'It's ok to live in poverty, it's ok to be hungry'
<
https://www.opendemocracy.net/author/theo-hessing> Theo Hessing
3 November 2014
This quiet, shocking film reveals the penury and despair the UK government
is forcing upon asylum seekers. (Video, 8 mins)
http://vimeo.com/109469875
This week's news that the UK government is presiding over
<
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-29805830> a backlog of 29,000 asylum
cases would be bad enough–but this statistic does not begin to describe the
true extent of the human suffering that the UK asylum system is creating.
<
http://vimeo.com/109469875> Section 95 film from
<
http://vimeo.com/user9151112> theo hessing on <
https://vimeo.com> Vimeo.
According to Still Human Still Here, a coalition of over 60 organisations
including Oxfam, Amnesty International and the Red Cross, the government is
actively forcing more than 25,000 asylum seekers in the UK into poverty. It
is doing so by freezing asylum support–the financial support offered to
asylum seekers while they await the outcome of their claim–at what
campaigners say is a degrading and unsustainably low level, while
simultaneously prohibiting them from working.
The result is that a single adult asylum seeker must survive on as little as
£5.23 per day. The London Living Wage–calculated as the minimum pay rate
required for a worker to live with dignity in the capital–is £8.80 per hour.
And this week’s Public Accounts Committee report revealed that 11,000 asylum
seekers in the UK have been waiting at least seven years for an initial
response to their asylum claim.
'We don't want to encourage spurious claims'
Vianney Jaminah, who fled with his wife and three children from
post-conflict Sierra Leone to the UK in order to protect his children from
genital mutilation at the hands of the country’s powerful secret societies,
has been pursuing an asylum claim in the UK for two years. During this time
Vianney says he and his family have managed to subsist on asylum support
only by developing survival strategies: for instance, by resorting to
illicitly obtaining food from food banks where their entitlement has
expired.
“It is very stressful when you have a family and you are used to taking care
of them and providing for them and no longer can. It has been horrible. If
we need to go to any appointment we are forced to walk. We can’t buy toys,
we can’t do activities–we find it difficult to even cover the children’s
food,” he said.
<
http://www.refugee-action.org.uk/assets/0001/0045/Briefing_on_support_rates
_legal_challenge_April_2014.pdf> According to the charity Refugee Action,
nearly 40% of asylum seekers on asylum support do not have enough money to
feed themselves properly and 88% do not have enough money to buy warm
clothes. 60% feel that the low level of asylum support inhibits their
ability to proactively pursue their asylum claim.
Based on its research, Refugee Action took the Home Secretary to court in
early 2014, arguing that the freeze on asylum support payments is unlawful.
In April 2014 it won its case. The High Court found that Theresa May had
acted "unlawfully" and "irrationally" when setting asylum support rates, and
ordered her to review them. However, Refugee Action’s victory was
short-lived. In August 2014 the Home Office responded to the High Court’s
ruling not with an adjustment to asylum support rates but with a maintenance
of the freeze.
The Home Office said: “we must…be mindful of costs to the taxpayer and…that
increasing support could encourage spurious asylum claims, which clog up the
system and make it harder for those with a genuine fear of persecution from
accessing the vital support they need.”
The wording of this response is not dissimilar to the government’s rationale
for <
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-29799473> refusing to support search and
rescue missions to save refugees in the Mediterranean, which it justifies by
arguing that these missions simply encourage more migration.
However, there is little evidence that asylum seekers are burdensome to the
public purse. On the contrary, according to UN figures asylum applications
in the UK have been steadily declining from a peak of 84,130 in 2002 to
23,507 in 2013, of which
<
http://www.scottishrefugeecouncil.org.uk/media/facts_and_figures/asylum_dec
isions_uk_figures> only around a third were approved. At the end of 2013,
the population of refugees, pending asylum cases and stateless persons made
up just <
http://www.unhcr.org.uk/about-us/the-uk-and-asylum.html> 0.23% of
the population of the UK.
In a political climate where populist anti-immigration sentiment seems to be
ubiquitous, the government’s quiet announcement to indefinitely maintain its
cap on asylum support has generated virtually no press, and yet when
understood in the context of a gargantuan asylum backlog, its implications
are enormous.
“The government is effectively saying that it’s ok for people in UK society
to live in poverty, it’s ok for people to be hungry,” said Amanda Shah,
Refugee Action’s Policy Manager. “And it’s important to remember who we’re
talking about here. These are people who have fled some of the world’s worst
situations, people fleeing human rights violations in Syria and Iraq who
come to the UK to seek sanctuary, and what they’re faced with is having to
live a hand-to-mouth existence because asylum support levels are too low”.
Research conducted by the charity Freedom from Torture has shown that
financial insecurity contributes to a serious deterioration in the mental
health of victims of torture,
<
http://www.pafras.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/5_Mental_health_destitu
tion_and_asylum.pdf> who make up 5-30% of all asylum seekers in the UK.
Systemic delays within the asylum process, in combination with the freeze on
asylum support rates, not only leave asylum seekers in indefinite limbo, but
make an already highly vulnerable demographic even more vulnerable.
Today, Vianney continues to do his best for his family using the weekly
asylum support payment he receives from the state, while awaiting a response
from the Home Office on his family’s pending asylum claim. However, to date
he has received no information from the government indicating the status of
his application or how long his wait may last.
Received on Mon Nov 03 2014 - 08:57:35 EST