Examination of Witnesses (Questions 186-199)
23 JUNE 2004
MS MAEVE
SHERLOCK, MS
BHARTI PATEL
AND MR
DENG YAI
Q186 Chairman: Ladies and Gentlemen,
can I call the Committee back to order and welcome the representatives
of the Refugee Council: Ms Bharti Patel, who is Head of Policy,
accompanied by Maeve Sherlock, and Maeve has brought another colleague
along. Maeve, it would be helpful if, to set the scene, you could
introduce your colleagues, talk a little bit about your work,
and then there will be some questions we might address to you.
Ms Sherlock: Thank you very much,
and thank you for the opportunity to give oral evidence. With
me today is Bharti, who is our Head of Policy and Development
at the Refugee Council, and Deng Yai, who is our Policy Specialist
on employment and related issues.
Q187 Chairman: Deng?
Ms Sherlock: Deng, Bharti and
Maeve. Chairman, very briefly, the Refugee Council is one of many
but the largest charity that works with refugees and asylum seekers
in the UK. We have been involved in employment policy and development
and delivery for a number of years. We have a small specialist
wing that works around education and training issues and employment
support, which is sadly being less employed of late than in previous
years since the ability of asylum seekers to access support to
moving into work was removed, so it is more difficult for them
to do that work, but their numbers are still there. We are currently
leading ASSET UK, an equal development partnership which is working
UK wide to support the vocational and integration of asylum seekers,
and we are also involved as a partner in the LEADER EQUAL Development
Partnership, again supporting refugees into employment in London.
We also do work with specialist groups, more high-skilled refugees,
with the BMA. We have set up a refugee doctors database to keep
details of the very many refugee doctors who would wish to move
into work, and we can, if the Committee wishes, later on talk
about those and some of the other high-skilled professionals,
especially in the health sectors, who have had problems moving
into work; and we regard that as being a waste of the resource.
We are currently contributing to development of integration strategies,
both regional integration strategies and working to support the
Home Office as it develops its own integration strategy, and we
have done our own work, of which Bharti has been the author, developing
our own approach to integration and what we think works; and we
are looking to support a range of specialists. We expect you wish
to focus today more on refugees than asylum seekers since it is
a DWP Committee. Our basic contention is two-fold: one is that
there is simply inadequate data gathered about the position of
refugees, about their needs, about their achievements and barriers.
However, there are some areas in which a lot is known, and our
basic contention is refugees arrive—they come into this
country. Refugees on average are, in most cases, as well-qualified
as our own population, and yet two or three years down the road
their labour market participation rates are dramatically low.
Something is going badly wrong in that process. Having looked
at the evidence it is difficult to track a direct casual relationship,
and obviously there will be some people for whom the experiences
they have been through that led to flight will make it harder
for them to get involved in work. However, we know, both from
the evidence and from our own work, that there are so many refugees
around the country who want to work and who are unemployed or
under-employed, despite having manifest skills. At a time where
there is a very tight labour market and there are clear skill
shortages, many of the refugees have skills, experience and qualifications,
it would seem to be both a terrible waste of human talent and
also a loss of a resource that the country can ill afford to ignore.
That is our basic contention, Chair, and we are happy to expand
on aspects of that today.
Q188 Rob Marris: Maeve, you mentioned
the lack of data, and that reinforces the evidence we have had
in terms of the DWP's failure to monitor the ethnicity of its
clients, customers, call them what you will these days. What impact
does that have, that lack of data? You did mention that there
is considerable data in other spheres, I think. What impact does
that lack of data in the DWP have on the quality of its ability
to provide a service to refugees?
Ms Sherlock: At its simplest,
of course, it has no idea how successful or otherwise it is in
helping that target group. It only started, it was only from April
this year that a refugee marker, if you like, was put down in
gathering data about clients of Jobcentre Plus.
Q189 Rob Marris: Is that supposed to
be on every client now from April?
Ms Sherlock: From April 2004,
we understand a refugee marker has been introduced to the JCP
labour market computer system so that they can monitor and analyse
clients. There have previously been markers around ethnicity,
but not about refugee status. One of the things that the evidence,
such as it is, does show is that refugees do markedly worse both
than domestic ethnic minorities and other migrants in participation
in the labour market and job results. Knowing that people are
refugees is a key piece of information, and simply assuming that
you can extrapolate from data around ethnicity or migration patterns
is not useful at all. At its simplest, the problem has been that
the DWP can neither identify clients who may be in particular
need of particular help, nor can it work out if any of the work
it does more generally is successful for this group because it
cannot monitor the effects of it.
Q190 Rob Marris: Does the DWP take into
account the needs of refugees in delivering its services? In some
ways it does, I imagine, and in some it does not? Can you highlight
the ways in which it does and the ways in which it does not?
Ms Sherlock: What it does is that
it is going absolutely in the right direction in the sense that
it is developing a strategy. I have to say, it has been developing
a strategy since, I think, about 2000. The employment strategy
for refugees started in 2000, and we believe it is approaching
completion, which obviously is greatly to be hoped for. Any day
now it may be coming out! I sound a little sharp, but I do not
mean to be, because, in fact, I think they are going in the right
direction. They did a report. They commissioned some research
in 2002, which hopefully you have seen, Chairman, which is a very,
very useful piece of research and constitutes a very big chunk
of what is known about this group in relation to employment and
education in particular. So it knows much more now about the barriers
facing refugees moving into employment, and I can elucidate there
if you wish. It did its own report in 2003, called "Working
to rebuild lives?", and had a conference, so, again, it is
moving in the right direction. It is currently developing its
refugee employment strategy, and Deng is involved with that and
can talk more to you about that if you wish. It is also developing
its refugee operational framework, which, again, will hopefully
aim to improve the quality of services, and it has set up an access
group, again which Deng sits on, to advise on issues. So it is
doing all the right things, it is just not doing them quite as
quickly as we might like. So I think they are to be commended,
but anything the Committee can do encourage them to accelerate
the pace of progress would be much appreciated.
Q191 Rob Marris: You mentioned barriers
to work. We are going to move on to that. You used the phrase
"this group". Without wishing to be too mechanistic,
how do you define refugees: because we could, for example, start
with Jews from the 30s and move forward to Chilean refugees in
1973, and so on. I do not imagine that is what you focus on. Can
you delineate a little bit?
Ms Sherlock: It is very interesting.
Somebody is a refugee if they have been accorded refugee status.
In practice, there is no single definition about the point at
which someone ceases to be a refugee. Once someone has come in
and is given refugee status, one of two things will usually happen:
either at some point they will return home, or they will stay
in the UK and integrate and possibly become a British citizen.
If you talk to some of the refugees on my Board, they will often
say it takes 25 years to stop feeling like a refugee, sometimes
it takes a generation. If you talk to the children of refugees,
they talk about how very much they feel like the children of refugees.
If you look at stock rather than flow, for example, then it is
hard to be sure by that definition how many refugees there are.
I think the UNHCR (the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees),
to suggest a figure of the order of a quarter of a million, and
the DWP report, Deng advises me, put the figure at nearer 350,000.
Q192 Rob Marris: Can you give us some
idea of the diversity within that group?
Ms Sherlock: The diversity is
interesting. The pattern of the migration flows, if you follow
it through, is like a pattern of the history of global conflict
over the last century. For example, if you look at the top five
countries from which refugees are coming right now, the top five
would be Somalia, Iraq, China, Zimbabwe, Iran; and yet Afghanistan
would have been on that list a couple of years ago. There would
have been East Asia in the past, there would have been Vietnam.
You could work your way through all the conflicts. In the 1990s
it would have been Eastern and Northern Europe. One of the reasons
the numbers of asylum seekers in Europe have gone down is that
we had a number of wars in Europe (Kosova and Bosnia) which created
refugee flows which tended to be located in the region. So the
pattern has changed enormously. Therefore their needs are going
to be wildly different, and they are. However, there are patterns
that emerge about the levels of unemployment and under-employment.
One of the things that I think is most useful is that there needs
to be, to some degree, a strategy of market segmentation, of you
like, a differentiation strategy, but one of the easiest ways
to do that is simply to start off. . . Refugees in our experience
are very, very keen. They are desperate to get into work. This
is not a group you have to encourage into work; they are desperate
to get into work. Very often the barriers are so simple that,
if you ask them, they will tell you instantly and you can help
them to overcome them.
Rob Marris: Can you pause there, because
I think Joan Humble wants to come in on the barriers to work?
Q193 Mrs Humble: Before talking about
barriers to work, can I raise a question about barriers to entitlement
to benefit? In your submission to us you point out that that tends
to be because refugees simply do not know what they are entitled
to. Whose responsibility is it to tell them what they should be
entitled to?
Ms Sherlock: I will give you the
basis, and Bharti can maybe answer this. That is a very interesting
question. Strictly speaking, it is DWP's responsibility, it is
JCP's responsibility. Since the integration of both halves, it
is the job of a personal adviser, if somebody is out there to
advise them on benefits and access and entitlements to tax credits
as well as to work. However, part of the problem is that many
of refugees never get that far. They do not even know that JCP
exists. What happens is that because it can take months, in some
cases years, to process an asylum claim, and the transition can
be hugely traumatic. Finally, one day, you get the thing you have
waited for for months or years, but at the same time that signals
a massive upheaval in your life. You are supposed to get 28 days'
notice. You might be living in a house provided by NASS (the National
Asylum Support Service). You are not entitled to benefits or any
of the conventional support, so all you get is a house provided
by NASS, and, if you are lucky, a small amount of money. It is
not a lot, but it is secure. Then, all of a sudden you get a letter
saying, "The good news is you have got refugee status. The
bad news is you have to be out of the house by 30th May."
And, of course, you are suddenly catapulted out into the world.
If you have not got a family, you are almost certainly not going
to the top of the list for housing. You have not chosen where
you live, you have been dispersed, with no choice, to some part
of the country in which you probably have no friends or family.
You may not have been integrated into the local community, because
the integration process will not start until you are a refugee,
so you are sitting on top of, rather than necessarily being a
part of, the community and, so all of a sudden, you have no money,
you have no income, you know nothing about the local environment,
you have no house, you have nowhere to live. It is down to luck
how far you get picked up. There are some useful pilots. For example,
we are involved in running for the Government part of their Gateway
programme, a programme under which refugees, in this case, Liberians
from UN camps in Ghana- are brought across and settled in the
UK. We are looking at ways of developing good practice about how
you can centralise support from a single point of contact. We
in our integration strategy have called for the equivalent of
a personal adviser system, some single point of contact at the
transition point who can help you get around that. I would like
to think that the Home Office will listen sympathetically to that.
Bharti, have you some specifics on benefits that you would like
to add?
Mrs Humble: We are going to be asking
you more detailed questions about benefits in a little while.
I am starting off with a general discussion about the sorts of
services that are available and lack of knowledge about the widespread
services. You quite rightly pointed out that it is basic things
like housing and other things that have been offered, but I think
Karen Buck wants to come in with a quick supplementary before
I move on.
Q194 Ms Buck: Can I ask you, from your
experience, what are the implications for people receiving exceptional
needs positions, because there seems to be quite a separate path
into the system and a risk of falling through holes in the ILR
(Indefinite Leave to Remain) system? You have been talking earlier
about the refugee status, but in fact, the vast majority of people
I have ever dealt with get a temporary ILR and although they find
some kind of under-occupation, some kind of employment, do not
ever go through a proper Gateway system that would start giving
them the basis for a proper employment strategy that would make
use of their skills. I was just wondering if you monitored that
or whether anybody is seeing an exceptional need as a particular
category that needs to be addressed?
Ms Sherlock: That is interesting.
I am not sure that we have monitored distinctions in people getting
other forms of protection in refugee status, but actually what
you describe, Karen, and a lot of the refugees find that as well,
is that even if they are getting refugee status, they are still
not going through a Gateway. So in fact what you describe, and
you are absolutely right to point it out is that increasingly,
and in fact it has been noticeable in recent years, certainly
the last year in particular, the first decisions on asylum, granting
asylum, are going down, although I suspect a lot of those will
get picked up again on appeal—that is what always seems
to happen—but there are people coming through getting other
forms of protection whose status is very uncertain. Again, the
Home Office does good things. There are pieces of good news, like
David Blunkett's asylum for people who are here under those kinds
of protections who have families and kids and have been here for
a long enough period. But we worry that the good news is too often
accompanied by the difficulties. I was up in Nottingham last night
talking to a group of managers, and we were talking about some
of the issues around homelessness, one person said "I used
to work with the services", with the RAF, and "do you
know how many servicemen, have problems when they leave the service?",
and somebody else said, "I used to work in the prison service
and the problems are similar" There are common issues about
people leaving supported environments, whether or not they chose
them and however good they are. It can be difficult leaving something
which is outside of society where you do not have to pay bills,
you do not have to know how the economy functions; no-one teaches
you any of the things about how to live a life. There are lessons
there for us to learn. I recently had a meeting with a number
of London homelessness agencies who expressed concern at the number
of refugees turning up with a suitcase on the doorstep saying,
"The good news is I have got refugee status, the bad news
is what do I do now?" It will be a shame if, having done
exactly the right thing and given protection, which as a country
we should be doing to people who really need it, we cannot help
them over that hump so that they can become contributing members
of our society.
Q195 Mrs Humble: Can I follow on from
that? Who should be doing it? Is the "we" who should
be doing it the Department of Work and Pensions, or should there
be a separate agency to do it, to coordinate all these different
life-skills that people are going to need an awareness of how
to integrate and live within our society? What is the role of
the DWP? What is the role of organisations like yours? If you
see yourself as having a larger role in it, how can the DWP help
you in that and how should they coordinate perhaps with other
government departments to offer exactly that sort of support and
overview?
Ms Sherlock: Who should do it
and who is responsible are two slightly different questions. Who
is responsible? I think the responsibility is between the Home
Office and DWP. I think DWP has responsibility for some of the
specifics related to information around entitlement to benefits,
or tax credits, or income support matters and/or child benefit,
for example, and employment, and the Home Office has responsibility
to help sign-post people to the other areas. There are too many
agencies. My preference would be a scheme whereby people who were
given status, given a period of transitional support where they
are kept initially in their existing accommodation. There is no
reason in many cases, especially those with families, why that
could not become their accommodation- they could be allowed to
carry on having it but then paying for it out of housing benefit
so that you do not move the kids out to new schools. So I think
if the Home Office could work to try to help people make the transition
better, and ideally, between them and DWP, fund agencies like
ours, or local voluntary agencies, to provide packages of sign-posting
and support for a defined period of, say, up to three months,
I think it would be enormously useful. I will give you one recent
example of what happens and why it does not happen- the EU Accession
States. As you will know, earlier on this year anybody who was
coming in who had an asylum case in transit—there were about
two and a half thousand people and their families—who had
an asylum case which was still being processed, who came from
one of those States, overnight they became an EU national; so
overnight, on the up side, they could work, but on the down side
they were thrown out of their houses. It goes right to the wire,
and then somebody says, "Maybe we should give some transitional
help", I would suggest funding refugee agencies, or those
refugee community organisations who provide that support, and
have both agencies, and help them simply be a front gate: because
there are a lot of issues around language, around culture and
access to mainstream services that if people are not at that point
they would not necessarily find it easy to present directly to
a Government. Finally, one of the things refugees have in common
is many of them come from countries where they fear authority,
for very good reasons, and therefore engaging directly with Government
departments, especially a department that may have been involved
in the process of determining their asylum claim, can be something
which would deter them from taking up support. So it is one of
these areas in which, I think, and not just for reasons of delighted
self-interest, the voluntary sector is the better place to deliver
these services than the mainstream agencies of the state.
Q196 Mrs Humble: Can I put one caveat
in on that? Like Archy, our Chair, the constituency that I represent
has very few members of minority ethnic communities and very few
refugees, and when we received some refugees as part of the dispersal
programme, nobody knew what to do with them because there were
not communities to support them informally through language and
organisations that they were involved in. So if we went down the
line that you are talking about, about using voluntary organisations,
it would impact upon any dispersal scheme and you would then surely
be left with a situation where there is disproportionate number
of refugees in London and in certain areas of the south coast.
How can we balance that?
Ms Sherlock: I think there are
two things. One is that if refugees have been sent, and they certainly
were sent, to places where they were amongst the only ones for
miles around, frankly that was a failure of the dispersal policy.
There were clear dispersal guidelines about what is called "cluster
policy". We have developed ideas which we have shared with
NASS and the Home Office, and we hope that there will be improvements
on this in the future. Dispersal needs to be based around clear
criteria; and there are a range of criteria, but at the very least
you do not send somebody out to be the only person who speaks
his language in a fifty mile radius, or its to go somewhere were
there is no access, where there is no domestic ethnic minority
community and absolutely no support. It is not good for the individual
or for the community. So I think the criteria around clustering
dispersal ought to be about access to support; you simply do not
send people out to places where there is no support. Secondly,
the support is not wider than one would think. At the Refugee
Council we have offices in Birmingham, in Leeds, in Ipswich, you
know, we have teams in the detention centre, but also we do a
lot of work supporting the refugee community organisations, like
national groups, the Afghan Association, the Ethiopians. There
are far more of those in London, but as dispersal has happened
more communities are growing up outside London and outside the
main Metropolitan areas. So I think it is a mixture of making
sure that you do not put people somewhere where there is no access
to support anyway, perhaps in a rural area miles from any transport,
because it is not good for anybody, and certainly not good for
social cohesion never mind for the individual, but also increasingly
supporting the development of communities so that they can help
themselves, which can be the most effective way of doing it.
Q197 Mrs Humble: We have gone off on
an enormous but very interesting detour, so I am just going to
come back to barriers to work.
Ms Sherlock: I will go off on
detours until stopped, Chairman. Do rein me in!
Q198 Ms Buck: Why do they do it?
Ms Sherlock: I think they do not
any more, is the answer.
Q199 Ms Buck: I know they do not any
more?
Ms Sherlock: Why do they do it?
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