The main side effect of our lifestyle last week was the feeling of being hungover, which Marianne and I both reported. The lack of nutritious food combined with long walks is not healthy.

Safe to say we are now back onto normal food, and especially enjoying the fruit, veg, meat, and use of the bus!

The only thing I can say about this challenge is that it really highlighted how badly we treat refused asylum seekers, and that it is no wonder they have to be so resourceful in their survival strategies  http://www.oxfam.org.uk/resources/policy/right_heard/downloads/rr-coping-with-destitution-survival-strategies-uk-040211-media-en.pdf

In total, Marianne and I raised £600 – and would like to thank anyone who donated. Sadly however, this will only go a small way. I would encourage you to add your voice to any campaign calling for the forced destitution of refused asylum seekers to be abolished. http://stillhumanstillhere.wordpress.com/take-action/

Some of the typical contents of a food parcel, as distributed to refused asylum seekers by the Red Cross

Friday – day four of our challenge. I’ve just had an update from our friends in Birmingham who are joining us from Mon-Fri and their experiences sound similar to ours; to quote Siobhan: ‘My body is telling me that it’s very much looking forward to fruit, vegetables and meat!’.

The four of us on this challenge have been fortunate. We have been careful not to ask people for food, but it is the nature of our placements (drop in centres) that there are sometimes leftovers. Mostly they are offered to service users, but then we as volunteers can take what’s left. So on Tuesday I could bring home some leftover veg and pasta, on Wednesday some fresh milk, and yesterday Marianne brought home bread and chocolate. Similarly, in Birmingham they have been given leftovers of pasta, curry, yoghurt and fruit. I think we’ve all wondered if we were ‘cheating’ doing this, but have come back to the fact that if we were really destitute we would accept without hesitation.

The biggest challenge for me this week has been the after affects of walking long distances without proper nutrition. The walks themselves were fine, but the days after, i.e. weds and this morning, I feel like I’m hungover and am craving some vegetables!

We’ve used most of our cans of food and will be eating a lot of plain pasta and rice this weekend. We already had plans to visit a friend’s open house, so today should be OK food wise.

What strikes me this week is how much energy has gone into planning. From seeing how creative we could be with rice and pasta, to weighing and measuring each portion of food, to making sure I left enough time to walk to every destination. There is little freedom in any of this and all I can do is to come back to the point I made earlier: the way we treat refused asylum seekers is inhumane. I am seeing with new eyes just how valuable my placement and others like it are.

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.

10/04/2011. “I woke up in the wee small hours this morning with an urge to plan next week’s meals. As we will be ‘destitute’ with only a food parcel and £4.50 to our names I had to plan very carefully. Never before have I considered measuring out the milk for my cereal, or dividing a can of sweetcorn into three parts. Nor has a bowl of plain pasta seemed like a viable option for a meal.

All this planning for the week ahead led me to reflect on the week past. We don’t spend much on food each week – around £60 for 5 people – yet eat very well. Last week I also went for drinks with friends, was treated to cake, and bought chocolate on my way home from work. Not excessive things, but things I won’t be able to do next week. Similarly last week I made full use of my unlimited bus pass, travelling around the city for work and to visit friends at the weekend. According to walkit.com without my bus pass I will be walking a total of 40.3 miles next week.

I’m not particularly looking forward to any of this, and I’m hoping that the good weather holds out. I keep reminding myself that for thousands of people this is the usual pattern to their week and that I am lucky to be able to come home to sleep in safety at the end of the day.”

Background to the challenge:

When an asylum seeker is refused the right to remain in this country their support is immediately cut off and they must leave their accommodation. Such a person must survive on the kindness of friends, or manage to find a bed in a night shelter; many sleep rough.

Refused asylum seekers are denied the right to work in the UK, meaning that they have no access to an income. The Red Cross works in partnership with churches and community centres that provide food parcels to destitute asylum seekers. Each parcel contains a variation on the following:

• Pasta
• Rice
• Sugar or oil
• Tinned tomatoes
• Tinned sweetcorn
• Baked beans
• Biscuits
• UHT milk
• Teabags or coffee

They also give £4.50 for bus fare to ensure the scheme is accessible.

For more information on Oxfam’s work with asylum seekers in the UK see here, and other blog entries here

In fact, women’s experience of asylum may be different to that of men from the outset. Arriving with their children to ‘testify’ why they’re seeking refuge, a lack of childcare at immigration offices means that many women have to tell their stories in front of their children, and may consequently hold back on more horrific details, of sexual violence for example. (For more info  see Asylum Aid’s Every Single Woman campaign, including the Refugee Women’s Charter)

For those who are subsequently refused asylum, life as a woman continues to present additional difficulties and dangers. Finding themselves alone with no place to sleep is a huge risk for a homeless woman.  The report tells the story of Mary, who was unable to sleep at her friend’s house as she had another visitor. She found herself in a nightmare all women imagine: “it was night and I was walking in the park. There was a man and he started to follow me. I was very scared and started to scream and run, full of tears.” Many people in this situation have a home to escape to; Mary didn’t.

Coping with Destitution also shows that women are more likely to have to stay home looking after children, and so are less able to earn any money – even a couple of pounds. They find it harder to cope with the lack of privacy which asylum seekers moving around, sleeping on sofas and floors of friends or contacts for example, have to face. For many, their culture forbids this lack of privacy, so they suffer agonies of remorse in addition to not being able to support themselves financially.  Men are often more able to find work and make friends.

Women may find it easier than men to find partners of the opposite sex to support them. ‘Support’ can be a dangerous thing however, and while both women and men are forced into transactional relationships to survive, and some end up selling sex out of pure desperation for cash, women are at much greater risk of coercion, entrapment, and violence as a result.

But it’s not just new relationships that can victimise women; many destitute asylum seeking women suffer at the hands of existing partners. Women in this position face a double whammy: violence if they stay with their partner, but further suffering if they leave, as this may cut any ties with their community – a particularly vital lifeline to women who have no access to public funds, such as basic benefits, and housing.  (See Forgotten Women report).

Coping with Destitution makes a number of recommendations, including reform of the asylum system and an end to policy of destitution. But as we have seen, women’s experience of the asylum system, and of destitution, differs from that of men in many ways. So it is important that policy makers and voluntary organisations who work with asylum seekers are both aware of this and take the particular needs and experiences of women asylum seekers into account in designing and delivering services and support for them.

Mike Kaye, Advocacy Manager for Still Human Still Here, looks at recent evidence of how asylum seekers survive in the UK and calls for the elimination of destitution in the UK as a fitting way to mark this important anniversary.

The term “sofa surfing” has been used as shorthand to describe the transient existence of refused asylum seekers who move from one place to another looking for any sort of short term accommodation with friends, family or members of the community to keep them off the streets. Coping with Destitution, a new report from OXFAM and Swansea University, provides a detailed and alarming picture of what this means in practice for the individuals affected.

Even where refused asylum seekers are housed and assisted by supportive and well motivated members of the community, this still has a devastating impact on the individual’s dignity and self esteem over time. The effect of being entirely dependent on others simply to subsist and the fact that there is no foreseeable end to a period in which their lives have effectively been suspended inevitably affects the mental and physical health of refused asylum seekers.

Another worrying finding of the report is that refused asylum seekers are so concerned about being returned to their country of origin that they try and avoid all contact with officials and that their distrust of the authorities extends to health professionals and even refugee charities. This means they are often not accessing services they are entitled to (e.g. primary health care or Section 4 support) or taking advantage of the advice and support offered by voluntary sector service providers. 

The isolation and desperation of these individuals means that they are vulnerable to manipulative, exploitative or even abusive relationships with the people who are supporting them. Both male and female refused asylum seekers contacted during the research had been involved in commercial sex work as a means of survival.

Despite the horrors of living in destitution in this ‘civilised’ country, evidence from the report shows that destitution will not force refused asylum seekers to return to their country of origin and should be a spur for the Government to review its current asylum support policy.

The Government’s stated policy is that nobody needs to be destitute and that asylum seekers who have been refused should leave the UK. On the face of it this does not appear an unreasonable position, but it does not take account of the problems in the decision making process. For example, in 2010, around one in four asylum decisions made by the UK Border Agency were overturned on appeal. While the appeal process works for some asylum seekers, its effectiveness is largely dependent on asylum seekers finding good quality legal representatives and this is in increasingly short supply. 

The second problem with the determination process is that there is a protection gap which appeared in 2002 when Exceptional Leave to Remain (ELR) was abolished. ELR used to provide protection to individuals fleeing conflict and widespread human rights violations, but who could not necessarily prove that they were being individually persecuted. ELR was given to 24% of asylum applicants in 2002, but the new categories of Humanitarian Protection and Discretionary Leave which replaced it are only given to around 10% of asylum applicants and the great majority of these are children.

The consequence of this is that there are groups of asylum seekers who have been refused any form of status, but cannot be returned to their country of origin because it is not safe to do so. For example, there have been no removals to Zimbabwe in around eight years. Thousands of asylum seekers from Zimbabwe alone have been refused during this time and have been left in limbo in the UK, many surviving in ways outlined in the report.

A senior UNHCR official has recently noted that the approach of some European countries towards people fleeing generalized violence in countries like Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia “often defies common sense”. 

 If the UK Government amended its policy around Discretionary Leave or Humanitarian Protection so that UKBA caseworkers could provide temporary protection to asylum seekers who do not meet the strict definition of a refugee but may be at risk if returned to their country of origin, it would end the current situation where asylum seekers from a small number of countries end up refused and destitute, but then cannot be removed from the UK.

 This year is the 60^th anniversary of the 1951 UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees – it is an international standard that has literally saved hundreds of thousands of lives since it was established. Implementing the recommendations from the Coping with Destitution report and eliminating destitution from the UK’s asylum system would be a fitting way to mark this anniversary.

Mike Kaye is Advocacy Manager for Still Human Still Here

OXFAM is a members of the Still Human Still Here Coalition

 www.stillhuman.org.uk

“My day starts waking up on a mattress on a friend’s floor. The floor changes every few days, depending on who I’m staying with. And the “mattress” is really two duvets folded over… I tend to move around so I don’t impose on anybody for too long. I was kicked out of my accommodation just a few days before Christmas and am currently staying with a friend in her one bedroom flat.

I’m out of the door  early in the morning and depending on how much I’ve been able to pack into my day I’ll be back sometime in the evening. I try to fill my days with things to do and places to go. I make myself busy, so that I don’t have to think about my situation. I don’t allow myself to stop.  

There are various drop-in centres and sessions in different parts of the city all week, I attend as many as possible, and that also means I’m not under the feet of whoever is giving me shelter that day. I will usually be given some food for lunch or I can pick up a food parcel or sometimes cash at these sessions. The Red Cross Destitution Clinic gives out £10 a week for four weeks to people who are destitute. My four weeks are up now so I have no other way of getting money. Maybe friends will give me some cash now and again, but it’s not much.

If it’s a laundry day then it can be quite an ordeal. The friend I’m staying with doesn’t have a washing machine, and I don’t have money to pay for the launderette, so I go to another friend’s house to do it. I lug my clothes across town on foot and I stay there until it’s done. It’s not easy to get there and I walk everywhere because I have no money for the bus. I don’t like to impose, so I try not to go too often. So I’ll go maybe every 2-3 weeks and do two or three loads at that one time. Doing things, keeping busy is how I cope. It distracts me from my situation, my reality.

When I get back to my friend’s we will prepare dinner, I am fortunate to have such good friends willing to share their food with me.  Being dependent on others is difficult, especially as I’m an independent person. I don’t like to ask people for things. I cope with what I have and I’m happier to go without, so I tend not to ask for things.

I’m very lucky; I haven’t gone hungry or had to sleep on the streets. There was a gentleman from my country who was disabled and his case was refused. He had nowhere to go, so was sleeping in a stable, in winter. I know people who have had to sleep on the streets. When you are destitute a lot depends on how involved you are with other people around you. If you don’t know anyone then you will struggle.

Everyone is doing as much as they can for me, but I don’t know what’s going to happen from week to week. The same people can’t support me for a long period because life is difficult for them and they have their own matters to worry about such as financial strains.

Getting to sleep is not too difficult, I’ve made sure that I’m so tired I haven’t the energy to think too much. The less I think, the less likely I am to breakdown. I know I have to cope, if I didn’t what would I do?”

*Nikki’s name has been changed to protect her identity

Yet our research launched today is full of such stories.  It shows for the first time both the horrors of what is happening here in the UK and shown that, despite government policy, people do find ways to survive.

Oxfam works with refugees all over the world. Whilst the majority of refugees are hosted by developing nations, a very small number come to the UK.  If they are refused asylum here, they are forced to resort to living on their friends’ sofas, surviving on handouts from charities, entering into overtly transactional relationships and sometimes illegal work, including sex work. In short, they are forced to live in destitution.

At Oxfam, we believe that two immediate changes in policy would help to create a fair, efficient asylum system that protects the rights and dignity of the people who use it.  They are giving asylum seekers unconditional cash support until the point of return and improving the decision making in the asylum determination process.

Firstly, change from badly administered payment cards to unconditional cash support until the point of return. Currently, someone who has been refused asylum can receive limited support (‘section 4 support‘, consisting of accommodation and an Azure card worth £35.29 a week), if they agree to return home when it is safe to do so. With many refused asylum-seekers feeling they were wrongly denied asylum and fearful of persecution at home, it is not surprising that few take up this option.

Lucy, a teacher seeking asylum here in the UK, talks about the problem with this. She speaks of a 45 minute walk until she reaches the one store which will accept her card.  On the way she passes not only other shops but markets that sell the African ingredients she knows how to cook with. Section 4 support is costly, and the conditions and poor administration mean that many refused asylum-seekers would rather live in destitution. With an unconditional cash alternative, refused asylum-seekers have access to some level of support.

Secondly, improve the quality of decisions in the asylum-determination process. Oxfam is not suggesting that people who are refused are automatically allowed to stay but initial decisions from the system are often wrong. Almost a third of applications that are initially refused and overturned upon appeal, meaning people who have been refused asylum have not been given a fair hearing. Returning someone who has been wrongly refused asylum because of poor quality decision-making violates the Refugee Convention by forcing people to return to a country where they face persecution and fear.

Free legal advice and representation for those at the end of the process would not only improve the quality of decision making but more accurate initial decisions could save up to £13.5 million[1].  Appellants with legal representation have a 51% success rate, giving the UK a much better chance of running a fair system.

We have a proud tradition of providing sanctuary in the UK. Yet, as we have heard, currently we are leaving some people in destitution.  One of the people interviewed in our research remarked that it brings back all the horrible and sorrowful memories of the struggle they went through in fleeing persecution in their own country in the first place. We never need to treat someone like that, under any circumstances.  We believe that these changes in policy, giving cash support, improving decision making and granting the right to work, would turn our system from one that leaves people as “living ghosts” into a fair, efficient and humane structure that we can once again be proud of.

Please see http://www.oxfam.org.uk/applications/blogs/pressoffice/2011/02/04/asylum-policy-leads-to-life-of-destitution-says-oxfam/ for more information

For Oxfam’s latest research report ‘Coping with Destitution – Refused asylum seekers in the UK’, see http://www.oxfam.org.uk/resources/policy/right_heard/coping-with-destitution-survival-strategies-uk.html

Once you meet the people you begin to understand how this could happen in a country with a strong welfare state, and it is largely to do with bureaucratic delays in the benefits system. The mother of a man dies. He is a single father and his 3 children were in the grandmother’s care. He will eventually get financial support for these children but that is months away. He was about to go to loan sharks for money, likely to make the problem worse in the long term, when he was given vouchers for the food bank. One of the volunteers in the food bank described times she had people weep with thanks and relief as they were given the food parcels.

That was in Ebbw Vale where jobs are almost impossible to come by. In Newport the job situation was bit better. I visited a primary school in one of the most disadvantaged estates, Duffryn. There, there is a nurture programme for very young children who are disruptive in class and need special support. Our project is to work with their parents, to help them get into more sustainable livelihoods. As one mother told me that sessions weren’t so much about livelihoods but about helping you cope. Let me describe one single mother. She had managed to get a job but the shift’s she has to work are when her children are home from school, so they have to look after themselves and only go to bed when she gets back very late. Unsurprisingly they are tired and chaotic. She is worried about losing her job if she asks to change her shift. The project is working with her to see if they can help her to make this happen. By the way the nurture programme has already lost its local authority funding and everyone was concerned that the Welsh Assembly money keeping them going was likely to disappear with the budget cuts. If it does it would be hugely short-sighted. These sorts of projects are the ones that help break the cycle of repeated generations in deprivation.

What I saw though was far from depressing. The community had organised itself to reduce drug problems and violence on the estate, mainly by giving young people things to do – sports, arts and drama. Even the local journalist I met said that the estate had been transformed in the last 10 years. Similar individual transformations were taking place with young people through the work at Fairbridge, working with 13-25 years old in Cardiff. This is about giving young people basic life skills, self esteem and then helping them get started in constructive lives. Again the level of deprivation was shocking. I was told the story of an 18 year old who turned up outside the centre 1½ hours early every day on his bike so as not to be late. When asked why, he finally confessed he hadn’t a watch and in any case couldn’t tell the time. What chance does an 18 year old with that level of skill have in our society?

Finally, I visited the Oasis Centre in Cardiff where we are running a drop in support centre for refugees and asylum seekers. Can you imagine being in a foreign country and just not understanding how it works? This centre has provided enormous emotional and practical support to people and several of the refugees/asylum seekers are now volunteers there themselves.

So what does all this say about poverty in the UK? The first thing is that it is different from the poverty in the poorest countries. One of our Ugandan staff spent a year on secondment in the UK poverty programme. As she said, we are all poor in Uganda so there is no stigma attached. If you can’t afford the bus that’s because nobody else can afford it either.

Despite the welfare state, it is easy to see how people fall into poverty and destitution when life events hit them. What is most worrying is that the budget cuts will unfortunately hit the poorest people and most disadvantaged communities hardest, whether because community projects vital to those people are cut, or because these people are most dependent on public services. Then there are the proposed changes to the benefits system. Some may be good, for example ensuring that work pays. But any change will have winners and losers and even the change itself is terrifying for people who know only too well how slow the benefits system is to respond to their own life changes. They are worried about how they will cope if benefits stop as the system changes.

Finally there is the continued negative media portrayal of those people on benefits as ’scroungers’ – yes, of course there may be some ‘scroungers’ in the welfare system, just as there are people in paid employment who take advantage of their expenses, or wealthy people who manage to evade taxes. But the vast majority of poor people in the UK just dream of a society where they can work and get support to help them raise their children decently. Let’s help them, not stigmatise them, or make their lives worse. 

Although the government assures it will provide a helping hand to encourage the growth of communities, a huge amount of money will be withdrawn from the sectors at its very heart. As Paul Segal highlighted in the Guardian, the cuts will have a negative impact on inequality and people living in poverty. Many in the community and voluntary sector, which is the focus of the plans, have serious concerns about the impact it will have on their work. Women, child asylum seekers, and the lowest earners have been shown to be among the people who will be hit hardest.

The UK Poverty Programme’s Routes to Solidarity project works with Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) women. This is a group who face racial and gender discrimination, including barriers built into the way our society is structured that put them at a disadvantage. This discrimination leads to economic inequality, increased risk of poverty, greater deprivation and reduced life chances. The BME sector will also be at risk from the cuts.

Oxfam have spoken to the women involved with Routes to Solidarity about how the cuts will impact on their work. Many of the women highlighted that there is little commitment to providing guidelines or central equality monitoring. The cuts are therefore likely to hit under-resourced organisations, such as domestic violence services, which are not considered ‘frontline’ but are often a lifeline for BME women. Women-only spaces provided by community groups are typically the only places that issues like domestic abuse, honour based violence and forced marriage can be properly addressed. The impact of the cuts on the public sector is likely to have a knock-on effect on such invaluable specialist services; services which will be at breaking point already due to the squeezing of the voluntary sector.

Moreover, the systemic inequality that currently prevails will be maintained or intensified. Many of the women commented that, although the government wants to give people the chance to have a say on issues that affect them, this wont be possible when the system does not allow people to participate equally. Instead, the power relations that are created by this inequality of opportunity will be played out in a local context, and those groups whose voices are currently the loudest will continue to dominate.

Today the Comprehensive Spending Review will be published, and we will discover the true extent of the cuts we are facing. It remains to be seen whether the community groups and volunteers championed by the government will be able to pick up the pieces and recover. What is clear is that these changes will make already vulnerable women more vulnerable and leave the sector struggling to provide vital services for disadvantaged people.