This is a House of Commons Committee report, with recommendations to government. The Government has two months to respond.
This is the report summary, read the full report.
When people flee their homes to seek sanctuary in other countries, they need humanitarian assistance to meet their immediate needs. Typically, the international community mobilises to provide such humanitarian support. However, the drivers of displacement are often deep-rooted and complicated. Diplomatic solutions are often difficult to identify or there is a reluctance to implement them. In such cases, refugee communities remain in host countries for many years. Most refugees want to return home, but only when it is safe to do so.
As crises become protracted, refugees often seek access to the same infrastructure, public services and rights as citizens of the host country. The international community should support refugee-hosting countries to meet the needs of both refugees and host communities. Funding by international donors tails off as crises linger and are replaced on our TV screens by emergencies that are more recent or that are closer to home. As the regional response to the Syrian war reaches its 12th year, for example, assistance to Syrian refugees is being reduced and poverty levels are soaring.
Despite international initiatives such as the 2018 Global Compact on Refugees, which sought to provide a framework for more predictable and equitable responsibility-sharing, host countries are often left to pick up a disproportionate share of the costs. As well as being far from fair, such outcomes have economic consequences and carry risk for social cohesion in the host country. Current practices are failing both refugees and refugee-hosting countries.
The UN Global Refugee Forum is taking place in December 2023. The UK Government must develop ambitious pledges to bring to the Forum to improve responses to refugee crises. The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) should use the Forum to advocate a global strategy for responding to refugee crises that can be extended over the short-, medium- and long-term to provide predictable support for refugee host countries. The strategy should set out how the international community will support host countries to move from the initial humanitarian response to a long-term development approach that incorporates access to education, healthcare, nutrition, water, sanitation and hygiene, social security and essential infrastructure and addresses the underlying causes that force people to flee.