Select Committee on Work and Pensions Minutes of Evidence


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 200-219)

23 JUNE 2004

MS MAEVE SHERLOCK, MS BHARTI PATEL AND MR DENG YAI

  Q200 Ms Buck: Yes?

  Ms Sherlock: The short answer, is that the numbers of people claiming asylum went up very sharply in the 1990s. The pressure was so great that what became the determining factor was overwhelmingly the availability of accommodation. But if there is lots of empty accommodation somewhere there may be a very good reason for that. One of the lessons that have to be learned is that it is not enough. For example, you do not send people somewhere where there has just been a major economic shock, or there is massive unemployment, or public services are so strained that inevitably it becomes a source of contention. You have to take a more intelligent, view about that, and I think it is much better than it used to be.

  Q201 Mrs Humble: Barriers to employment!

  Ms Sherlock: Oh, yes. Sorry.

  Q202 Mrs Humble: You talked about unrealistic eligibility criteria for the training and development programmes. In using that description were you talking primarily about asylum seekers, or were you talking about refugees, and what can be done to make training and employment programmes more easily accessible to refugees?

  Mr Yai: The barriers are well documented, and there is a DWP report that was produced by Alice Bloch which outlines in detail the barriers to employment. So there are a few that we would like to focus on because those are the ones that affect the majority of refugees. One is lack of knowledge of entitlements and statutory services, especially those provided by Jobcentre Plus, a DWP the report of Alice Bloch, for DWP found that only 49% of refugees had heard of any schemes run by Jobcentre Plus. Also, refugee participation in Jobcentre Plus training was very low. Though only 60% of the respondents to the survey said they were interested in training. So obviously Jobcentre Plus needs to market its services more to refugees and ensure that they know their entitlements. But the other issue is lack of adequate English language, and that is a barrier not only to training and education but also to employment. It is, in fact, determining the kind of job that you get and the level of pay that you also get. The other issue is attitudes of employers. Some employers do not believe overseas qualifications are good enough or attach any value to overseas experience, and this is a major barrier that needs to be tackled. One thing that Jobcentre Plus can do is to raise awareness of employers of the economic potential of refugees. The fourth barrier that tends to affect the majority of refugees is also lack of UK work experience, and employers demand invariably that people have UK work experience, and this is extremely difficult for refugees given that there are less volunteering opportunities in the country. One thing that Jobcentre Plus can do is to create more opportunities for work placement. The fifth and also main barrier is unfamiliarity with UK job surge culture. When I applied for my first job in the Sudan I wrote an application by hand, walked into the local council and half an hour later I was sitting at a desk working as a junior clerk, but in this country it is extremely difficult and it is more complex than that. One thing that Jobcentre Plus can do is people with job service skills. One of the findings of the DWP report is that more people found a job through friends than any other route, and that was 32% of the sample. So job service skills will be extremely useful and I think Jobcentre Plus can help in that respect.

  Mrs Humble: Can I ask another question based on that? In your submission you also talk about cultural barriers among some communities about selling yourself: telling people how wonderful you are in order to get the job?

  Rob Marris: Politicians know more about that!

  Q203 Mrs Humble: I could not possibly comment! To what extent is that a real issue, and, if it is a real issue, how can it be overcome?

  Mr Yai: It is a real issue, in the sense that people are not able to convince themselves to do it, but it is also about the ability to be able to market yourself, the ability to be able to master the language and be able to handle job interviews; but even at an early stage, being able to complete a job application form, writing an appropriate CV, but also writing an appropriate supporting statement to be able to reach the interview stage; but then at the interview stage it is also about being able to market yourself well, being able to tackle the questions well, being able to convince the panel that you are the most suitable candidate.

  Q204 Mrs Humble: To what extent is the DWP liaising with other departments, like the Department for Education and Skills, in sending people off on training courses to learn English and to learn exactly these sorts of skills: because certainly attached to New Deal there are lots of skills training courses available? Are you finding that refugees, not asylum seekers but refugees, are being sent on those sorts of courses?

  Mr Yai: DWP has got its own courses, some are part of New Deal programmes, some others are part of Work-based Learning for Adults, and some of those would teach job search skills to everybody, including refugees. The problem with that is that the content of the program will not be appropriate for refugees because of the cultural differences, because of the language issues and others that are specific to refugees. But in terms of liaising between DWP and other government departments, like the Department for Education and Skills and the Learning and Skills Councils, I think there is a need for improvement on that. Obviously the other departments can improve, contribute to improving the employability of refugees in terms of improving learning skills, but also the other courses that are provided by further education colleges, I think, if you approach it as a team, probably they will improve the employability of refugees and have better results in terms of job outcomes.

  Ms Patel: May I add something?

  Q205 Chairman: Before you do that, we have got 15 minutes left and there are two important areas of questioning I would like to get through, if you would not mind. So a little bit more discipline all round and we will get there comfortably, but let us move on to the next section, if we may.

  Q206 Mr Dismore: Following on from where Joan Humble left off, one of the questions I was concerned about is whether DWP, following on from what you were just saying, can show the flexibility but that in practice the bureaucracy prevents, effectively, the flexibility that you are talking about? Can it ever get there?

  Mr Yai: Can you repeat the question?

  Q207 Mr Dismore: You are talking about working for all these other agencies, and one of the things that came out of the work we have done in the past, particularly in relation to the particularly hard to reach groups through, for example, New Deal, is the question—and I think it is quite an open question—when you are dealing with people who are hard to place or who are hard to work with, for a variety of complex different barriers, like, for example, language and background, whether the DWP can demonstrate the flexibility it needs to demonstrate in dealing with that particular individual's circumstances and requirements, or whether he is better, effectively, to hive that sort of work off, with appropriate financial resources, to the voluntary sector who can show a much greater degree of flexibility?

  Mr Yai: I think in terms of what DWP can do, there is a need for flexibility. We are aware of the fact that some refugee professionals do not get the support they need from Jobcentre Plus offices, and they tend to be referred to voluntary sector organisations and other specialists, training providers, who will then work to support their needs. Take, for example, doctors. When they go on clinical attachments they are put under pressure, some have their job-seekers allowance stopped as a result of being engaged in a full-time clinical attachment or following a full-time international English language testing preparatory course, and I think because of that they tend to lose their benefits. Obviously flexibility is needed in that regard. It is not only doctors that tend to lose their job-seekers allowance, but also dentists, nurses, mid-wives as well, and this tends to affect refugee professionals generally who tend to engage in full-time re-qualification programmes that will help them to work in the UK.

  Q208 Mr Dismore: I think that is an important point. In fact, in my own constituency Barnett College have got a whole course designed to teach medical English to encourage doctors to go into the NHS. It costs about a quarter of a million pounds to train a doctor. We are getting doctors quite cheaply if we are able to achieve that. Looking at the statistics, the ones I have here are a bit out of date, but looking at the statistics it does reinforce one of the points that you are making, that a lot of this goes by word of mouth: because we seem to have a disproportionate number of Afghan doctors in training. I am not complaining about the fact, but I know that the Afghan community is not necessarily the largest refugee community in my constituency, there are professionals from all over the place. It seems to me that perhaps they have cottoned on, through the informal networks, to this particular course. That is something you have identified. Is that something you welcome or something that needs to be tried to be addressed in different ways?

  Ms Sherlock: One thing it is fair to say is that informal networks play a very powerful part in communication. If you think, in a lot of these communities English language proficiency is limited. It is not surprising that informal networks will be a very powerful way of communicating things. It is interesting: even if the Afghans are not the largest refugee community in your constituency, they may be one of the more recent ones. One of the down sides—I will not get into it—about not allowing asylum seekers to work is if you take a number of years to process someone's claim they let the skills degrade so much in that time that it is quite hard to help people to get back up—the path back up is very difficult—whereas if you have a group community that has come in relatively recently, if you can intervene early enough and pick them up, you can make a difference. But, finally, in answer to your earlier point, I have worked in the past with lone parents and DWP—I have been out and trained, many years ago, job centre advisers working with lone parents—and the two things that work are: (1) the partnership between JCP and voluntary sector agencies to help them understand things better and to work out when they can do things better themselves and when they are better to go off and to frankly farm them out to voluntary agencies. The second thing that works is targets. After years of appearing before this Committee and giving evidence, and in a variety of previous roles, in the end what made the difference in terms of pushing MDRP up and getting JCP to take lone parents seriously was that all of a sudden they changed the ranking mechanism and the number of points you got for getting a lone parent into work went up. Lone parents used to say to me that once that happened, over night you would walk into a Jobcentre Plus and it was like having a target painted on your chest. All of a sudden people were interested in coming and getting you. JCP is a tremendous target-driven organisation, therefore the two things that make a difference are (1) them wanting to do it because it makes enough of a difference to achieving your targets, and (2) you are getting in touch with your partnership and those who understand how to do that.

  Q209 Mr Dismore: Can we get on to asylum seekers, refugees, rather.

  Ms Sherlock: I mean for refugees. Sorry.

  Q210 Mr Dismore: We are quite short of time. Can I put another point to you?

  Ms Sherlock: I am sorry, I was talking about refugees on the targets, not about asylum seekers. I am sorry I did not make that clear.

  Q211 Mr Dismore: We have got completely lost here now. I was going to ask you about the point at which it is best to try and help refugees, the point at which they need most help from agencies. The DWP view is when they are first given permission to remain in the UK. Are the right mechanisms in place to enable Jobcentre Plus to do that? Is that the right point at which intervention is necessary?

  Ms Patel: I think a lot more needs to be done to explain the position people are in at this point. [transition to refugee status] We are talking about people who have been through the asylum system, which may have taken months and, in some cases, in excess of a year. In that time, people will have been completely reliant on support from NASS, and that is either accommodation, or dispersal accommodation, plus some support pitched at something like 70% of income support rates, or, in quite a large number of cases, people will have taken a cash element of the support from NASS but chosen to remain within their community. So they will be staying in quite unacceptable and over-crowded conditions living within the homes of friends or relatives. The point at which people get recognition, I think on the whole we are talking about a group of people who will not have any sort of savings in the bank, they will not have possibly even the basic essentials, and the decisions that people have to make at this stage, I think are going to be extremely complex. They are about a whole range of issues, not just how they are going to continue to support themselves, but also how they can secure their independence in terms of finding work, getting their kids into school, and so on. I think the approach has to be focused, intensive support to people at this point to get them into an alternative framework of support. That may be support by helping them to find work, or it may be support in terms of helping them to make the transition to a different support framework within the mainstream benefit system. The RIFCO pilot which is being undertaken in Harrogate, we would argue—

  Q212 Mr Dismore: What is RIFCO?

  Ms Patel: Deng, would you like to explain RIFCO?

  Mr Yai: Yes. RIFCO is Refugee Integration for Career Opportunities. So it is an abbreviation of that.

  Ms Patel: This is a pilot project that is being undertaken by DWP. It has yet to be evaluated, but it works on the basis that people will be given that intensive focused support which looks at their needs, not just in relation to advice about getting jobs, but also needs in relation to housing advice, benefits advice. That is the sort of model that we would advocate in terms of helping people to make an effective transition from life as asylum seekers to life as UK residents.

  Q213 Mr Dismore: One further question. How do you think Jobcentre Plus can work better with employers to utilise the skills of refugees?

  Ms Patel: I am sorry, could you repeat the question?

  Q214 Mr Dismore: How do you think Jobcentre Plus can work better with employers in trying to break down the barriers and ensure that refugees get into work?

  Ms Sherlock: Two things they can do. One would be to help employers to overcome their lack of understanding of foreign qualifications. That would be a good start. There is a lot of work, indeed a lot of expertise has gone into looking at the equivalent qualifications for educational purposes, and I presume a lot of that knowledge and administrative assistance could be made available to employers wishing to be able to evaluate qualifications for a range of purposes as well. Secondly, there is evidence that employers have some fairly significant attitude problems. It is not simply a matter of racism, there is a fear of people not fitting in; there are some clear fears about employing refugees. There are things that I think the Government could do, and JCP could help. Again, I suspect it is quite similar to other groups that JCP has worked with where they are quite hard to place, yet, when employers do place them, they find they are fantastic employees. So they have a lot of experience working with hard- to- place groups, and the lessons that can be learned from lone parents and British ethnic minorities could be transferred across. For example work placement; so if somebody is in a workplace and can be seen to be successful, employers might find those barriers are overcome. Also, I think the Government in general could do more to promote an understanding of what refugees bring to this country and the contribution they can make and trying to do more to bring a wider understanding of that group.

  Q215 Ms Buck: I have got four questions in five minutes, so we will see what we can do. The first thing is: I would say, in my experience, that one of the principal drivers of poverty, in my area anyway, is the extent to which households are accommodating refugees, people working their way through the system either not yet having status or falling foul of the system in some way, which is the NASS/DWP interface. It is households carrying people with no income, section 55 disclaimers, people who have dropped through holes in the net in NASS. I have got people who have waited a year or a year and a half to get benefits after NASS, or after they have had their papers, or because there has been a Home Office mix up. I have had a family with two children who have been taken off their father's application and have disappeared and have had no income at all for a year and a half. Could you quickly comment on the kind of poverty, the social poverty implications rather than the individuals, of how we are putting in place systems for asylum seekers and what the implication is for them?

  Ms Sherlock: It is extremely interesting to hear you say that. We have been campaigning against section 55 under which people who are deemed not to have applied quickly enough for asylum, irrespective of the strength of their asylum case, are denied any sort of support while the case is being processed. One of the things I would like to come back on is that the Government is saying that there is no evidence that these people are homeless. You go to the homeless hostels and you go to places where homeless people hang out. They are not there: ergo there is not a problem. We did a report where we surveyed refugee community groups and refugee communities and frontline agencies to find out, and we found out—it is so interesting—that what is happening is exactly what you describe: communities are taking people in. They are taking it in turns to have them on their floors. The houses are overcrowded. The communities themselves are taking the money out of their own pockets and the impact on what are already some of our poorest communities is a burden they simply cannot be expected to carry on. It is a particular problem that is going to get worse because section 55 has only been in now for—in practice it is only in a second year, but it is a cumulative problem. This problem is going to get worse because cases do take a long time. It has been compounded by people who are in that limbo at the end, hard cases who have been through the process, been refused asylum, but often cannot physically be returned because there is no safe way to get back to Somalia or Iraq and they are stranded, often with no money. It is a huge problem. One of the things that can happen—the other aspect of what you describe—is people are taking a long time to get access to benefits. There was a pilot run in Liverpool, very successfully, where when letters were issued giving refugee status with them came a National Insurance card. Things as simple as the fact that it can take weeks or months to get a National Insurance number can make a big difference. So if that can be rolled out quickly to helping people to move in.

  Q216 Ms Buck: That is very helpful. Three questions in two minutes. The back-dating issue. The fact that DWP officials sometimes do not know and advise people of the system of back-dating entitlements and the impact of the proposed withdrawal of the back-dating entitlement?

  Ms Patel: In our experience the back-dated payment has been extremely helpful to enable refugees to make the transition which we have talked about previously, to help them buy the basic essentials that they need at that stage. We are concerned that there are plans to remove that entitlement, and I think we have expressed our concern. It is on public record that we are concerned about this move. In terms of the proposal to replace it with a loan, I think one has to wait to see the detail of what is being proposed, but I think it is absolutely critical that at the point at which people are given the status they are given sufficient resources to help them to begin to make a home; relocation costs, money to buy things like furniture, to help them to put roots.

  Q217 Ms Buck: If you could say in one word: will it make integration harder?

  Ms Sherlock: Yes.

  Q218 Ms Buck: Third question: one minute. The removal of the right to choose housing after a positive decision, after dispersal, makes a certain amount of sense in terms of the distribution of housing availability. My suspicion is that it will increase the number of people going for support only options in London and the South East. When they get a positive decision they will apply for housing in London and the South East. Does that increase the risk that the Home Office is going to remove the support only option? Is this going to have perverse consequences?

  Ms Sherlock: I worry very much that the Home Office may choose to remove the support only option, and I think it would be a very grave mistake. I also think that decisions about people being entitled to chose where they live either at the dispersal stage or subsequently when they get status, which is also under threat, actually make it all the more reason why the Government needs to focus on getting dispersal right in the first place. If they are going to stay in areas for a long time, you really need to get those areas right in the beginning.

  Q219 Ms Buck: Families who receive a positive decision will then, certainly in London and the South East, go into the homelessness route and into temporary accommodation. In temporary accommodation, a misnomer, they will stay several years. Rents in temporary accommodation are £400 a week in some cases. It is almost impossible for a refugee family to then clear the housing benefit hurdle in order to be able to take a job. Is there a case for saying that the approach to refugees needs to integrate with the approach to temporary accommodation to create a work incentive proposal? Is it madness to take two parallel routes of refugees on the one hand and temporary accommodation on the other?

  Ms Sherlock: I absolutely agree. There would be much more of a chance of people moving into work if you can make that transition work, but you must take a judgment about housing people which creates a sustainable solution, or at least a pathway from one to the other. Otherwise we simply create a situation where those who wish to work and support themselves are prevented from doing so by the consequences of a government policy never intended to have that effect.

  Chairman: Thank you very much for your help and assistance this morning. The meeting stands adjourned.





 
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