5. Memorandum submitted by
Asylum Welcome
PERFORMANCE OF NASS
1. Asylum Welcome is a small charity working
in Oxfordshire with asylum-seekers and refugees. Our work includes
running an advice service for asylum-seekers and refugees, working
with detainees at Campsfield Immigration Detention Centre, and
supporting families and young people. We have been running for
six years, and we work with more than a thousand people a year.
We have in the region of 400 members, over 100 active volunteers
and six paid staff.
2. We would like to address specifically
the third question the Committee has set itself, to explore how
adequately support is provided to asylum-seekers by the National
Asylum Support Service. Many, perhaps most, of the asylum-seekers
who come to us for advice and assistance are seeking help to apply
to NASS for assistance, or are already in receipt. As an organisation
in direct and daily contact with both NASS and the recipients
of their services, we hope you find these comments useful. We
have already been in contact with our local MP, Andrew Smith,
on this subject, and the concerns we express below are drawn from
the evidence and views we submitted to him.
3. We have found NASS to be inefficient,
slow, prone to error, over-centralised and very difficult to communicate
with. Listed below are the main concerns expressed by our workers:
3.1 Initial applications to NASS for
support take a long time to process. It is common for NASS
to take one to two months to process an initial application for
support.
Case Study: X applied for NASS support with our
assistance on 11.12.02. By 17.01.03, he had heard nothing some
came into Asylum Welcome and Advice Worker phoned NASS. File note
says: "Initial Processing Unit explained that X's application
is not yet in the system. They explained they have such a huge
backlog that December applications are not yet in the system".
We should remind the Committee that asylum-seekers
apply to NASS for assistance because they are destitute and have
no other source of income.
3.2 Poor quality and lack of emergency
accommodation. Asylum-seekers awaiting a decision on their
application for NASS support should in theory be able to receive
emergency accommodation and board from voluntary organisations
contracted to deal with the reception of asylum-seekers in a particular
area. Our experience is that the emergency accommodation offered
is of poor quality and there is not enough of it. For some time
last year, asylum-seekers referred for emergency accommodation
in our region were told to sleep in the concourse of Heathrow
Airport, where they were provided with hot food. We have also
received many complaints about the standard of accommodation at
the Thorncliffe Hotel, where asylum-seekers are accommodated.
Case Study: Y was joined in the UK by her 14-year
old daughter in May 2002 Asylum Welcome contacted the Refugee
Arrivals Project on her behalf, but was told that the hotels
were full and they would have to sleep on the concourse at Heathrow
airport. After the intervention of a solicitor, Oxon Social Services
agreed to house the family for a few days until there was a room
for her at the Thorncliffe Hotel. Once there, they had problems
with the food—Y is diabetic and could not eat much of the
food they offered her, resulting in deterioration of her physical
and mental health. There were also concerns about the daughter's
safety at the hotel, lack of any communal space, and poor hygiene
standards. The family had to stay at the Thorncliffe for three
months until they were eventually dispersed to Glasgow.
3.3 Vouchers fail to arrive. Even
once an asylum-seeker has been accepted for support, we find the
service provided by NASS to be erratic and unreliable. We receive
many complaints from asylum-seekers that their books of vouchers
(that provides them with their basic weekly cash allowance) have
failed to arrive. In these cases, we contact NASS to inform them
of the error, yet there is often a long delay before the error
is corrected. NASS's assertion that they resolve all such problems
in 24-72 hours is, in our experience, simply not true.
3.4 NASS loses documents. On a number
of occasions, NASS has simply lost documents we have sent to them
on a client's behalf, including applications for assistance, despite
the fact that we send these by recorded delivery.
3.5 NASS fails to record information
changes. On many occasions, asylum-seekers have come to us
asking us to inform NASS on their behalf that they have changed
address. We fax this information through to NASS, yet the information
does not get recorded on their file, sometimes for over a month.
This can create enormous problems, as all correspondence, including
vouchers, are sent to the wrong address during that time. Our
Advice Workers express the view that NASS's failure to record
changes of address causes more problems than any other factor.
3.6 NASS is extremely difficult to contact
by phone. Main numbers are permanently engaged, and direct
line numbers to specific departments seem to change constantly.
It is not unusual for our Advice Workers to have their call transferred
six or seven times before they reach the right person. This slows
up our work immensely.
4. A number of the concerns we highlight
above are administrative and procedural, but the result is an
unacceptable level of human hardship and misery:
— asylum-seekers are going without
basic necessities: food, clothing, adequate accommodation;
— asylum-seekers are becoming increasingly
distressed by the fact that a system they have difficulty understanding
in the first place because of cultural and language problems,
fails to operate at the most basic level. Some of these are clients
in poor physical health and may be suffering emotional or mental
health problems; and
— our Advice Workers do not have the
time to offer clients the kind of constructive support they should
be giving, because they spend their time firefighting problems
with NASS.
5. We do understand that all systems have
their limitations and that we, to some extent, have a role in
taking up the slack. However, the consistent and draining amount
of work we are having to do simply because of the apparent shortcomings
and efficiencies of the NASS system is helping to conceal the
very poor NASS standards. We estimate that around 60% of our Advice
Workers' time is spent dealing with errors or omissions by NASS.
We have also had to increase our direct assistance budget from
£6,500 in 2000-01, to £13,000 in 2002-03 due to the
greatly increased need to provide emergency short term assistance
to clients left with nothing due to NASS slowness and inefficiency.
6. RECOMMENDATION
We believe that NASS is seriously under-resourced,
and, most importantly, ridiculously over-centralised. The decision
to run a national operation as complex and sensitive as the NASS
system from one central office was a serious error. NASS deals
with the provision of basic and essential needs, and, as such,
it needs to be accessible and to have the capacity to react quickly
to urgent need. We fully support the recommendation by the National
Association of Citizen's Advice Bureaux[14]
that NASS operations should be decentralised and that local public
access counters should be established.
Sam Clarke
Chair
24 March 2003
14 NACAB, Process Error: CAB clients' experience
of the National Asylum Support Service, 2002. Back
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