Southwark Council is spending £6m a year on families who need support to survive but cannot apply for government benefits like universal credit because of their immigration status.
Most of the money the council spends on these families who have ‘no recourse to public funds’ goes towards housing, according to deputy leader Cllr Jasmine Ali, who spoke to a parliamentary committee last week.
‘No recourse to public funds’ means people are ineligible for statutory support even if they have the right to live and work in the UK, and may have been in previous employment.
Local authorities are responsible by law for supporting these people and get no extra money from central government to cover the added strain on their finances.
Southwark is likely to be among the London boroughs spending the most on this. Figures collected by umbrella group London Councils in 2016/2017 showed that the average annual spend per borough was about £1.7m.
Southwark Council currently supports 130 families, who have about 220 children between them, she said. Most of these families are single-parent. Families are usually reliant on council support for about two years before the Home Office gives them a more permanent status in the UK, she said – although it can take much longer.
Cllr Ali, who is the council’s cabinet member for children, young people and education, told the Work and Pensions select committee last Wednesday (October 20) of her worries about the children in families who have no recourse to public funds.
“I’ve got statutory responsibility for safeguarding all of our children in Southwark,” she told committee members in a session on children in families with no recourse to public funds. “It’s a wonder that I can sleep at night really… we need to be safeguarding children”.
In an impassioned address to the committee via videolink, she called for the Home Office to put in place “proper funding streams to fund charities, to fund local authorities for their efforts in supporting these families and to make sure that children don’t fall through the cracks.”
Cllr Ali added her concerns that economic pressures driven by the Covid-19 pandemic may have forced more people with no recourse to public funds to slip into “destitution”.
She called for the Home Office to speed up the process of giving people a more settled status in the UK, which she described as “punitive”.
“There’s no rhyme or reason to any of this but one thing that we do know is the majority of families that we support who are stuck in this no man’s land end up getting leave to remain, or they end up getting the restrictions for no recourse to public funds taken off them.”
Cllr Ali added that the council struggled to house families in good temporary accommodation, despite its ambitious social housebuilding programme.
The housing people are put in is “quite often quite crowded… and not always in Southwark,” she said.
“The big issue is that we’re having to use, because of the scarcity of housing, very expensive temporary accommodation which isn’t as adequate as we would want for our families,” she added.
Several other local councils were represented at the committee meeting. Manchester City Council spent about £1m on families with no recourse to public funds, committee members heard.
A spokesperson for the Home Office said: “The provision of no recourse to public funds has been upheld by successive governments and maintains that those coming to the UK should do so on a basis that prevents burdens on the taxpayer.
“There are safeguards in place to ensure vulnerable migrants who are destitute and have community care needs, including issues relating to human rights or the wellbeing of children, can receive support.”