to leave the country for reasons recognised by the Government, which can include illness or it being unsafe for them to travel. That includes the same payment and housing support.

Section 98 support is emergency support that is offered to people who are facing destitution, in theory—there are often a lot of delays with that support, so it can lead to people falling into destitution.

On the circumstances in which people can receive support, the prerequisite is destitution, so a destitution test is applied. A burden of proof is placed upon the person seeking asylum to prove that they are destitute, which can be very problematic, especially for people who are newly arrived in the country. It can require something like six months’ worth of bank statements, which are obviously hard to provide if you have not had a bank account or been living here. There is a different burden the proof for children and families, but, again, a destitution test is applied. Destitution is not an issue for unaccompanied children, who in theory should be placed directly into foster care—we know that many children instead go into what is termed “contingency accommodation”.

Chair: Could you expand on what you said about proving destitution?

Maria Stephens: At the moment, the burden of proof lies with the person who is seeking asylum. That can be a request for documentation to show that they do not have any money or an address where they are able to stay. It is impossible for some people—for example, those who are already destitute, those who perhaps have had to leave their country very quickly without any documents or those who have lost their documents while coming here—to prove that they are destitute, which can then delay their application for support. For example, if they are trying to claim asylum and they need Section 98 while their Section 95 application is being decided, this means that they would basically remain in destitution.

Chair: We have heard evidence in other sessions, and when we visited Manston, that a lot of people arrive in the country with no documentation at all. They may have brought documentation with them when they left their own country, but they may have lost it along the way, for obvious reasons.

Maria Stephens: Exactly, so then to be asked for bank statements, in a country where you are not able to have a bank account and have no documents with which to set one up, is an impossible situation to be in. We also see examples of people’s documentation being lost when it is submitted to the Home Office, which can be problematic.

Chair: How much do people get per week?

Maria Stephens: At the moment, people receive just over £40 a week if they are on Section 95 or Section 4. There was a ruling just before Christmas that means that that amount will be increased to £45 a week, but that has not been implemented yet. It is likely that there will be a further ruling that will see that go up again, because it has been noted that the means by which asylum support is decided do not fairly match the cost of living, and it is therefore likely to increase again.

Chair: Was that increase of just over £4, roughly, a cost of living increase to reflect inflation last year?

Maria Stephens: Yes. As I understand it, it was because the methodology that had previously been used by the Home Secretary was based on spending by the poorest 10% of the UK population, but there had been certain deductions from that—what we call “missed meals”. This means that, according to the Home Office, people in the lowest 10% chose to spend additional money on food. Those additional costs have been taken out for people seeking asylum to stop their benefits going above the rate of inflation. However, given that the cost of living has gone up exponentially, combined with the cost of particular items—milk has gone up by 30%—people can no longer afford to live, so the court ruled that that must be changed.

Chair: Is it £40.85 or £45 across the board, or are there special categories?

Maria Stephens: For Section 95 and Section 4, it should be the same rate. Section 98 does not have a payment, because it is housing only. For children and families there is a different rate, but I do not have that figure in front of me.

Chair: Polly, is there anything you would like to add? We are really just interested in getting an overview at the moment of what support asylum seekers have the right to and what they need to do in order to realise that right.

Polly Glynn: The only thing that is missing from that general description is that a lot of families are now in hotels and do not get £40.85 per person. I think they get £9.20 per person. So if you are a family in a hotel, that is all you get to pay for things like nappies, milk, school trips, school uniforms, schoolbooks, everything. It is just not enough, and it is a real source of incredible pressure on families who are living long term in a room in a hotel.

Chair: Just to be clear, the reason why people who are put in a hotel get less is because they get fed in the hotel. Is that correct?

Polly Glynn: Exactly.

Chair: Although I believe there have been some issues about the quality of the meals they receive.

Polly Glynn: The experience my clients have had is that the meals are often absolutely appalling. The menu will say that it is chicken and potatoes, and you think that sounds good, but then they send you a photograph of it and it just looks inedible. Often the meals are given in little plastic bowls like take-out boxes and then reheated in a microwave before they are given to people. Sometimes people report that they are still frozen on the inside. My children went through a stage of being a bit fussy about what they ate. Children will refuse to eat the food, particularly when they have been taken half way across the world and the food is completely different from what they have always eaten.

More seriously, to my mind, is that the food is often not nutritionally adequate. I have had clients whose children are suffering from malnourishment as a result of the food that the Government are paying to be provided to them. It is outrageous that in this society we are seeing children malnourished from food that is being given to them by the Government. The Government are paying for it. It is not as if the Government are not paying for it, it is just that they are not monitoring the subcontractors who are giving people the food, so they are getting the cheapest and most rubbish food. Doing it like that is outrageous.

Chair: So you are actually seeing children who are malnourished as a result of the quality of the foods they are being given by government contractors in asylum hotel accommodation.

Polly Glynn: I have seen that, yes.

Chair: Just be clear, is that because of a lack of vegetables or fruit?

Polly Glynn: It can be that. In the past, I have had cases where we were complaining that no fresh fruit and no fresh vegetables were being given to people. It is the sort of food that, if it was for a month or two, I do not think anyone would be making a big fuss about it, but we are seeing families who have been living in one room in a hotel for over a year. That is the real problem.

Chair: To be clear, if you are in a hotel and you are having food provided, the only money you are getting per person over and above that provision of food is £9 plus how much?

Polly Glynn: I think it is £9.20.

Chair: And that would need to cover what?

Polly Glynn: The hotel sometimes gives toiletries, so it depends. The problems I have seen my clients facing include things like schools saying, “You need a uniform to go to school”, your children needing shoes that fit them, there is a school trip and you have to pay £5 for it. Things like that are very difficult. Then, if the children do not like the food that is being offered so that you have to supplement their diets, that is a problem. In the summer, you want to go out into the park with your children. All the other children are being bought lollies, but you cannot do that. It is a real problem for children and it is not how we should be treating them.

Chair: Does the support you have described raise any specific human rights concerns?

Polly Glynn: I think it is obvious that it does, yes.

Chair: Could you list for us what those might be?

Polly Glynn: I suppose Article 8, the right to family life, is the most obvious one. Sometimes I think the support approaches inhuman and degrading treatment.

Chair: The absolute right to be free of inhuman and degrading treatment is Article 3. Otherwise, it is the right to family life and the right to a private life. Maria, would you like to add anything?

Maria Stephens: I definitely agree with what Polly said. We see the same issues with nutrition. We have recently been working with a family who needed to buy powdered milk for their baby. They are on £8 a week. I think it will be raised to £9.10 after the ruling before Christmas, but that has not come in yet. The two parents were having to spend the majority of their money on the baby milk, because it was not provided by the hotel, which put huge pressure on the family, which led to nutrition issues for the other children because they could not afford additional food for them, and to mental health problems because of the strain of being in one room together.

The rates for payments and for contingency and other types of accommodation present serious human rights issues. We have touched on Article 8 and Article 3, but Article 2 also applies. We are seeing people in situations where they cannot afford to eat and they are reliant on food banks or facing destitution. We know that people who are street homeless have a markedly lower life expectancy than others. This is the reality of the amount of and delays in asylum support, and as a consequence people end up destitute.

It is also discriminatory. Everybody who comes to the UK should be under UK jurisdiction, but the calculation for asylum support is not in line with mainstream benefits; it is done differently, which is discriminatory on the basis of nationality or identity.

Chair: On the issue of people who have babies, and for completeness, no doubt if somebody from the Government was here they would point out that there is a bit of extra allowance if you are pregnant or have a new baby. Is that right?

Polly Glynn: Yes. It is £3 a week if you are pregnant, £5 a week if you have a child less than one year old, and £3 a week if you have a child between one and three years old.

Chair: Do you think those really very small amounts, particularly in the light of inflation across the UK at the moment, go any way to addressing the needs of a pregnant woman or, indeed, a parent with a baby or a small child? The answer may seem obvious, but I need you to tell me why not.

Polly Glynn: If you have a baby, you are buying nappies, milk, cream—and clothes, because babies grow quite quickly. The same goes for children between one and three years old. It is not going to be enough, even if you are going to charities and they are giving you second-hand clothes.

Q38 Chair: Anyone watching this evidence session who has been responsible for the welfare for a baby or a child will know that the answer you have given me is fairly obvious, so forgive me for asking a very obvious question.

I want to ask you about how the money is given to asylum seekers. I understand that it is done through a card system: it goes on to a card, and they can use the card to take out cash or to pay for services. Is that right? Maybe Polly could explain that.

Polly Glynn: It is called an ASPEN card. If you are on Section 95 support, you can use it to get cash out. If you are on Section 4 support, I think you just use it as a card.

Chair: Are there certain retailers who will accept it?

Polly Glynn: I think it is more restrictive for those on Section 4 support, but for Section 95 support you can take out cash.

Maria Stephens: This is also very discriminatory, because transport is not seen as an essential cost under the Home Office’s definition of essential living costs. That means that if you are on Section 4 and you can only use an ASPEN card as a debit card, you cannot use it on many bus services, which are obviously the cheapest way to travel, so you are prohibited from going to things like doctors’ appointments or sometimes even if you need to go somewhere for an essential reason for your case.

It is also highly problematic when it comes to the right to a private life. The Home Office is able to track the spending on an ASPEN card and on everything those seeking asylum do, so it infringes that right. It causes huge mental distress, because people worry very much that they might be seen to buy something or take a journey, sometimes to see a solicitor, that is not seen as reasonable, and they might then find that the money is deducted. There are a lot of problems with that system.

Chair: The Home Office can monitor what people are spending the money on and asylum seekers are aware of that. Are they told that that is the position, or have they worked it out for themselves?

Maria Stephens: I am not sure if they are told clearly, but it is definitely seen as common knowledge among the people we work with.

Polly Glynn: There is a concern about how algorithms are used to monitor where people are spending the money. There may be a problem where someone is going to care for a relative in another area so the ASPEN card is used is another in another area, and then that may lead to the computer saying, “Hang on a second. This person is not living where they’re supposed to be living. We’re going to terminate support”. There is a concern about how the computer programmes are used to make decisions. I cannot say more than that, but it is a concern, and I do not know that it has actually been bottomed out.

Q39 Chair: We know that asylum seekers generally do not have a right to work while their claim is being processed, and this is an issue that has been raised frequently in Parliament. I know there is a campaign at the moment to lift the ban on working. What do you think are the human rights implications of a policy that, as a general rule, says that asylum seekers cannot work?

Polly Glynn: Maria has more to say on this than me. For me, when I speak to these people, especially young people, it is as if their life has come to a halt. You cannot work or get on with your life. It can be years and years before your asylum claim is sorted out, and during that time you cannot do anything. You are just sitting there waiting for some government department to make a decision, and there are masses of delays, and you cannot do anything about that. It is such a waste of peoples’ potential.

I have seen people over the years and years of waiting and their mental health deteriorates. You can imagine how awful it is when you are just waiting and there is nothing you can do. That seems to me a terrible waste of peoples’ potential and peoples’ lives. It really will affect their life choices, even after they have been granted refugee status: that gap in their lives, when they were literally sitting there doing nothing, having no money to do anything. It is all very well to be in London, a fantastic place, and what a fantastic place this is—you can walk in it for free, but if you cannot afford to get on the tube or the bus to come here, you cannot even do that. You are literally sitting there. If you are in a hotel, your lunch is given, but if you miss it, you do not eat. Your life is so restricted. It is such an awful thing that we are doing to people.

Chair: These people have little or no autonomy.

Polly Glynn: Yes.

Chair: Sorry to be a pedantic lawyer about this, but from a rights point of view—

Polly Glynn: I would say that it is an Article 8 problem.

Chair: There is no express right in the European Convention on Human Rights to work, but I believe the jurisprudence of the Strasbourg court has brought in the idea of a right to work under Article 8. Is that right?

Polly Glynn: I think so.

Chair: Article 23(1) of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights says that everybody has the right to work. Maria, perhaps you would like to expand on this. Is your organisation involved in the Lift the Ban campaign? Perhaps you could tell us a bit about that as well.

Maria Stephens: Sure. That would be great. I will run through the rights implications first and then say a little about the benefits and the work of the campaign.

I think the right to work is in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, so we would see the ban as contravening that right. As I mentioned in relation to Article 2, it forces people into destitution. It can have very serious effects on mental health, and we see people with suicidal ideation who are stuck in limbo unable to work, not knowing when a decision will be made on their claim.

There are also Article 14 implications—the risk of labour exploitation and discrimination after joining the workforce—because they will have lost skills in the time they were waiting. There is also gender discrimination: 82% of people who are dependent, who are unable to work ever during their application process, are women and generally the primary carers in a family. Article 3 would say that it is degrading to be left in limbo, isolated from communities in housing and vulnerable to exploitation.

The Lift the Ban campaign, which Refugee Action is a member of, has been calling for the right to work for people seeking asylum, to be granted after six months and unconstrained from the shortage occupation list. The shortage occupation list is highly restrictive; it includes professions like geophysicists, and most people are not qualified in that way. It has been extended recently to include professions in social care, but we have seen very punitive demands for people on quite low incomes to pay contributions towards their accommodation, which puts them at the same level they would be on if they were just claiming asylum support and still at risk of destitution.

If people were able to work, fewer people would be claiming support. We suggest that they might still need accommodation support. People should be supported into the workforce. If you are newly arrived, you are unlikely to be able to access the private rented sector and there can be complications around status. Accommodation would still be there, but there would be a massive amount of pressure off in terms of subsistence payments. We have estimated that there could be a saving to the UK economy of £333 million from that, which would obviously be a benefit, and £84 million of that would be through support.

There are many human rights implications, but there are also huge benefits. As well as people being able to offer their skills, we know through survey work that 42% of people who are waiting in the system would have been classed as critical workers during the pandemic, and people desperately want to work. In research that we have done, they say that it is the thing that would make the biggest difference to improving their lives, their mental health and their standard of living.

Chair: That is very helpful, thanks. I hand over to Lord Dubs now for the next set of questions.

Q40 Lord Dubs: My name is Alf Dubs, and I am a Labour Member of the Lords.

Could you say a bit about the types of accommodation that are available to asylum seekers, and whether in allocating people any note is taken as to whether their children in the family are being accommodated?

Polly Glynn: You can get self-contained accommodation; shared self-contained accommodation—a room in a house or a flat; hotel accommodation; barrack accommodation; hostel accommodation. Account should certainly be taken of peoples’ needs before they are placed in accommodation. You would have to ask the Home Office whether they think there is.

I have certainly seen many people placed in accommodation which, if they had properly considered the needs of those people, they would not have been placed in. I see women who are victims of sexual violence being placed in mixed hotels. I have seen women whose experience of sexual violence has been in hotels being placed in hotels. We see families routinely being placed in hotel accommodation for long periods of time, despite there being generally accepted evidence that it is really bad for children's long-term future to be in hotel accommodation for long periods of time.

We see people being placed 10 to a room—people who themselves are traumatised or who have mental health issues. That exacerbates the problems that I think any of us would face living long term in a room with 10 other people, particularly when there is no shared language and during outbreaks of scabies or during the pandemic when Covid was a problem. We see people with disabilities being placed in accommodation that is not properly accessible for them.

We regularly see people’s individual needs being completely and routinely ignored when allocating accommodation.

Maria Stephens: I agree with everything that Polly said. I will point out how bad the conditions are and the human rights implications. Between April 2016 and March 2022, 107 people died in Home Office asylum housing and, of those, 17 committed suicide, according to research carried out by Liberty Investigates and the Observer. It is very challenging for people to live in the conditions that have been described. Contingency accommodation—hotels, where 35,000 people are housed at the moment—should be used only for very short amounts of time, but we often work with families who are there for a year or more, so the problems can become much worse.

We also see that if people have an existing health condition, it can be exacerbated by the poor standard of accommodation; respiratory and skin problems are very common for children and families, for everyone.

Chair: I am afraid I have to suspend the committee for about 15 minutes, because there is a vote in the House of Commons.

The Committee suspended for a Division in the House of Commons.

On resuming—

The Chair: Welcome back to the Joint Committee on Human Rights, after a brief suspension to allow for a Commons vote. My colleague, Lord Dubs, was asking questions about rights issues around the types of accommodation available to asylum seekers.

Q41 Lord Dubs: I will slip in a little supplementary. Some of us visited Manston before Christmas, and it so happened that I was in Oxford for a meeting on refugees two days later. People there told me that 200 people from Manston had just been transferred to Oxford, and Oxford local authority—I think they meant the county council—had had no warning of this. Have you any experience of whether local authorities are alerted when people are moved from places like Manston to slightly more long-term accommodation in a particular area?

Polly Glynn: I do not have direct experience, but my understanding is that that happened: emergency hotels were found, and people were taken out of Manston and put into places on a very ad hoc basis. We have certainly encountered situations where the hotels were not properly set up for people when they arrived and there was not easy access to healthcare, for example. These were people who had been placed in Manston over some considerable period, also without proper access to healthcare, so it was quite serious that they were being placed in hotels where there was no access to healthcare.

Maria Stephens: It is our understanding that sometimes communication between the local authority and the Home Office in those cases is not clear, and that hotels can be put into use without the proper safeguarding checks taking place. The conditions in hotels have been described as a safeguarding disaster for children by Ofsted, and the speed with which this happens is often related to the lack of safeguarding there.

We also have concerns, similar to those that Polly mentioned, that people are placed in areas that have no specialist asylum support services. So if you have a particular psychiatric need or if you need access to support with your application, it can be very problematic. It was obviously very important that people were moved out of Manston, given the absolutely appalling conditions, but if there was perhaps some improvement in the number of people waiting in the accommodation system, it would be easier to process them through it and there would be less pressure or less of a breakdown of communication between the Home Office and local authorities.

Q42 Lord Dubs: You have anticipated my other substantive question. Could you comment on the conditions of asylum accommodation? What human rights concerns arise from such conditions, particularly in hotels and, of course, in army barracks?

Maria Stephens: In hotels, we have seen completely shocking conditions that contravene people’s right to life to some extent and that are definitely inhuman and degrading treatment. We have seen rat and bug infestations, damp and mould—this is also in dispersal accommodation, which is longer-term accommodation that people might be housed in, not just in hotels. In one instance, some of the children of a family we were working with ingested rat poison that had been left out in the accommodation. We have seen people who have serious health conditions being put into situations that are so unsanitary that they have been immunocompromised, their healthcare professional has tried to intervene to make sure that they were removed, but that has not happened and they have become more seriously unwell. So the conditions are very serious.

Overcrowding is also a problem in Manston and Napier barracks. This led to Covid-19 infections and to people being so mentally distressed that they attempted to take their own lives, which is more than suicidal ideation; it is an attempt. That is deeply concerning, given the Government's plans to increase the use of that type of institutional accommodation centre. So we are very concerned about the current conditions.

Another issue is that people have very little autonomy in some of those settings, particularly hotels. So there are questions about places like Manston and Napier and the right to liberty being taken away from people without any kind of trial, because it ends up acting as de facto detention, with people placed in frankly horrifically poor conditions.

Lord Dubs: Polly, do you want to add anything?

Polly Glynn: I think Maria has covered it. It is absolutely shocking. You went to Manston, so you will know how shocking it was. It is appalling that we are putting vulnerable people who have come to the UK to seek asylum in that kind of situation. It is absolutely shocking to me and to all right-thinking people. It is terrible that, even when people are moved out of that situation, they are put in hotels and still cannot get healthcare.

There is also a huge problem with a lack of legal advice. You may say, “Well, you would say that, because you are a lawyer”. I am not an immigration lawyer. There is a huge problem now with a lack of immigration advice and, given the standard of the Home Office’s decision-making, 50% of appeals are successful, so 50% of the time they get it wrong.

Chair: From the conditions you have described, it sounds like, in addition to immigration advice, people need advice about remedies in relation to harms that are being suffered as a result of the conditions they are in.

Polly Glynn: I do believe that is right, but immigration advice is also incredibly important. Because of the cuts to legal aid and to the hourly rate for legal aid year on year, many firms find it impossible to give immigration advice any more, and there is a huge lack of lawyers. When we have a client who needs an immigration lawyer, even with our contacts we find it difficult to get one. I think Refugee Action, which is also a great organisation in good standing, also finds it difficult to get an immigration lawyer.

That is so important for people, because if you get that decision wrong, you are not talking about not having enough to eat, living in a room that has water pouring down or sharing a room with 10 other people and getting scabies; you are talking about getting deported back to somewhere where your life may be at risk. So it is really important to get that part of the jigsaw in place.

Chair: We will return to the question of legal remedies in a moment.

Q43 Bell Ribeiro-Addy: You have made clear your views on the use of surplus military sites, but the Government are also talking about using disused holiday parks and former student halls as sites for accommodation for asylum seekers. What are your views on that?

Maria Stephens: We absolutely oppose in every way that plan to place people in those kinds of conditions, which are not suitable places to live on a long-term basis. In some cases, victims of torture and abuse, including sexual assault, have been placed into crowded spaces where they will live alongside strangers. There are many problems with the location of those settings: people may not be able to access legal aid or other support, and children may not be able to access education if they are in a family.

It has been said that some of those settings will be used only for young men who are not vulnerable, but we have major concerns about how those vulnerabilities are measured, given the very serious impact we saw on people in Napier barracks and other similar types of accommodation. So we wholly oppose that as a new plan and do not think that it is sustainable. We would recommend other things: keeping people in communities would be better for integration and probably better in the longer term as a sustainable way to house people seeking asylum that meets their human rights needs.

Bell Ribeiro-Addy: Thank you. What is the longest time that either of you have heard for a family being housed in a hotel?

Maria Stephens: For some of our clients, it is over a year. I could not get an exact number from our services lead, but I am incredibly shocked that it has been well over a year in some cases.

Polly Glynn: This week, we had someone who had been in one for 15 months. Again, I can check what the longest period is.

Chair: If you could and perhaps write to us, that would be of great assistance in forming our report on this matter.

Polly Glynn: On the holiday camps and the new things, if you were coming to this new, you might think, “What’s wrong with that? It sounds like a sensible idea. You’ve got empty holiday camps. People pay to go to those places on holiday. Why wouldn’t you want to put asylum seekers there? Are they being so fussy that they don’t want to go into an old holiday camp?” Where Maria and I are coming from on this is that the track record of the Government placing people in this type of accommodation is so bad. Napier barracks was so bad. As you have seen, Manston was also so bad. So there is a complete lack of trust that the Home Office will do this in good faith and make them decent places for people. That is the background of our feeling that this will not work.

If you are putting people a long way from communities, there are other issues. How do they get legal advice? How do they get education? How do the kids go to school? Even if it is just young men, what do they do all day? Will they just sit there, five miles from anything, even a college where they could learn English? How do they get anywhere? They are not given enough money for bus fares.

It is issues like that that are of concern and that affect the belief that all this would be done in good faith and that they would try to set them up in a sensible way, with access to legal advice, education, bus services into communities. There is no trust that that sort of thing would ever be considered. The Government have shown themselves completely incapable of monitoring their contracts. I think they were paying £10 billion for the contract to provide asylum support, but as far as I am aware their monitoring of that contract is not working.

Q44 Bell Ribeiro-Addy: That brings me to my next question. How much profit do you think a lot of these providers are making from providing what is meant to be a public service, and obviously doing so for their shareholders?

Maria Stephens: From what we can tell, they are making huge profits from a service that is, frankly, worse than terrible. It has been reported in various papers that some of those profits go into the millions. People make complaints to the AIRE provider and to the private housing contractors, and on multiple occasions there is no response and they are left in conditions that contravene their human rights in multiple ways. The providers are not accountable, and there is no accountability even to the Home Office. So public money is being given to people who are not fulfilling in any way the support that is meant to be offered to some of the most vulnerable people who come here seeking protection.

Accommodation centres also mean deprivation of liberty without fair trial, because they end up acting as de facto detention because they are isolated and far away. That is a really important point with regard to human rights.

Q45 Bell Ribeiro-Addy: That is very important. Have you, or colleagues from different organisations that may support refugees, experienced any barriers to going into hotel accommodation or other accommodation to support people? I have been thrown out of two hotels in my constituency when trying to support people seeking asylum there, so I wondered whether it was common for people to be thrown out and be told to check with the Home Office before they can speak to people housed there.

Maria Stephens: As far as I understand, there have been some delays, depending on when a new hotel is taken on and when services can be accessed, but in general we have been able to gain access. I would need to check with my services colleagues exactly how long that has taken and their concerns around that. Sometimes we are not aware that a new hotel has been taken on, and it takes time to get there. Also, volunteers who are in hotels sometimes feel very sidelined by the providers running those hotels, even if they are raising concerns about the well-being of people there. This is obviously very worrying, given that, as we said, these are often in isolated places.

Polly Glynn: I have had experience in the last few months of not being allowed into a long-term hostel being used by Home Office providers. I am also aware that groups that had organised giving clothes to newly arrived asylum seekers, by collecting them from neighbours and going down in their cars, had been asked to move out of the hotel car park.

Chair: In what capacity were you visiting, Polly?

Polly Glynn: I was going to see a new client. They would not allow me anywhere near it.

Chair: What reason was given?

Polly Glynn: No reason was given.

Chair: No reason was given, just that you could not come in to see a client as their solicitor to give them legal advice.

Polly Glynn: Yes.

Chair: Sorry to interrupt

Bell Ribeiro-Addy: No, I was going to ask what the reason was, just to see if it was the same as mine. It was quite similar, just, “No, we have to check with the Home Office”, even though apparently the individuals in the hotel are free to come and go, which I find quite interesting.

Going back to the right to work, are you aware of any assessment that has been done on the economic benefit if asylum seekers were allowed to work after six months, knowing full well that they are unlikely to be returned to their home country, rather than being given these small grants. There would be economic benefit to the country: they would be working, paying taxes, spending.

Maria Stephens: The Lift the Ban campaign has estimated a potential gain of £333 million to the UK economy if people seeking asylum were allowed to work. That would be through national insurance payments and tax, and through savings to asylum support payments. It is a significant amount of money, and obviously stopping people from working has costs in itself; this is the cost of hostility, in a sense.

The Migration Advisory Committee has recommended on two occasions now that the policy be reviewed. The Government themselves had committed to a review. They were not forthcoming with any evidence, but suggested that the figures in the financial estimates were not accurate. However, those estimates have been checked very carefully and are the estimates that seem most likely for the kind of gains made. It is very conservative: it is based on 50% of people in the system working.

Bell Ribeiro-Addy: Thank you very much.

Q46 Lord Henley: I am a Conservative Member of the House of Lords.

I will move on to the process of dispersal of asylum seekers. Later on this afternoon we will see various council leaders from throughout the UK who are taking in asylum seekers. How they are dispersed will be rather important. Could you tell us a little about the process of dispersal? Particularly in relation to this committee, how do you think it might affect the human rights of individuals as decisions are made?

Maria Stephens: Previously, dispersal took place to areas where there was more housing stock, but recently that has changed and it will be mandatory, so all local authorities will have a duty to accept people seeking asylum into their local authority. It is done on a no-choice basis, so it presents quite a number of serious risks to peoples’ human rights. We have mentioned already that in some cases it can mean they are sent somewhere where there is no access to specific medical care or support that they might need. That might be psychiatric care, which is quite common for people who have been traumatised, in dealing with PTSD.

It can also breach the right to family life, because people who come to the UK seeking asylum sometimes have a family connection or people they are close to here, which is obviously fundamental when you are trying to maintain balance in your life at a very difficult time. That can be completely taken away if you are sent to another part of the country. It can also be very disruptive and problematic for children’s right to education.

We have serious concerns about the mandatory dispersal on a no-choice basis. We recommend that there should be discussion with people about where they—

Lord Henley: Can I pause you there? Is there no discussion?

Maria Stephens: At the moment, it is completely no-choice. The people are not given any choice.

Lord Henley: There is a difference between no choice and whether people are actually asked for their views.

Maria Stephens: As I understand it, they are not asked for their views, and they are then dispersed. The argument is that it is in the public interest to offer dispersal in that way, because it is organised through the Home Office’s plans.

Lord Henley: Do you have any idea how the Home Office works in this way? You say there is no choice and no discussion, but presumably it is in the interests of the Home Office to try to put people in places that might be appropriate—or are they just picking names out of hats? Is that what it seems like to you?

Maria Stephens: It seems to us is that dispersal is completely random, and it will become more so. The Home Office is under a huge amount of pressure, because it has an enormous backlog. If some of the backlog was cleared, it might be able to make decisions based on choice, but as far as we can tell there is no choice. We sometimes put in evidence or requests for people to be housed near family members or support services, which should be taken into account but in most cases are not. Even when there is a clear medical reason or something that could be used as evidence that might enable someone to have more choice, it is generally disregarded and not listen to.

Lord Henley: Even when there is a clear family reason.

Maria Stephens: Yes, even when there is a clear family reason, people can be sent to the other side of the country. Obviously when you are living on asylum support, it is not easy to travel back or have any contact, especially as travel is not seen as an essential requirement by the Home Office in terms of what is offered to asylum seekers.

Polly Glynn: There is also a problem when people have been in a hotel long term and have children. The children have started school, and suddenly, after a year or so, they are moved. I do not know if you have children, but year 6 in junior school is a big moment—there is an end of term thing. I have had clients who were dispersed just a month before that happened, so suddenly the children are taken out of that school without any of the school-leaving things. It is a bit heart breaking because it is unnecessary.

You asked whether there is any discussion. There is no discussion; the people come up and the accommodation providers are asked to provide the accommodation, and there is no way that any discussion with the individual is put to the accommodation providers about where they would prefer.

Lord Henley: That brings me on to something else. You are suggesting that after that initial dispersal, subsequent dispersals can happen in quite an arbitrary fashion. According to what?

Polly Glynn: Back before they started using hotels on a long-term basis to accommodate people, generally you would get dispersed and that would be that, subject to a particular house not being available or something. Now, with the long-term use of hotels, I am seeing more often that people are moved somewhere for a few months and then moved somewhere else for a period of time. That problem seems to have come up more in the last few years.

Lord Henley: Is this under the new arrangements that came in last year, or has it always been the case?

Polly Glynn: I have seen the move from one place to another more in the last three or four years. Before then, it seemed to be more that if you were dispersed, you were dispersed, and that was that. There was upheaval, but then you stayed. Now, it seems that, with the long-term use of hotels, people are going from one place to the other.

Lord Henley: I am thinking of who we are seeing later on. You and your family might be sent to Newcastle, and soon after that, for reasons that are inexplicable to you and your family, you are moved to North Devon.

Polly Glynn: I have not had a lot of experience of that. It is more when you are in hotels long term. If people are given self-contained accommodation in Newcastle, I have not seen them very often being moved to other self-contained accommodation. I do not think that is the real issue.

Lord Henley: So it is mainly those in hotels. Could the hotels be anywhere?

Maria Stephens: The hotels can be anywhere, and increasingly they are all over the country. There are also issues with people being given almost no notice that they are going to be dispersed. One person we were working with was given a phone call 15 minutes before he was going to be dispersed. He was unable to be ready to move his whole life and be there in 15 minutes, so he lost the window and was left for an extended period in the very poor-standard accommodation that he was living in. The system is problematic in that sense of people’s rights.

Lord Henley: Okay, thank you very much.

Chair: What sort of rights are engaged by what you have just described to Lord Henley? It seems to me that there is an Article 8 issue.

Maria Stephens: Yes, Article 8, the right to family life, and I would say Article 3 too. It can be very degrading to be sent somewhere that has poor conditions, where you do not know anyone and you are being taken away from your family. For children, as we mentioned, there is obviously the right to education. If you are moved from being in school to a place where you are not in school, there is a huge gap in getting you back into school, which means that children are going without learning. I suppose it can impact children’s leisure and well-being and their right to their own identity. It is certainly not in the best interests of the child to be moved in that way.

Chair: We have touched a bit on access to legal advice. Lord Singh will ask you a couple more questions on that.

Q47 Lord Singh of Wimbledon: I am a Cross-Bench Member of the House of Lords. You have touched on some of the points on legal aid. What are the available remedies for asylum seekers who wish to challenge the asylum support and accommodation that they have been given? Is there any sort of flagging up that you can contact a person? Is there any lead that suggests that asylum seekers have a right to challenge?

Polly Glynn: I have never seen it being suggested to anyone that they would be able to contact anybody.

Chair: Were there any notices up in the hotels that you visited?

Polly Glynn: Saying that they could get a lawyer? No.

Lord Singh of Wimbledon: There is nothing, which does not help very much. The situation that you describe is heart-breaking. You have already commented on the difficulty and meanness of legal aid and the poor pay for those providing it. Polly, would you like to add anything to that?

Polly Glynn: If we are going to give people legal rights—and we do; this Parliament gives people legal rights—we need to enable them to have those rights. There is no point having legal rights written on a piece of paper if you cannot do anything about it when your rights are infringed. Parliament really needs to think about this, and think about its role in making laws. If you make laws but the people who those laws affect cannot do anything about it, there is no point in the law, as far as I can see. I feel very strongly that we as a country have laws that govern who should be granted asylum or given refugee status. We need to make sure that people have those rights in practice.

In relation to asylum support, it is the same thing: we have rules saying that the support has to be of a certain standard and that the Government should take notice of people with disabilities and of what is in the best interests of children. But without access to lawyers those are just ideas; they are of nothing.

Lord Singh of Wimbledon: That is very strongly put, and accepted. Maria, would you like to add anything?

Maria Stephens: At the moment, only 50% of people who need access to a legal aid lawyer can get one. From a recent FoI request we see that there is a deficit of about 25,000 people who need access to a legal aid lawyer but do not have one. That is likely to grow worse with the new approach to accommodation and people being sent to different parts of the country. We know that there are even bigger legal aid deserts. Combined with the hourly rate not being sufficient for solicitors to take on legal aid cases, of which there are many examples, access to justice and the right to a fair trial are effectively being taken away because there is not enough access to legal aid.

On your previous question regarding raising complaints, although this is not related to legal aid, people should in theory be able to report issues to the advice, issue reporting and eligibility—AIRE—contract provider. However, we have many examples of people being treated in a very degrading way by being held on the phone for hour upon hour, not having their sometimes very serious reports of poor conditions, including collapsed ceilings or damp in housing, taken on board, sometimes not being called back, or having their details lost and having to spend three to four hours waiting to speak to the provider. Obviously quite a lot of public money is being spent on that contract, so that is definitely something that should be considered.

Lord Singh of Wimbledon: The points that you have made about laws and rules that cannot be implemented is completely taken. Thank you.

Chair: We have covered as much as we can in the time available. Your evidence has been powerful and affecting. I thank you both very much for coming and giving us your time and the benefit of your experience and expertise this afternoon.

Oral evidence: Human Rights of Asylum Seekers in the UK