Irish experts and duty bearers are researching child and family poverty across the island. Anaka’s input highlights the situation of families with experience of the UK asylum system in the north. Its policy briefing, available here, shows how decades of successive UK governments’ ‘hostile environment’ policies eroded the supports and options available to these people, preventing them from supporting themselves and making them wholly dependent on a hostile system while waiting for a decision.

As far back as 2018 parents in the asylum system responding to a survey supported by PPR reported that they could not afford basic items such as food, clothing and transport, not to mention recreational activities and school trips for their children. Many said they experienced anxiety, isolation, depression or overwhelm as a result.

At that time, asylum seekers were generally living in houses and flats, mostly in Belfast. This began to change in mid-2021, when the Home Office (through its contracted asylum accommodation provider, the private company Mears Group) began placing people in hostels set up in hotels across the north. Official figures indicate that by 2023, they numbered more than 1,000.

Families placed in hotels reported that, in addition to being denied the right to work, they had great difficulty meeting their children’s needs. (Government support is currently £8.86/week per person, with small top-ups for children under 3). They were not allowed to store food or cook anything for themselves or their children, many of whom lost weight and failed to thrive. In autumn 2022 residents began systematically documenting their living conditions and reported their concerns around  health, poverty and more at a meeting with duty bearers in October 2022.

Then Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s December 2022 pledge to “abolish the backlog of initial asylum decisions” led to a unprecedented number of claims being granted quickly. By mid-2024 there were only around 300 people seeking protection still placed in hotels here. To speed things further the Home Office changed its guidance around ‘discontinuing’ asylum support to a new 28-day moving on period – an exceedingly short time for parents who have hitherto been barred from working and who as a result have no savings.

In terms of income support, new refugees do become eligible for the UK’s Universal Credit benefit system.  However, given the UC system’s deliberate five-week wait for the first payment, even in the best of circumstances there is a gap between asylum support ending and UC beginning, exposing people to hunger and hardship.

The inability to work and lack of savings mean that the private rental sector is closed to these families. Responsibility for housing them therefore falls to the Northern Ireland Housing Executive, already labouring under a social housing waiting list of nearly 48,000 households. With the housing shortage, the NIHE is also now lodging homeless families in hotels – different ones, often far from the ones these families were living in before and from the community relationships they may have built up. In NIHE hotels food is not provided and families have no access to laundry or cooking facilities.

Finding work in new and unfamiliar areas is difficult. The temporary nature of the housing doesn’t help – parents are told by the Housing Executive that they will be moved somewhere permanent as soon as possible, but they have no idea when this will be, or where. Money for transport to get to interviews is scarce. Additionally, the Education Authority has in recent weeks announced a new policy of not offering school places to children in such ‘non-standard temporary accommodation’ until their families have been allocated a permanent place to live – something wholly out of their and their parents’ control. This means that parents looking for work have to juggle a whole additional set of demands around childcare.

As a result, for many of these families the long-awaited positive asylum decision brings new hardship in the short term. They are not alone in their need – disadvantaged families throughout the north face the unwanted, relentless struggle against unemployment and homelessness. The consequences of their enforced inaction while in the asylum system, and the additional barriers to their integration posed by the housing crisis, are just extra hurdles to overcome.