21
Examination of witnesses
Roger Gough, David Worden, Susan Aitken and Lesley Storey.
Q48 Chair: Thank you very much to all the council leaders for joining us this afternoon. We are very grateful to you, and we are looking forward very much to hearing what you have to say to us.
We will start by introducing those who are with us in person, and then I will move to introduce those who are with us online. In person, we have Councillor Roger Gough, who has been the leader of Kent County Council since October 2019. He sits on the Local Government Association's children and young people board and chairs the South East Strategic Partnership for Migration boards. Thank you very much, Councillor, for joining us.
We have Councillor Lesley Storey, who is a cabinet member at Newcastle City Council and has special responsibility for refugees and asylum seekers.
We have Councillor Susan Aitken, who has been the leader of Glasgow City Council since 2017, a councillor since 2012 and the leader of the SNP group on the council since 2014.
Last but very much not least, we have Councillor David Worden who has been the leader of North Devon Council since 2019.
We are grateful to you all for coming today. We have invited you because we wanted to make sure that we had people from across the United Kingdom, and we know that you all will have particular experiences of this issue, particularly you, Counsellor Gough, as you are at the receiving end of so many asylum seekers in Kent. We are the Joint Committee on Human Rights, so our particular interest in these questions is from a human rights perspective.
I will start by asking you this. In your work with those seeking asylum, to what extent are human rights considerations taken into account?
Roger Gough: Clearly, there are a number of rights engaged under the convention—your previous speakers and others will be more chapter and verse on that than perhaps I will—which will naturally inform our work. An issue that I will come back to later, because I do not wish to drag the conversation into another area, is that one of the things that, for most of the time, has been a big issue for us is unaccompanied minors. It is therefore particularly the Children Act and our responsibilities under it, many of which ultimately refer to other rights, that are among the main drivers of our responsibilities in this area.
There are a whole number of rights, which previous speakers addressed, that local authorities will be drawn into, whether directly or indirectly, because in a number of cases there will be facilities in our areas that are operated by the Home Office, its contractors and so on, and we have very specific roles in relation to those, which may be related to public health, safeguarding, Prevent or other specific responsibilities. There will be other key responsibilities that will rest with the Home Office itself and its contractors.
Chair: As a public authority, you have duties and responsibilities under the Human Rights Act to everyone in your area, and that will encompass asylum seekers and people who are already living in the county. That is right, is it not?
Roger Gough: Yes.
Chair: Councillor Storey, in your work, to what extent do you take human rights considerations into account?
Lesley Storey: My view and that of Newcastle City Council is that human rights need to underpin all our policies, procedures, principles and approaches to working with asylum seekers and refugees. To what extent we are able to discharge those responsibilities in the way we would like to in the current policy framework is very difficult.
I do not want to trespass too much on territory that we have already been in, such as hotels, but for me there are key, crucial issues around the use of hotels and moving people around without getting any idea from them about where they want to be.
I want to bring up a couple of issues from the previous conversation about hotels. We have heard a lot about food and why that is important. We do a lot of work. We send environmental health officers and food safety standard officers into hotels, and where we do that we see standards driven up and the tummy aches, the diarrhoea and the terrible situations improve, but as soon as we stop doing it those situations re-emerge. We have to constantly monitor hotels, which is a huge drain on us.
The other issue, and this is very much a human rights issue, is that those hotels apply a different standard to asylum seekers and refugees from the standard they apply to other residents in hotels, by which I mean that asylum seekers are often not allowed to use the dining areas but have to stay in their rooms and cannot use the communal areas. I find that deeply concerning.
We find that we are always playing catch up. We are always trying to track people down and reach out to them, because we are not always made aware with enough notice that groups of very vulnerable people have arrived in our city. We want to warmly welcome them. We feel that it is our duty to ensure that we reach out to people. It is an asylum seekers’ and refugees’ human right to seek refuge in our country, and we take very seriously our duty and responsibility to ensure that we are receiving those people warmly and to the highest possible standard. I just wanted to set that out. We do not see asylum seekers as a problem; we see the system as the problem, not the people.
Chair: That is helpful, and we will certainly come back later on to some more focused questions about accommodation. Councillor Aitken, to what extent in your work with asylum seekers on Glasgow City Council do you take human rights considerations into account?
Susan Aitken: I see it as the overarching principle to consider human rights, safeguarding, integration from day one into the receiving community and to support the recovery from trauma for vulnerable people who have arrived in our city. To echo what Councillor Storey said, the legislation makes it extremely difficult for us to carry out our work with asylum seekers in the way that we would like to.
There are explicit barriers put in the way of local authorities acting within the law and supporting asylum seekers in a welfare-based way that puts human rights, safeguarding and integration at the centre of the approach. I would say that we use the law wherever possible in Glasgow to push any legislative approaches as far as we can to deliver support and services for asylum seekers in the way we would like. It is clear that over the past couple of decades, since the dispersal system came in, the human rights of asylum seekers in the UK have been steadily eroded and human rights have been explicitly removed. The right to work is an obvious one, but there are many other examples that I could cite.
The integration part is incredibly important. The Scottish Government’s New Scots strategy has integration as an overriding principle from day one, and this has very much driven the work that we have done in Glasgow, which is the single biggest asylum dispersal authority in the UK. We have been a dispersal authority since 2000 and we have enormous experience of this and, it is fair to say, a lot of success; we can point to Glasgow as a success story for integration. This was hard-won success, after some very challenging initial experiences. But it is increasingly difficult. Achieving the best possible outcomes, for asylum seekers and for receiving communities, is made increasingly difficult by the legislation and the barriers placed in the way of local authorities.
Chair: Could you give us an example of what you mean by a barrier?
Susan Aitken: The biggest and perhaps most egregious one is “no recourse to public funds” legislation. When someone is appeals-exhausted, they are, essentially, forcibly made destitute. In those circumstances, it is extremely difficult for the local authority to find a legal route to support that person. There could be all manner of vulnerabilities there that require support, but it is very difficult for us to give it. We do not end up with a person who then voluntarily returns to their own country, because that is not the outcome that you get from no recourse to public funds. In fact, it is completely counterproductive to that: you often get a vulnerable, often homeless, person for whom it is extremely difficult for us to provide any kind of statutory support, although we endeavour to do so via any available legal routes.
Chair: David Worden, in your work with those seeking asylum in North Devon, to what extent are human rights considerations taken into account?
David Worden: We are relatively new to the hotel experience in Ilfracombe. Only about 140 or 150 asylum seekers have moved into the area in the last couple of months. But, as a district council authority, we are really a facilitator for a multiagency approach. We are concerned about safeguarding, integration, community cohesion et cetera, so we have tried to encourage as much work with voluntary groups as we can, particularly with the Pickwell Foundation, which has done some wonderful work with regard to human rights and helping the asylum seekers in our area. It has co-ordinated with the churches and many other people, as well as us, to ensure that people get the clothing they need, things like notepads and pens, cosmetics for the women and all sorts of little things like that, which all add up towards making it really good for a person to be in our area.
So we are trying to do our best, but a lot of it is being done voluntarily rather than through any government scheme. I echo everything that was said in the first session about the problems concerning finances and things of that nature.
Q49 Chair: That is very helpful. I will direct my next question specifically to Councillor Gough, because people who cross the channel in small boats obviously arrive in your county. What challenges are you facing in relation to people arriving after crossing in small boats? How does the increase in the influx of small boats affect the ability of your council to comply with its legal duties to both those seeking asylum and other people living in your council area?
Roger Gough: I will address the nature of the issues that we face, specifically in Kent. My council is a two-tier area, and, as a county council, we in Kent have some very specific responsibilities, particularly in relation to children. Until a year or two ago, whenever there were stages with significant numbers of arrivals, the overwhelming bulk of the impact was from the unaccompanied minors and asylum-seeking children. That was certainly the biggest area by far. This is on your agenda a little later, so I will hold off talking about it. A number of issues to do with the discharge of our responsibilities are raised by this, and I will come back to it.
Other areas did not initially affect us very much because, as was mentioned earlier, we had pretty much 20 years of the dispersal policy, so very small numbers of people were living in Kent under dispersal arrangements. Of course, what changed was that, starting in September 2020, we had Napier barracks, which was in effect an early form of contingency accommodation. Subsequently, we had Manston, which performed a rather different function, and, most recently, we, like other areas, have started to see issues in relation to asylum hotels.
Going back to Napier in particular, from the point of view of community leadership we were engaged very much with Folkestone and Hythe District Council. There was also a set of responsibilities, particularly in relation to public health and engaging in the nature of the health facilities that there were—or, frankly, were not—at that site. You will know that, in its first six to nine months, there were very distressing and difficult incidents at Napier, including a fire, a degree of disorder, a Covid outbreak et cetera, and we had significant public health responsibilities in relation to that. That situation has changed significantly since that time.
Another area where we are really starting to see an impact across Kent as a whole relates to the crisis that we saw in the autumn of last year. This feeds through very directly from two things: first, the increased number of small boat arrival; and, secondly, the growing backlog and therefore the reliance on hotels in particular rather than traditional dispersal accommodation. As that whole system essentially became blocked, particularly in the case of Manston, some of those issues pushed their way back into Kent, as in September and October Manston took on much larger numbers than it was supposed to. The situation at Manston was clearly unacceptable at that time.
What has really affected an area like Kent is partly the simple visibility of the issue: we see these very large numbers of arrivals, which potentially has some implications for community cohesion. Secondly, as I say, there are specific issues around unaccompanied minors, which I will come back to. Above all, some of those problems were gradually moved back into Kent as a result of the fact that, for all the reasons that we have heard, the contingency system—or, in effect, the dispersal system—could no longer be used effectively, and there was a reliance on contingency accommodation, which itself was hitting severe bottlenecks, so you saw major problems in areas such as Manston.
Q50 Chair: I understand that in November, at the end of last year, you and the leaders of 13 other local authorities in Kent, including the county council, reportedly sent a letter to the Home Secretary saying that public services in your area were under extreme pressure from surging local demand due to Channel crossings. Can you tell us about that letter and what you were saying to the Home Office in it?
Roger Gough: The letter was signed by 14 of us: the leaders of the county council, the Medway unitary authority and 12 district councils in the Kent County Council area. It is worth saying that that is a cross-party group of leaders, predominantly Conservative leaders but not solely by any means, and it was signed by cross-party members.
There were two things that particularly brought that out. The first was that we were seeing a confluence of pressures, many of them related to asylum, some of them to other schemes. One of the things that I know we touched on in that letter was the impact on school placements. At that stage, this was to do with the Afghan-related accommodation, particularly in the areas of Canterbury and Ashford, and you could see some very specific school place pressures in a couple of school years in those areas, because that was where that accommodation was. It is worth saying that at that time we were just starting to see the evolution of hotels as contingency accommodation coming into Kent. That has moved apace since then.
There was a knock-on effect on local health capacity, not from Napier at this stage but certainly from Manston, and, as I have said, there were further impacts from unaccompanied minors and their particular needs. We will come back to that later, but it ties into certain areas of accommodation and fostering.
I think the letter was also focused on the question of the impact of dispersal in the change programme, and again we may come back to this in your questions. This was not an imminent issue in Kent but potentially an issue over time, given, as mentioned earlier, that previously dispersal had focused on areas where there was more of that sort of that accommodation available than you find in many parts of Kent or the south-east.
Chair: What was the reason for writing to the Home Office? Should we understand you to be saying, “Look, we’ve got a huge amount on our plate already. We can’t really cope with anybody more by way of this new dispersal policy”? Is that really what you were saying?
Roger Gough: It was a combination of things. At the time the letter was written, Manston was already an issue, so that was undoubtedly a significant factor. We were starting to see adult contingency accommodation, particularly hotels, starting to come through in Kent, and they have indeed come through in significant numbers.
This was coming on top of the experiences of initial services related to people's arrivals, plus everything that is related to unaccompanied asylum-seeking children. There were the specific issues of the time, and I know that what concerned my district colleagues, as housing authorities, was looking ahead to what was coming through in the change programme. We understand entirely the logic of the change programme, because clearly many parts of the country have taken large numbers of dispersed asylum seekers into dispersal accommodation over the years in a way that has not happened so much in the south-east, so I think we would all see the logic of the natural justice of re-allocating that.
Given that, the question that was frequently asked was how that was to be practically delivered in areas where, for example, there are significant obligations in relation to the challenges of domestic homelessness which local authorities are already struggling to meet, and the degree of confluence of all these factors.
Q51 Chair: That is helpful. I move now to a question for Councillor Aitken. You heard what Councillor Gough had to say. He has described the pressure in his local authority’s area. As you have told us already, Glasgow has been doing more than its bit for quite a long time with regard to the dispersal policy. What is the impact of the duties that you have taken on under that policy in your local authority area? It is a huge area with considerable challenges, particularly in the field of housing. I am interested to hear from you how the duties you have taken on in relation to asylum seekers have impacted the council’s ability to comply with its human rights obligations across the board.
Susan Aitken: The first thing to make clear is that Glasgow’s experience as an asylum authority has been if not unequivocally then overwhelmingly positive. It has been transformative for the city and incredibly enriching. The new Glaswegians who have come to live in our city through us being an asylum dispersal authority—they are now Glaswegians and understood to be such—bring an enormous amount to the city, and there is a lot of civic, and indeed political, support.
I always think it is important, when we are getting into talking about the challenges that the system creates, to say that it is not the asylum seekers who are the problem. Far from it; it is quite the opposite, in fact. But undoubtedly the way the system is run puts pressure on us as a local authority, and we receive virtually no funding from the UK Government for the work we do, or we had not done until the recently discussed changes to the dispersal system, which I am sure we will come on to.
All the duties that we carry out, whether through our housing and homelessness services or our social work services, or through education, are being carried out at our own cost, in single-figure millions every year. It is not vast amounts of money in Glasgow's overall budget, but equally it is not nothing, and obviously it is funding that could always be used elsewhere. We regard that as a good use of funding, but equally this is a UK Government responsibility, and the UK Government are not shouldering the cost of that responsibility. We are shouldering it at local authority level, and until now we have received no support for doing so.
There is undoubtedly pressure in the housing system. It may be fair to say briefly that Glasgow has a different housing system from the majority of local authorities. We ourselves are not a landlord. We have a network of over 80 community-led housing associations in the city that are excellent partners, and we work very closely with them. They have stepped up to their responsibilities, and I would say they have gone above and beyond them in providing accommodation, certainly for refugees, for people who have been through the system and received refugee status. They are very good partners in this.
However, the issues that have been caused by us as an authority not having control over asylum accommodation, and the disconnect between that being a privatised for-profit service rather than a statutory public service run by us as a local authority, in tandem with all the other things that we do, mean that providing a properly cohesive and co-ordinated approach to integration and supporting asylum seekers to live fulfilling and fulfilled lives in our community is an enormous issue and puts strain on the system and on our budget.
I know that we will come back to the issue of relationships with providers. This is very much in the past, but certainly while I have been leader of the council we had a very serious issue with the previous accommodation provider in Glasgow, which at one point threatened essentially to mass-evict 300 people from their accommodation. They were just going to evict them on to the streets of Glasgow. They said that they were appeals-exhausted. That was Serco, I should say.
We forced the issue with them. There was uproar in the city over that, quite rightly. It turned out that most of them were not appeals-exhausted; some actually had refugee status, were our responsibility and should have been passed to us, as the local authority, to deal with in our homelessness services. But Serco and the Home Office had not passed on that information. Some people were not appeals-exhausted at all, and our partners in the Scottish Refugee Council, for example, were able to help them. That is an example of where huge stress and pressure in the system was caused by the way the system itself works.
We, as a local authority, along with our third sector partners, have to pick up the pieces of failure, underfunding and the approaches taken by the contract holders for the asylum accommodation. The burden falls to us, and we pick it up because that is the right thing to do, but I stress again that we are not and have not been funded to do so. It is the job of the UK Government, the Home Office and the asylum accommodation providers to do that, but there have been so many occasions when there have been failures and breakdowns and where we have been the last resort, stepping in, along with our third sector partners, to support people.
Q52 Chair: The situation with Serco that you described was well publicised at the time: it was raised in this Parliament and in the Scottish Parliament. Thank you for that full answer, which was very helpful.
Councillor Worden, you are obviously in a different situation and at the opposite end of the scale from Councillor Aitken and Glasgow, which has been involved with this for a long time. You described that your local authority has only recently become involved in the dispersal scheme. To what extent has it affected your local authority’s ability to comply with its human rights obligations to everyone in the area?
David Worden: First, the fact that the commissioning arrangements have been centralised, rather than being local, has not been very satisfactory in my area, because the hotel that was chosen is in a very deprived area. Ilfracombe has a lot of poverty, has a lack of medical facilities, is isolated and so on, so this has had an impact on our general population, which was already very stretched.
I am obviously also concerned about what will happen after the hotel, because we have a housing crisis in our area. We have about 44,000 houses, but in the last year, for example, we had about 2,000 approaches from people who were potentially homeless in our area. So finding accommodation in North Devon for people once they come out of the hotel is a real problem. Some 2,500 people, or thereabouts, are on our waiting list at the moment.
So there is a general lack of facilities, and Ilfracombe is probably the last place where we would have wanted asylum seekers to go. We realise that they have to go somewhere, but if we had to take asylum seekers and if we had had the opportunity to make the decision locally in our area, we would certainly not have chosen Ilfracombe because of the deprivation there.
Chair: So it is a local resources issue that would have made you say no, as opposed to anything else.
David Worden: Yes.
Chair: Councillor Storey, could you discuss the impact of the asylum dispersal policy in your local authority area, particularly in relation to how it has affected your council’s ability to comply with its human rights obligations across the board?
Lesley Storey: Our experience is very similar to Glasgow, and I echo and reiterate a lot of what has been said. We really welcome asylum seekers and refugees and are proud of the work that we have undertaken. We are a city of sanctuary, and we have a schools of sanctuary approach. We take this very seriously and have a compassionate rights-based approach to solidarity, because it could be us and we always look at it in that way. So our experience is very similar, and we are so proud of our work.
We have done very well so far, but undoubtedly, because of years and years of austerity, under the system we are now approaching breaking point, and I am not sure how long that can go on for. It is about that backdrop of cumulative cuts over years and years: we have seen a 40% reduction in our budget and a 37% drop in housing, so we are working around massive issues here.
We manage very well, and, as we have just heard, we would like to have the powers to manage more. We would like them devolved to us, because we know our communities, we know the area and we know how to manage things, and we are so frustrated when the Home Office puts people in hotels in the middle of nowhere, on the periphery of the city or, as recently happened, in a totally unsuitable hotel. A very senior police officer contacted the Home Office directly to say, “We are so concerned about children and families in this hotel. There is a risk of criminal and sexual exploitation”, but that went unheard.
A lot of problems could be avoided if local authorities were listened to more. But the discharged responsibility and contracting with the private sector and hotels, some of which are shamelessly exploiting this for taxpayers’ money, are absolutely wrong. We want to be able to discharge our human rights duties fully and properly, and we want to be funded to do that, because we know how to do it.
Chair: That is powerful evidence, thank you.
Q53 Lord Dubs: How many asylum seekers are currently being housed in your local authority area, and what type of accommodation is being used? How does this differ specifically for children? If it is fair, I will ask Councillor Gough, whom I met before, to kick off on that.
Roger Gough: I will. I remember with great pleasure engaging with you and a number of your colleagues on issues, particularly when we have had various moments of a lot of pressure, on the unaccompanied minor issue in particular.
In Kent, we take direct responsibility for just under 500—I think the precise number is 485—unaccompanied minors, by which I mean under-18s. I keep saying this, and I will address it in more detail when we come to unaccompanied minors, but that is a combination of our 0.1% requirement, or cap, on the young people population, plus the reception and safe care service that we provide, which I will also come back to.
If we can just park that figure for a moment, we have 1,061 care leavers of asylum background. That is in the 18-to-25 age range. Inevitably, that is a corollary of the fact that we had significant numbers of arrivals—there are probably not many left over now from the large number of arrivals in 2015, but certainly from 2020-21—and of course all councils’ responsibilities in that go up to the age of 25.
With regard to others, maybe I can speak more about the south-east as a whole. There are now very large numbers of contingency hotels across the south-east. Historically the south-east has had relatively low numbers of dispersal asylum seekers, well above our share of the national population. We have seen the change programme, which indicated that that should go up pretty sharply—from memory, to about 7,000.
We now have a situation where, with the numbers in hotels, that pretty much balances out. In effect, the south-east has roughly the sort of numbers envisaged under the change programme, but it is on a completely different balance from the bulk of the country. I think it is still the case overall in the country that about two-thirds of asylum seekers are in dispersal accommodation, and a bit more than one-third—it might be heading more towards 35% to 40%—are in contingency accommodation, chiefly hotels. In the south-east, that is completely the other way around. That will be even more the case in Kent, because historically, as I say, we had had very few under dispersal.
Lesley Storey: I am so glad that I have this information with me. We have 1,100 people living in dispersed accommodation. We have 550 people living in contingency accommodation, meaning hotels, and under the Homes for Ukraine scheme we have 300 adults and 90 children who are resident in the city of Newcastle, which is a very small city. Those are our numbers at this point in time.
Susan Aitken: We have 5,500 asylum seekers in Glasgow just now, which is considerably more than our population share. That has been the case for some time in Glasgow. There was a point where we were taking 10% of all the asylum seekers who came to the UK, but obviously we are not 10% of the population of the UK.
We have a relatively small number in hotels. The vast majority of our asylum seekers are in dispersed accommodation, private accommodation. We have 120 in hotels at the moment, and that is a legacy of the move during the pandemic of people into hotels. We do not have a history of having people in hotels, because we have always been insistent with providers—we do not have the power to enforce that insistence, but we have stamped our foot and shouted—that hotels were not used. They were then used during the pandemic, but folk may be aware that there was an appalling incident of extreme violence in June 2020 that resulted in the death of an asylum seeker and injuries caused to several other people. At that point we pushed for a plan for people to be dispersed back out of hotels into accommodation, and that has happened since then. At the peak I think we had about 400 people in hotels, but we have got that down to 120 and we are continuing to reduce the number of people in hotels as much as possible.
We have no one under 16 in hotels. Where there are young people or children in hotels, they are prioritised to be moved into settled accommodation as quickly as possible. The same goes for families.
There are an additional 500 asylum seekers in hotels in other parts of Scotland. We have been the only dispersal authority in Scotland since the dispersal scheme began, but that is now changing and other parts of Scotland are starting to receive asylum seekers, just now primarily in hotels. So there are a larger number in other parts of Scotland, but our proportion of people in hotels is much smaller than perhaps in other parts of the UK.
David Worden: I do not have the numbers that we have just been talking about, because we are only a small district authority. Ilfracombe itself has a population of only about 10,000 and 11,000. We have one hotel with a population of between 140 and 150 asylum seekers—that varies because people are being moved in and out, as you probably realise. Among those we have a small number of children, most of whom are in families, so I do not really have a lot that I can add to what has been said. I do not have the figures for the county of Devon, for example, which might have been more interesting to you. Obviously in Devon there will be quite a sizable number; I know a large number of hotels have been taken for asylum seekers in different districts throughout the county.
Lord Dubs: I am sure that if you want to send us some figures for the whole of the county, we would be delighted to receive them.
My next question is this—.
Chair: I think Councillor Gough wanted to come back in on a point there.
Roger Gough: I will add a couple of other figures, if I may. You are looking at 700-odd hotels currently in Kent; that is a capacity number, and some of them are just in the process of opening. That is purely for adult asylum seekers. Clearly there is a different situation in relation to the Afghan schemes, and the numbers of those in dispersal accommodation in Kent would be very small indeed.
Councillor Storey mentioned Homes for Ukraine. I should add that we have 2,000-odd Ukrainians staying with hosts in Kent under that scheme. Cumulatively that has been about 3,000, but nearly 1,000 have come into the scheme and then moved into other parts of it. That does not include Napier barracks, which has a capacity of nearly 350.
Lord Dubs: My apologies, Councillor Gough. I did not mean to bypass you.
Roger Gough: On the contrary, I was coming back with some extra information having spoken once already.
Q54 Lord Dubs: My next question is this. Whose role is it to raise and address safeguarding concerns and to ensure adequate accommodation conditions? To what extent can local councils take action whenever valid complaints are received?
Susan Aitken: It is the Home Office’s role. I have touched on this already. We in local authorities—certainly in Glasgow, and I am sure this is the experience of other colleagues—step in and do a lot of the work of safeguarding, but that is not our role. It is the statutory duty of the Home Office. Others have touched on this already, but it is my strong view that the asylum system should be run as a public statutory service at local level, but the duty lies with the Home Office.
Lesley Storey: I absolutely agree. I have already given an example of where we as a local authority were very concerned about the safeguarding at a hotel. We escalated that to get a very senior police officer to contact the Home Office, but we felt that that did not go anywhere. We have often had serious safeguarding concerns and sometimes feel that we really do not get anywhere. I keep saying this, but the use of hotels really has to stop. It is impossible to ensure safeguarding.
David Worden: Our situation is very much the same as the one the previous speaker mentioned. We are very concerned about safeguarding issues. We have escalated one or two already and we have asked for a risk assessment. We want closed-circuit television cameras in the hotel as well, because we are concerned particularly about female children in a predominantly male environment. It is very worrying in many ways and a lot more needs to be done in this area. We ask for risk assessments, policies of the hotel and so on. I will leave it there.
Roger Gough: Colleagues have covered this issue pretty thoroughly. It is clear that the responsibility lies with the Home Office and, in delivering it, with its contractors. Local authorities across the country will find occasions when they are concerned about how those are being discharged, and indeed about having the capacity to do what is supposed to be done in that safeguarding, so local authorities will take that up. In the case of a two-tier area like Kent, some of that informal responsibility, if I can put it that way, will come to us at the county and some to our district colleagues who are dealing with those issues. Otherwise, I simply echo what others have said: we get brought in, but the fundamental responsibility for this lies with the Home Office, because these are ultimately Home Office facilities.
Q55 Bell Ribeiro-Addy: Does the Home Office always tell you as soon as asylum seekers come into your various areas? Does it give any particular type of guidance or support on providing accommodation?
Lesley Storey: No. Absolutely not. I keep going on about this, but it was such a serious situation at the particular hotel that I have talked about. We found out by the by that 104 people had been moved into a hotel. No notice was given and we were not made aware of it. We are catching up all the time and finding out after the fact. We are given less than 24 hours’ notice that people are arriving. We then try our very best to get out there, meet them and reach out and make those connections, but we are simply not given enough time.
Roger Gough: I broadly agree with what has been said. I think there have been different stages of this experience. I think the point was raised earlier—or perhaps it was in the indications that we were given in approaching this committee—about 24 hours. The 24-hour question is an interesting one, because there have certainly been cases that we have seen where 24 hours did not apply; again, we or our district colleagues found out after the event.
The Immigration Minister, as part of his efforts to improve engagement with local authorities, came in with this proposal of a minimum of 24 hours. In the cases that we are seeing most recently, we are getting that notification, in many cases well beyond 24 hours, because that is then part of the discussion about our proposals to put people in this hotel or that other facility and getting a local authority view, although there is a distinction between getting a local authority view and whether much notice is then taken of that. Both we and district colleagues will raise issues to do with the suitability of particular facilities—safeguarding issues or whatever it may be—but we then find that it moves ahead none the less.
Still, the most extreme situation—again, this ties in a bit with what we were saying earlier about Manston—was the point at which Manston was clearly overheating, and then there was the need to move on dispersal from there very quickly. In those cases, notice was almost retrospective.
Bell Ribeiro-Addy: Councillor Worden? No? In the interests of time, I would say that we have a general idea.
David Worden: —asylum seekers protested about it. Sorry, did you lose me for a moment?
Chair: We lost you there, because your screen froze for a moment. Could you go back to the beginning of your answer?
David Worden: I was saying that I am glad you asked that question. We found out that one of the hotels in Ilfracombe was being considered. We wrote and said, “Look, Ilfracombe is not the right place for asylum seekers”, and we were told that that hotel would not be used. We found out a fortnight later that during the night, about 2 or 3 o’clock in the morning, asylum seekers were actually moved in. We had no notice whatsoever that they were coming to the hotel in Ilfracombe that they are in at the moment. We were very disappointed about that, particularly having been promised that it would not be used, because in my opinion it is not really suitable. Did you get all that? I am sorry, it is very stormy here today.
Chair: I think we did.
Bell Ribeiro-Addy: Councillor Aitken, are they letting you know? I was just about to go back over my question, because it sounds as if—and please correct me if I am wrong—that sometimes you are given 24 hours’ notice if you are expected to provide the accommodation, but you are given no notice when they book a hotel to provide that accommodation. Does that sound about right?
Susan Aitken: Others may want to respond on that. We have a different situation, because we have put voluntary information-sharing protocols in place and we now have a good working relationship with our provider in Scotland, the Home Office contractor, which is now Mears. A lot of work has been put in by all sides to maintain that relationship. As I say, that is voluntary; we are not entitled to that information.
Where the Home Office is concerned, it is a constant struggle to get them to treat us as a partner and to share information. There has been a more localised approach, if you like. We have not had the experience of either no notice or 24 hours’ notice, but that is because we have pushed a different approach locally and, as I say, because of the good will of our provider in working with us on those voluntary arrangements in more recent years, certainly following the Park Inn incident that I referred to earlier.
Bell Ribeiro-Addy: Just in case any of the other councillors has experience of being given 24 hours to make necessary provisions for asylum seekers moving into the area, do you think 24 hours was sufficient time? What were you able to arrange within 24 hours?
Lesley Storey: No.
Roger Gough: I reiterate that there were moments when it was not 24 hours, but that was in the very specific circumstances in the autumn when the effort to deal with the situation at Manston in particular meant that the Home Office was playing a lot of catch-up to try to address those issues, so things happened with less than 24 hours’ notice.
Now, I do not think that 24 hours’ notice is adequate and, to be fair, I do not think the Immigration Minister would say that it was. His position on it was that that was his position as a minimum, given where we were coming from at that time, which was that things had landed without notification.
At the moment, if you look at the contingency hotels that have been proposed or are happening in Kent, there has been considerably more than 24 hours’ notice. As I have said, the problem relates more to the nature of the dialogue and what conclusion it comes to in the end, rather than necessarily the timing on that. But then, of course, we are in a position at the moment where it is a little different from that very intense period of both rapid arrivals and the Manston situation that you saw in September and October.
Chair: Last but definitely not least, I will hand over to Baroness Massey, who I think will want to ask you some questions about the position of child asylum seekers.
Q56 Baroness Massey of Darwen: I am delighted to be in this session. It has been a superb example of all kinds of things that we would like to see, things that we think are not quite right, people telling people what to do but not following up and that kind of thing.
It is interesting that the Children Act 1989 places a duty on local authorities to safeguard and promote the welfare of children in need within their area and to provide appropriate services to meet those children’s needs. I think that is an interesting statement, and it has been touched on all the time that I have been sitting in this room today.
This session has been very useful. I have noted some quotations from people that I think I can remember, but I will not try to name them. We have heard about localised approaches being the best thing. That is true for almost everything you can think of, including education and health. As soon as it gets bigger than local, it gets somehow lost and unwieldy.
We have heard talk about “new Glaswegians”—that is obviously in Glasgow—and about integration in communities, and how communities themselves can put pressure on things that are going wrong to improve them. That is a really optimistic thing to think about.
As the Chair says, I am interested in children’s issues, having been a teacher and a youth worker and all kinds of things. What we have to look at, and I wonder if people agree with me, is that we can learn from good practice. I have heard lots of good practice today. It need not be depressing. It is stimulating to hear people talking about things that have and have not worked. That is good.
We have heard from all of you how the councils that you are involved in are coping with some of the difficulties that you have. You have lots of difficulties and I hope they decrease, because they have been awful for you. How do you comply with obligations relating to unaccompanied asylum-seeking children, and how do you put up with the frustrations that you have around what happens in reality, such as the 24-hour system? I would like this to go on for a long time, but do not worry, Chair, I am not going to prolong it. It would be useful if we could put this together in a good package so that people, if they have not said it already, could write in and describe the situation on the ground where they are working in, and in some cases leading on, the systems involved. It must be hard work all the time, probably, and sometimes extremely stressful.
In terms of local areas, which we have talked about, what sort of circumstances can you envisage related to children going missing? That issue is one of the most devastatingly awful things that are happening. Those children are probably not getting any health or education services yet are going missing. What happens to them? They float off somewhere. How do people know where they are? How do you track them down? We are left with a whole set of problems that we have to address somehow. I would be interested in the different ways in which you are addressing the issues relating to those children who, through no fault of their own, are in those terribly difficult circumstances. I would like to see more dialogue on that issue.
I thank whoever has put this together for getting people from all over the country to talk about their own specific problems, because, as we have heard, they are very different, and we could learn from each other in a very positive way. We just have to get the new Glaswegians on the rampage and making a difference—
Chair: I am not sure about that, as an Edinburgh person.
Baroness Massey of Darwen: I am sorry. You rephrase it for me.
Chair: I am just teasing you. I agree: clearly this is an immensely fraught issue, but it has been interesting to hear about the diverse experiences from across the UK and to hear some positive messages and get some concrete ideas about how the situation could be improved. I am hearing very strongly a need for more focus on local authorities and for more power and autonomy to be given to them. They know the situation on the ground, where the accommodation is, and why some hotels would be completely unsuitable for people with children and so on.
We are running slightly short of time now, but I think one of the issues that Baroness Massey was covering there was the duty placed on local authorities in England and Wales by the Children Act and in Scotland by the Children (Scotland) Act. Local authorities have very specific duties in relation to children. Councillor Gough has raised the issue of unaccompanied asylum-seeking children. It would be useful to go around all four of our witnesses to hear the specific issues that they have faced in relation to dealing with unaccompanied asylum-seeking children.
Baroness Massey of Darwen: Just one thing. You can rephrase my words if you want to. It is also important for local authorities to give people their voice on the ground. The voice of the child is tremendously important. It is about involving everyone and producing people who can make a difference.
Chair: Great. Let us bring in Councillor Storey, who I know wanted to catch my eye, on the extent to which your local authorities are finding themselves able or not to comply with their obligations under the Children Act in England and Wales and the Children (Scotland) Act in Scotland in relation to unaccompanied asylum-seeking children.
Lesley Storey: If I may, I want to say something specific about the voice of the child, which is enshrined in that Act. First, children who are asylum seekers and refugees in schools form bonds and friendships, which are very important—they are important for all children—and we have had examples where children have been devastated when their classmate suddenly just is not there any more. They go into school one day and the person with whom they have formed that relationship has been dispersed and moved somewhere else. I would really like you to think about the wider impact, sometimes on whole classes or groups of children, and how frightening that is and the trauma that it induces in children. Where did that child go to? What has happened to them? Could it happen to me? It is not only about individuals; it is about groups.
I want to share an example of a situation that we had last year of a 16 year-old girl who was about to do her GCSEs. Her family were told with two days’ notice that they were being moved, just as she was about to sit her exams. The children in the class were horrified. They went home and talked to their parents, who were also horrified. They lobbied the school and put a huge amount of pressure on, and were successful in that family not being dispersed. That raises the question: why were they going to be moved anyway if there was an alternative? That shows the power of communities. I just wanted to be able to say something positive.
Chair: When some of us visited the family accommodation at Manston last year, there were kids running around aged maybe seven, eight and nine, and all those kids said to me, “We want to go to school. When can we go to school?” They were desperate to get to school. Obviously that is not the case for all children, but they wanted to make friends and they wanted something to occupy themselves. Councillor Gough, I know that has been a particular issue in your area.
Roger Gough: Absolutely. I will focus particularly on the unaccompanied minors, because there are different issues that arise in these contexts. What Lesley has mentioned relates particularly to families with children and the dispersal issues that arise there. It is fair to say that we have a long and proud record in relation to unaccompanied minors; it is an important issue for us. For the record, having put my glasses on, I can confirm that the figure of those in our care at the moment is 495, to go back to Lord Dub’s question.
However, there have been moments when we have not been able to discharge our responsibilities under the Children Act, and it is worth reflecting on the circumstances where that arose. Twice, in 2020 and in 2021, we have specifically declared that we were unable to take more unaccompanied asylum-seeking children into our care, precisely because we would not be able to meet our duties under the Act. That was based partly on the experience that we had had some years before. We had a large number of arrivals in 2015. We raised exactly those concerns with the Government, and the Government of the day then took the view that there would be severe consequences for the local authority for not simply taking that responsibility, so we had to, and undoubtedly situations arose from that where we were unable to discharge our responsibilities.
So you end up with many of these young people ultimately being placed very far away. You do not necessarily have the accommodation or, if they are under 16, the fostering capacity to be able to do that very locally, particularly in those days, I would say. Most of them were aged 16 to 18, so it was more about accommodation availability. Once you are in that situation, social work visits, reviews and all the things that we are quite rightly required to do under the Act are put under enormous strain. Our concern, when we had what were then seen as very large numbers of arrivals in 2020 and 2021, was that we would be in that situation again.
It is fair to say that we reached with the Government what was in principle a very good arrangement whereby we would take the young people up to the 0.1% level—in fact, it was then 0.07%, under the Immigration Act 2016—and we would take an additional number in what we call our reception and safe care service, where we would use the knowledge and expertise that our staff have in this area to deal with the initial needs of these young people before they were moved on to other local authorities. The national transfer system, which had fallen into some degree of desuetude, would be reinvigorated and indeed ultimately made mandatory, because we were in a position where otherwise we would be back in that territory of not being able to deliver our responsibilities. In some ways, that has worked quite well.
Going back to one of your earlier questions, Chair, the numbers now coming in have inevitably put even that system under some degree of strain. That is why we have seen some reliance, albeit for relatively short periods, on unaccompanied minors in hotels, which raises all the issues that we have talked about already.
We have spoken a lot about roles. I agree very much with my colleagues about the role that local authorities can and should be able to play, but my conclusion from what I have just been saying is that there is a national role in a lot of this as well. There is a huge amount to be done in co-ordinating and ensuring appropriate placement in different parts of the country. We were pushing for the national transfer system to be made more effective, not less, because otherwise we would have been unable to discharge our responsibilities under the Act. In all these cases, there is some interesting thinking to be done about the appropriate role and powers of the local authority and the appropriate role of national government, because each has its proper place in this.
To give you a context, in 2022 nearly 1,400 young people came into our care at some point. Many of them were then dispersed under the reception and safe care system, but that is over 100 a month. Imagine being a local authority, even a large one such as Kent, taking 100 children into its care each month. That is not a sustainable position. Through the operation of the national transfer system we made it more so, but, without that, undoubtedly those duties under the Children Act would have fallen by the wayside one way or another.
Q57 Chair: Councillor Aitken, I want to ask you about the experience of Glasgow with unaccompanied child asylum seekers going missing.
Susan Aitken: We have not had the experience of unaccompanied child asylum seekers going missing. In fact, when I was discussing this with my officials in preparation for today, they could only remember one incident in the entirety of Glasgow’s 23 years as a dispersal authority. That is because it is one bit of the system where we have control. We are able to exercise our responsibility and use the legislation to ensure safeguarding, to ensure that human rights are respected and to ensure that there is a proper welfare-based approach. It is an example of how, where the local authority has the power, we are able to deliver better outcomes.
We do not have the same numbers that Councillor Gough has just talked about. We currently have 150 unaccompanied asylum-seeking children in our care in Glasgow, but that is consistent at any given time. Those are the sorts of numbers that we have. Over the years we have had many hundreds, indeed thousands, of unaccompanied asylum-seeking children.
I talked earlier about the transformational impact of being a dispersal authority in Glasgow. That is most evident in our schools and in our education system. Among children and young people is where that impact has been most striking and overwhelmingly positive—I would say unequivocally positive. Undoubtedly it causes some operational challenges and costs, but I would say that the outcomes for the city and for communities entirely justify that.
Baroness Massey talked about examples of good practice. We have said repeatedly to the Home Office and the UK Government that we already have an example of good practice of how to do this in the UK in recent years: the Syrian refugee resettlement scheme. All 32 local authorities in Scotland took part in that. It was nationally co-ordinated through COSLA, the Scottish equivalent of the LGA, in a partnership approach. Local authorities had the lead role and made decisions locally about how to work with the people who were coming to stay with them. It was properly funded by the UK Government from the Home Office from the outset. Crucially, the people arriving were not criminalised but were recognised from the outset as being vulnerable people coming from a traumatic situation and requiring welfare and safeguarding.
Lo and behold, there have been some really heart-warming and moving outcomes right across Scotland, and I am sure there are other examples across the UK, of real integration of Syrian refugees into communities. If it can be done for that group, it can be done for an entire asylum system. That is how to do it. That is how you get good outcomes. Trying to do it on the cheap, trying to outsource it and do it privately, is a false economy. It does not give you the right outcomes, and it ends up costing a lot more in the end. Treat people with dignity from the outset and properly fund local authorities to support them and to respond to their local needs, and it turns out that you actually get some pretty good outcomes for the people arriving and for the receiving communities alike.
Q58 Chair: Were this committee minded to make a recommendation to the Home Office about how to have a human rights-compliant scheme for dispersing people who come to the United Kingdom seeing asylum, would you say, “Look at the Syrian resettlement scheme”. Would that be your message, Councillor Aitken?
Susan Aitken: Absolutely.
Chair: I can see you nodding, Councillor Worden, Councillor Storey and, indeed, Councillor Gough, so it is great to have that unanimity from very different local authorities from across the different nations of the UK.
Councillor Gough, I think you wanted to add something.
Roger Gough: Yes. Apart from the fact that I was about to say that I am in violent agreement with councillor Aitken about the Syrian scheme, during the whole process of retendering the contracts in relation to asylum dispersal, many local authorities were making the point that certainly the engagement with them under that scheme, and probably many other aspects of it too, should be something of a model.
Councillor Aitken mentioned missing incidents. What I had intended to mention but forgot to was that our own experience has been that, through most of our time, missing incidents have been extremely small in number. The exceptions have been where there are particular nationalities where there is cause for concern, particularly trafficking or something close to it. In the past, there were certainly occasions when we were very concerned about young people from a Vietnamese background and, more recently, as I think has been widely publicised in the press, young people of Albanian background. There has been wide publicity about those who went missing.
We emphasise that we always seek to focus on safeguarding and multi-agency work with those young people, but it must always be remembered that we do not run a detention facility, and ultimately there are limitations on what you can do if someone either wishes or feels impelled to go missing for whatever purposes. Excepting those circumstances, our experience of missing incidents has been very small.
Chair: Thank you. We have taken up a lot of your time this afternoon. I hope that has not inconvenienced you, but I can say that we as a committee have found your evidence immensely interesting and immensely useful, so we are really grateful to you for giving us so much of your valuable and already overcommitted time. We look forward to analysing what you have told us today and feeding it into the report that we will write as a result of this inquiry. Thank you very much to all four of our witnesses.
Oral evidence: Human Rights of Asylum Seekers in the UK
