Policies that demonise and punish people seeking asylum in a bid to court headlines have contributed to successive governments losing control of our asylum system, a new report has found. But Labour could transform the system and save taxpayer money by establishing safe travel routes, the right to work and a faster, more efficient claim process.
Published on International Migrants Day, December 18th, this new report from the Institute For Government (IFG) thinktank urges Labour to stop the arms race towards more and more hostile rhetoric and policy, and instead take an evidence-based approach to people seeking sanctuary. Steps it recommends include measures Asylum Matters and our partners have campaigned on for years: lifting the ban on the right to work for people seeking asylum; housing people in communities not camps; simplifying complex legislation and rolling back the anti-refugee laws while establishing safe routes for people seeking safety.
Here are some of its key findings:
Evidence, not assumptions
Too much asylum policy is based on “ill-founded assumptions” often aimed at winning political support, the report found. Whilst the Home Office’s own research shows that many asylum seekers are not able to choose their destination of travel and that those who are generally aren’t aware of the detail of each country’s asylum policy, government after government has continued to try to deter people from seeking safety using cruel and ineffective policies, from the ‘hostile environment’, to the disastrous Rwanda plan, to the ban on work. Evidence that fairer policies act as “pull factors” is “weak” and disputed, and should be dismissed in favour of accurate research into why people move and what they need, the report argues.
In order to take proper control of the asylum system, the Government must “avoid using unstable policy swings as a response to headlines” and creating “short-sighted measures aimed at conjuring an illusion of control”, the report says. This means reconsidering critical issues like lifting the ban on work and creating long-term policy based on real evidence. It could mean redesigning accommodation and support services to give people seeking sanctuary decent homes and the support they need, as well as continuing to roll back anti-refugee laws.
An effective asylum system requires robust evidence and thoughtful planning – not reactive short-term policy. The Government can, and should, take true control of the system in a way that is safer and fairer for those involved in it.
Listening to lived experience
Among the evidence researchers say the Government could use far more effectively is the understanding and expertise of people with lived experience of seeking asylum. By genuinely listening to these experiences, the Home Office could not only gain practical insight into how to improve the system, but challenge and correct faulty assumptions, like those on the supposed “pull factor” of access to work.
The report highlights the experience of people seeking asylum who said the Home Office had failed to properly understand their concerns, often throwing their lives into turmoil with frequent accommodation moves and causing them difficulty accessing public services. Where consultations on policy changes have previously been seen as “a box-ticking exercise”, with examples of questionnaires designed in ways that make it all but impossible for people seeking asylum to engage with them, the report urges the Government to make sure that all new asylum policy is properly tested with the people who know it best: those who are directly impacted by it.
Providing simple safe routes
An excessively complex, difficult to manage system allows safe entry to the UK to people from only certain countries, with bespoke schemes reacting to a limited number of world events. This has denied sanctuary to many who need it, or forced people into making life-threatening journeys, while proving complicated and expensive for the Government to manage.
Instead, one standardised safe route into the country would allow people, regardless of their location, to apply for asylum when they need it, and end the need for new complicated systems to be set up. “People in need of protection would have less need to resort to unsafe, unlawful and uncontrolled routes into the country” if they were offered a standardised, simple way to apply for asylum from outside of the UK the report argues.
This would mean a political choice to replace the hostile and ineffective rhetoric of deterrent with a safe, practical offer of sanctuary for those who need it.
This report makes it clear how successive Governments have sacrificed control over the asylum system in favour of promoting damaging rhetoric about the people forced to navigate it. Let’s hope this Government take its findings seriously, and follows its advice to take the heat out of the migration debate and replace politicised gestures with common sense policies that will make life better for both people seeking sanctuary and the communities that welcome them.
You can read more and download the full report on the Institute For Government website, here.
