Publication: Race and Class
Publication Date: 01-JAN-04
Delivery: Immediate Online Access
Author: Webber, Frances
Article Excerpt
On 31 July 2003, a High Court judge ruled that the UK government's refusal of support to three vulnerable asylum seekers debased them and diminished their human dignity to such an extent that it violated their most fundamental human rights. (1) The story caused hardly a ripple; no-one is surprised any longer that a Labour government should be found to be subjecting asylum seekers to inhuman and degrading treatment. The system that today forces asylum seekers into destitution and despair is the inevitable result of the government's decision to prioritise policing and deterrence over the provision of welfare for asylum seekers.
It was only the tabloid press and the Home Office which believed (or pretended to) that the numbers of asylum seekers coming to the UK in the 1990s were driven not by war, civil war and persecution but by the availability of benefits. Acting on this assumption, in 1996 the Tory government had changed social security regulations to remove many asylum seekers from state welfare benefits. In a stinging judgment, the Court of Appeal condemned the regulations for imposing on asylum seekers 'a life so destitute that ... no civilised nation can tolerate it'. (2) The Tory government's response was to recast the outlawed regulations as primary legislation, against which the courts were unable to act. Excluded from statutory benefits, destitute asylum seekers became the responsibility of local authorities, which have duties to care for vulnerable people in their area. Authorities in London and the south-east, faced with increasing numbers of destitute asylum seekers, began to send them to cheaper parts of the country.
When Labour came to power in 1997, it promised to reform the system of support for asylum seekers. Its reform, when it came two years later, amounted to refining and extending Tory policies of deterrence. The National Asylum Support Service (NASS), created in 1999, replaced both statutory benefits and local authority provision for asylum seekers by an all-embracing system of asylum support. NASS is an arm of the Home Office, whose philosophy is unabashed deterrence of asylum seekers by making their living conditions unpleasant. Under the NASS system, asylum seekers are compulsorily dispersed around the country. They were given their benefits in vouchers rather than cash until a powerful public campaign put an end to this added humiliation. The meagre allowance (around 38 [pounds sterling] per week for a single adult) makes subsistence difficult and dignity and quality of life impossible, while the accommodation provided ranges from shabby to downright squalid. (3) There is no aspect of an asylum seeker's life that is not subject to systematic degradation.
Healthcare
The dispersal system, in which thousands of people are shunted around the country from one makeshift abode to another with little or no notice, is bound to have a detrimental effect on the health of asylum seekers. Inevitably, patients lose touch with doctors and effective management of information about individuals' health proves difficult. In October 2002, a British Medical Association survey found that asylum seekers' health tended to get worse after their arrival, as not enough was done to safeguard it. The survey cited failure to perform basic tests to pick up illnesses, failure to refer torture victims to specialist centres, failure to give appropriate vaccinations to unaccompanied children, insufficient translating services, lack of continuity of care, dispersal and poor accommodation, which aggravated the physical and psychological effects of war and torture. (4)
The All-Party Parliamentary Group on AIDS and its sister group on refugees, reporting in July 2003, confirmed that the NASS system exacerbates poor health among asylum seekers, particularly for those with serious communicable diseases such as HIV. The report pointed out that the 'current immigration system forces individuals to live in abject poverty, thereby undermining clinical efforts to maintain good health'. It said that NASS 'consistently disregarded...
NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.
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