MORE than 100,000 children could be caught up in the asylum backlog, says a report from Barnardo’s.
The charity estimates that, since 2002, some 40,000 children have arrived or been born in the UK in asylum-seeking families. Some cases go back ten years, and the issue has received little attention from policy makers, says the charity. “These children should be treated as children first and asylum-seekers or refugees second. They have all the same needs other children have.”
The report, Like Any Other Child, describes them as living in temporary accommodation “with no say about where they live or how long they will stay in an area, and no control over the conditions in which they have to live”.
The Government’s pledge to halve the number of children in poverty by 2010-11 and to eradicate child poverty altogether by 2020 does not apply to the children of asylum-seekers, the report says.
It emphasises that asylum legislation over the past 15 years has increasingly restricted asylum-seekers’ access to support, while their numbers have continued to fall. “Quite simply, we can afford to treat the relatively small number of families who arrive in the UK to seek asylum more humanely.”
Case studies in the report describe the distress suffered by children in these circumstances, especially where families have been detained. Since March 2007, all new asylum applications have been processed using the New Asylum Model (NAM), which Barnardo’s welcomes; but the approach to families and children could be more compassionate, it says.
It calls for their cases to be allocated specially trained case-owners, as already happens for unaccompanied children. The report also recommends that, in clearing the backlog, the Government should take into account the needs of children who have lived for several years in the UK or who have been born here.
The report recommends that asylum-seekers be allowed to apply for permission to work if they have waited more than six months for their application to be finally determined, where the delay is not their fault, and that all asylum-seekers should be entitled to the same benefits as other claimants in the UK, or to equivalent levels of support, including allowances for children.
“We think that it is both inhumane and ineffective to use, as tools of asylum policy, the threat of destitution and of taking children into care because their parents cannot then support them. Section 9 should be repealed.”
The report highlights concerns over the humiliation suffered by families using vouchers in supermarkets, and the poor state of accommodation. One interviewee described a house “infested with cockroaches”.
The report also expresses concerns over racial harassment, and recommends not housing the children of asylum-seekers in areas where there is reason to believe that their presence will “aggravate community tensions”. Disruption to schooling is also discussed.
The recommendations aim at “ensuring that every child in the UK matters, regardless of their immigration status”.
www.barnados.org.uk/asylum