We spent all yesterday on a course, and in the evening we had our mentor from our volunteer program (JVC) over for dinner and she had brought art materials with her. We spent a pleasant evening chatting and being creative together.

In the evening I reflected on all the other ways we are nourished apart from food. We need company and outlets for our creativity, education and the chance to practice our faith if we have one. These are just some of the things that refused asylum seekers are often denied.

Yes, food parcels are a lifeline to many refused asylum seekers. No, giving someone a food parcel doesn’t fulfil their needs. I want to reiterate Amnesty International’s slogan; refused asylum seekers are: ‘Still Human, Still Here’ we need to treat them with some human compassion.

Today I had to walk 5.5 miles to my placement (and 5.5 miles back!). As we work in Manchester and Salford people often walk long distance to access the project. However, I was rewarded with a delicious lunch cooked from ingredients given to us by FareShare, a charity which distributes surplus food to charities. Our cook also gave me leftovers for dinner, so today’s food hasn’t been tasteless like yesterday’s, and I also got some vegetables! This highlights the need for community centres to provide hot, nutritious meals to people living in poverty. Sadly many such centres are struggling for funding at the moment.

In a climate where stories about governmental ‘blitzes’ on ‘out of control’ migration seem to dominate the headlines on a daily basis, to discover that antipathy towards immigrants is widespread within the population is perhaps unsurprising. Perpetrators of scam marriages, spreaders of disease, job thieves and killers – immigrants have come to prove a useful scape goat for all of the nations ills; no wonder that 64 per cent of Britons believe that the current level of immigration is making their country “a worse place to live”.

Disappointing in itself, such hostility becomes increasingly unpalatable when set beside the fact that a large percentage of the country, encouraged by the media, often fail to distinguish between economic migrants and asylum seekers or refugees.

It is, of course, a vital distinction and while those surveyed express their dissatisfaction at the perceived negative impact of non-natives on state education and the NHS it is worth remembering that ‘worse’ is, of course relative. As places to live go, a country free from torture, sexual violence, political oppression and the violent deaths or disappearance of loved ones is a substantially ‘better’ option to those places from which many aslum seekers flee. As a nation however we seem to do our utmost to ensure that the brighter future of which so many dream is little more than a squalid hand-to-mouth existence which condemns many to further pyschologial distress and physical hardship.

Forthcoming research commissioned by Oxfam and the Welsh Refugee Council covers the survival strategies of refused asylum seekers in the UK, documenting the effects of an asylum policy which, in increasingly restricting asylum seekers’ access to welfare support has had the effect of forcing thousands of individuals to live in destitution.

It makes for upsetting reading; a catalogue of stories of ill health, poor diet, mental anxiety, expliotation, physical hardship and despair – all underwritten by a commen theme of incomprension that such things could happen in such a ‘civilised country’. Hostile? Yes, we are – one asylum seeker, reports feeling “abandoned by the human race”, with “no hope in life”.

To talk about ‘quality of life’ while we countenance governmental policy which robs fellow human beings of all dignity and hope, and has proved ineffective in the aim of forcing immigrants to return to their country of origin shows Britons in an enormously unflattering light. Let us begin to see immigrants and asylum seekers as individuals, and ensure that all those who look to Britain to protect them are at the very least granted those human rights denied them elsewhere.

Research by the Centre for Migration Policy Research (CMPR) at Swansea University on the survival strategies of refused asylum seekers will be published later this month. Please see http://www.oxfam.org.uk/resources/ukpoverty/resources.html for related documents

Unfortunately, for Europe’s most deprived and vulnerable group: not a lot. More needs to be done on Roma exclusion in Europe and ‘Business as Usual’ will not be enough as pointed out by Bernard Rorke of the Open Society Institute. But hopefully this Summit will have helped. Perhaps, half way through the Decade on Roma Inclusion, ‘green shoots’ are appearing.

In the UK European Roma continue to migrate and settle. In some areas they are being proactively met with positive engagement. Oxfam’s partnership work in Glasgow was highlighted in the past year in Scotland and also in Europe as a ‘positive initiative’. Oxfam will continue in partnership to support the Roma Community in Glasgow and share experience to help in other areas.

Yet there is a long way to go. Media and public attitudes to new migrants are more susceptible to politicisation in an election. This week the government announced the ‘Deportation’ of destitute migrants who have lost their jobs. It’s sad when such language is used against vulnerable people who have lost their jobs but are here legally to work. It would probably be more responsible to deploy terms such as ‘assisted return’. So far the effects of recession have not usually been ascribed to migrants as in the past (maybe thanks to there being bankers and MPs to blame!).

It is important to remember what the Roma are facing in terms of poverty and institutional racism in Central Europe where in the past year Hungary elected a number of MEPs on an anti-Roma Agenda. The Czech Government has finally apologised for forced sterilisations of thousands of Romany women during the last decade. Clearly the situation for Roma in some Western European countries such as Italy is also deeply concerning.

The Roma will continue to face real risks in countries like the UK if we do not seek to engage and understand communities. I urge you to share this video, produced by Amnesty International, which highlights the issues that the Roma continue to face in Europe.

Last night in Glasgow the Slovak Roma celebrated Roma Day and the life of one of their most famous musicians: the Roma equivalent of Michael Jackson, Milan Tankos, who died earlier this year. As I said last year we hope that International Roma Day 2011 will give us more to celebrate.

Oxfam and the European Women’s Lobby have just reported on the impact of recession on women across Europe, based on research carried out in winter 2009-10. There is an invisible, long-term crisis where women are hard-hit, and the impact is invisible.

The results are shocking. Women in the labour market are doing badly – with growing discrimination in the labour market, including sackings of pregnant women, more precarious working conditions; increasing, and a shift to informal work. But those not in paid work are not protected either. They are dealing with rising housing, energy and living costs, higher levels of debt and difficulty with repayments. Women are eating less, and poorer quality food. Cuts in public services including hospitals and schools are having a particularly devastating impact on women, who still form the majority of carers in every European country. Most shocking of all, it reports rising levels of domestic violence in every country in the study.

So what’s to be done? Oxfam and the European Women’s Lobby have ambitious and specific recommendations (see below). But the biggest problem is the failure of politicians to speak out loud and clear about women’s continued poverty.

Oxfam and the European Women’s Lobby are calling for:

• Governments to compile data on complaints of sex discrimination filed in the recession
• Greater employment rights for migrant women so they aren’t stuck in part-time and insecure work
• Systematic monitoring of progress in relation to violence against women.
• Gender-sensitive universal social protection standards across Europe
• Assessment of the gender impact of expenditure cuts in health care and education
• New childcare targets which recognise not only numbers and costs, but also the quality of care.

For more details about Oxfam’s support to poor women in Europe click HERE.

To find out more about the British electorate’s real views on women’s poverty, see the Fawcett Society’s campaign “What about women”.

Well, one of the key causes of in-work poverty is a lack of access to labour rights. Labour rights seek to ensure that employers are prevented from exploiting workers and instead must meet certain standards of employment. The most obvious example of such a right is the National Minimum Wage, £5.80 an hour for those aged 22 and older. But there are other important rights that we often take for granted: protection from unfair dismissal, written terms and conditions, and redundancy pay. Doesn’t everyone who works have the same rights?

In a word: no. There are three employment statuses: ‘employee’, ‘worker’ and ‘self-employed’. As an ‘employee’, you have access to all rights available. A ‘worker’ – typically an agency worker – has core rights but no right to a written statement of employment terms, statutory notice, or protection from unfair dismissal. Someone who is ‘self-employed’ has no rights and is expected to negotiate their terms with their business partner – but, increasingly, workers are being falsely ‘self-employed’ and have no control over the terms, which are dictated by their employer.

The benefits to the employers are obvious: reduce the risk (and often cost) of taking on labour. However, the consequence of having one employment status over another is significant, and especially for poorer people. Indeed, it’s estimated that there are 500,000 low-paid workers who are denied their full employment rights – either being a ‘worker’ or falsely ‘self-employed’.

The reality for these workers blows the myth that any work is a sure-fire route out of poverty. Instead, their employment status means that they could lose their income at a moment’s notice and end up in a low pay-no pay cycle – with no hope of that cycle ever ending. Unscrupulous employers will also seek to classify their workers as ‘self-employed’, despite the worker having no power to negotiate their terms and conditions. Such falsely self-employed workers are not entitled to the National Minimum Wage and can be seen in hotels, where sub-contracted agency workers are paid a mere £2 per hour.

Can’t such workers claim their rights through an Employment Tribunal? The short answer is yes. However, working out your employment status is no easy task and, as Directgov will tell you, ‘just because you have a contract that describes you as an “employee” or as “self-employed” does not mean that it is the case.’ The reality is that if you are living in poverty, taking on the stress and cost involved in claiming your rights and proving your true employment status is simply not an option.

Such conditions permanently scar workers and their dependants, and serve to perpetuate poverty in the UK. In February the Joseph Rowntree Foundation said that the way employers treat their employees plays “an important role in the low-pay, no-pay cycle” and called on public sector bodies to use their purchasing power to favour companies that offered greater job security, adding that entering work could not provide a sustainable route out of poverty “if job security, low pay and lack of progression [once in work] are not also addressed”.

What can be done? Oxfam has previously called for a review of the employment status regime. We know that there are structural causes of poverty that make it difficult for those who live below the poverty line to ever make it above. We are not alone. We’ve joined the Fair Work coalition, which was launched earlier this month and includes a wide range of organisations, including faith groups and community organisations, which will be campaigning for a change to the current employment status regime. We call for all workers to have the same range of statutory employment rights to remove the confusion over who qualifies for which rights, and ensure that work can be a route out of poverty.

Will Horwitz works on communications for East London Charity Community Links. He is also an alumnus of Oxfam’s UK Poverty Programme. (Community Links are spending this week debating how the media portrays poverty).

A couple of years ago a headline in the Mail screamed “Welcome to Britain, land of the rising scum…. We’ve cornered the market on welfare layabouts, drug addicts and feral gangs.” An extreme example, certainly, but still perhaps illustrative of the way people on benefits, unemployed, or on low incomes are portrayed in the media.

Significant research over the last few years has shown how, even in less vitriolic publications – across newspapers, TV, and radio – depictions of people in poverty are unrepresentative, overwhelmingly negative, and often have scant respect for the individuals featured, despite the best intentions of many journalists.

We’ve decided to spend a week debating this on the Community Links blog. We’ve invited contributions from a wide range of people, from award-winning bloggers to young people from Newham. New ones will be going up every day. The first is a fascinating look at how coverage of the Edlington attacks illustrates the media’s focus on the ‘visible poor.’ Sign up for email updates or follow the RSS feed if you’d like to be kept up to date.

A couple of weeks ago I suggested some reasons why media portrayals of poverty are so important, and below are some questions to consider throughout the week. If you’d like to write a post then please get in touch, otherwise please do let us know your thoughts in the comments boxes under each post.

Finally, thinking and writing about these issues is important, but doing something is even more so. I hope we can arrive at some new ideas or new commitments to do something differently by the end of the week. In the meantime, please join the debate.

Some questions to consider

• Does it matter how the media portrays poor people?
• Are ‘poverty’ and ‘poor’ even the right words?
• Should charities engage with the media on this issue?
• Are you already doing work to change the way people are portrayed?
• What else could we do (as charities, individuals, journalists?)
• How does it feel to be portrayed in one of these programmes?
• What’s it like, as a journalist, trying to cover stories about these issues?

Who Cares? published today by Oxfam and Kalayaan, the specialist organisation for migrant domestic workers, highlights the exploitation of migrant carers at the hands of unscrupulous agencies. The research revealed workers who were forced to work excessive hours (more than 60 hours per week, and sometimes up to a 100), underpayment of wages, denial of holiday pay and sick pay, and the provision of accommodation by the employer in order to coerce and intimidate the worker into being constantly available for work. Indeed, one worker, Jula (not her real name) from Poland, said that following exploitation from her agency – deductions from her wages and being overcharged on her accommodation – she was forced into such a dire financial situation that within three months, she had been forced to spend the savings which had taken her ten years to put by in Poland.

We have seen these forms of exploitation before. Underpayment of wages, excessive hours, and coercion through links to workers’ accommodation are all forms of exploitation by agencies (or gangmasters) that were common within the agricultural sector now regulated by the Gangmasters Licensing Authority (GLA), set up in 2006 after the Morecambe Bay disaster in which 23 cockle-pickers died because of the negligence of their gangmaster. It should come as no surprise that we are seeing similar exploitation in the care sector as in agriculture: gangmasters tend to operate across several sectors where there is a similar demand for flexible labour, sectors such as agriculture, construction, care and hospitality.

But whilst the GLA has been successful in regulating gangmasters and rooting out exploitation in the agricultural sector, agencies operating in the care sector are currently regulated by the Employment Agency Standards inspectorate (EAS). And EAS’s approach – which relies on workers to report abuse, rather than proactively investigating employers – has been shown to be much less effective than the GLA’s in upholding labour rights and preventing exploitation of workers in the sectors in which it operates.

Which is why Oxfam is calling on the government to extend the remit of the GLA to the care sector (as well as to the construction and hospitality). It won’t solve all abuses of labour rights in the sector: but we believe that it is a vital first step in helping to protect Jula and workers like her who have shared their experiences with Oxfam for this research. With the government’s commitments on the personalisation of care in the Personal Care Bill, the use of agencies to deliver care is only set to rise and we must ensure that this positive initiative does not lead to the exploitation or impoverishment of the  workers who care for older people.

This morning the Guardian covered Oxfam and Kalayaan’s research on this subject

Particularly if all of this took place based simply on the basis of their race! If you then found out that these people lived in Europe and, even more so that they lived in the UK, then you probably wouldn’t believe it – and if you then found out that you, or maybe some your friends, were amongst those who felt such antipathy against them and yet almost assuredly had never met them or spoken to them, then you would be shocked!

This week many people watched with horror a BBC programme about a few Romanian Roma, who for a variety of reasons felt justified in exploiting their children to earn the money to survive.  Do not think for one moment that I approve or try to justify, I don’t. But I do want to explain - I want people everywhere to understand the whole story, and I want more work like the partnership project Oxfam supports in Glasgow rolled out throughout the country so that no Roma family will ever feel that desperate.

Roma from across Eastern Europe come here to get away from the discrimination that often leaves them living in extreme poverty, excludes them from the labour market, denies them decent health care, and often means that their children are sent to segregated or special schools, if they can get into school at all.

Many of the adults are in poor health particularly the women; they have had little or no work experience and many are totally illiterate. They arrive unable to speak the language, navigate the systems, understand the rules, and are desperate to find work. Those from Romania and Bulgaria are not permitted to work in the UK under agreements made within the EU when these two countries became union members, making them vulnerable to homelessness and exploitation.

In the whole of the UK there are around five projects whose aim is to guide, support, or advise Roma migrants. They face, even here, great prejudice – not only because they are Roma but because they are Eastern European migrants. In a recent study when members of the public were asked what they thought of Roma Gypsies and Travellers, over 60 % gave the standard stereotypical answers; that they were thieving, dirty, trouble makers yet, only one of these experts had ever spoken to, or even met a member of any of these communities. Fewer than 10% had anything  positive to say.

The press delights in publishing the most appalling racist stories about the Roma, and in the health and police services, teacher training, and local Government there is still a huge amount of both ignorance and prejudice.

I have worked with Roma families for 20 years and things have improved a little, due in a large part to the work being done by a few NGOs:  Save the Children, The Children’s Society, Oxfam and the London based Roma Support Group supporting Roma communities and raising issues which affect the community.  But it is far from enough, and you may well imagine that funding for such work is hard to come by. Of course it is. I said at the beginning, the dislike and prejudice is incredibly universal. One funder recently explained to me the Roma are seen as the undeserving poor and donors would not give to such a cause!

TV programmes such as the one this week only add to these problems, it is a form of racism in a velvet glove! And it can have the most detrimental and dangerous effect.

Heather Ureche is a consultant with European Dialogue who are an Oxfam UK partner.

And one of the things I have noticed is that, when it comes to migration, the newspapers can be so selective as to be positively misleading. There was an example of this yesterday. Both the Sun and the Daily Mail featured a poll showing that 81 per cent of the British public want a cap on migration. What neither publication mentioned was that the poll was in fact conducted by the anti-migration think thank Migration Watch – hardly a disinterested source!

And neither publication picked up another independent piece of research by University College London, which showed that not only do migrants from the EU pay their way, but also they are more likely to be in employment than their British counterparts and less likely to be claiming benefits. In short, here’s the proof of what anyone who works with migrants knows: migrants put far more into our national pot than they take out.

Other than the Financial Times no other national newspaper had picked up this story. We should expect better from our national press – after all, how many of the unfavourable public attitudes to migrants are rooted in failure of our press to give a clear picture of the contribution migrants make to society?

These claims were made by migrants from the eight Eastern European countries that joined the EU in 2004 (A8 migrants). But digging a bit deeper I have found that this represents an increase of only 77 people, a significant fact that the radio report failed to mention. Considering the vastly difficult economic climate that the UK has been experiencing, this is a very small and insignificant rise. As is so often the case, statistics fail to tell the whole story.

Last month saw the government extend the WRS for a further, and final, two years. This poorly thought-out scheme requires A8 migrants who come to work in the UK to remain in continuous employment for twelve months – with breaks between jobs lasting no longer than thirty days – before they can claim benefits. Yet, as you can imagine, fulfilling this requirement can be a difficult task for migrants who are often employed in temporary work, by employers that don’t provide the necessary paperwork. This policy has led to hardworking migrants – who have paid their fair share of tax – being denied benefits when they are in desperate need of support.

Due to the lack of mainstream media coverage migrants receive (other than usual scaremongering), you could be forgiven for thinking that they are immune from the problems facing the UK workforce. It is important to remember, though, that migrants are just as susceptible to losing their job in a recession as anyone else. Returning to your country of origin is not a straightforward process when you’ve been made redundant from a low-paid job and it is, therefore, no surprise that in February Homeless Link reported that migrants now make up one in four of rough sleepers in London. While I welcome the funding given by the government to Homeless Link, which aims to reduce rough sleeping among recent EU migrants, the failure to address the inadequacies of the WRS scheme is shameful and means that much of the good work being done will be wasted.

This exclusionary welfare policy puts many migrants in a position whereby they are desperate for jobs to survive. Radio 4 emphasised the “perception among employers that migrants work harder” but they have failed to recognise the impact of welfare policy on migrants’ need for work. Furthermore, our poorly regulated labour market means that exploitative employers can take advantage of poorer migrants’ desperation and their often-scant knowledge of employment rights.

Last week, Oxfam held a roundtable discussion attended by migrants, think-tanks, academics, NGOs and unions to examine the impact of the recession on migrant workers. One of the key areas discussed was the increasing hostility towards migrants, especially given competition for low-skilled jobs. It is clear that more must be done to confront the notion that migrants are “taking all our jobs”.

With tensions exacerbated in the recession, it’s imperative that the government appreciates the effect that their poorly thought out and exclusionary welfare policy, coupled with a labour market with limited regulation, will have on the livelihoods of both British nationals and migrants in poverty.