It’s easy to forget that the Institute for Public Policy Research’s political ‘turkey’ award at last year’s Labour Party Conference was won jointly by the Dome and asylum vouchers. Yet while the Dome is on the brink of extinction, why is it that the discredited voucher system has so far survived?
At Brighton, sustained pressure, led by Bill Morris and the Transport and General Workers’ Union, resulted in a statement from Labour’s NEC calling upon the government to conduct ‘an immediate, comprehensive review of the voucher scheme’ and to take ‘immediate steps’ to ensure that traders should be able to give change for unspent portions of vouchers. This was enough to head off a revolt by unions and ordinary delegates only hours before Nelson Mandela addressed the conference and paid tribute to the assistance and sanctuary the UK had provided anti-apartheid campaigners. In helping the persecuted, he said, the UK was making its contribution in the fight for human rights in South Africa and beyond.
But as this year’s conference approaches, ordinary members will be feeling aggrieved because the voucher system for asylum seekers continues to turn its back on such thinking and exposes today’s victims of human rights abuse to discrimination, racism and grinding poverty. An individual asylum seeker is still living on vouchers worth £36.54 per week. And supermarkets are still profiting from asylum seekers’ change. In fact, the situation for asylum seekers and their children has worsened because the value of vouchers did not rise this April in line with cost of living increases in Income Support.
As yet, the review set up by the then immigration minister Barbara Roche has still not reported, even though the fieldwork was completed some time ago. Why is it taking ministers so long to come to a decision? The most likely answer is that the evidence has left them facing some tricky choices. Do they dare to ditch a flagship policy which has been widely condemned, or should they face down their critics in order to shore up their ‘get tough’ credentials? What about a ‘middle way’, removing the most glaring defects in the system, such as the ‘no change’ element?
Whatever they decide, it is hard to ignore the weight of damning evidence submitted to the review. An in-depth report, Token Gestures, by Oxfam, the Refugee Council and the TGWU (available at www.oxfam. org.uk/policy/papers/vouchers/intro.htm), based on information provided by 50 agencies working with asylum seekers, found that vouchers are seriously undermining the government’s laudable objectives of tackling social exclusion and child poverty. A massive 96 percent of organisations said asylum seekers are not able to buy essential items such as shoes, underwear, baby milk, and nappies – and 82 percent said that asylum seekers are not able to buy enough food.
Then there is the issue of value for money. The fact that these vouchers can only be used in shops signed up to the voucher system means that asylum seekers cannot shop in shops and markets offering best value that other people on low incomes use to make ends meet.
The impact is especially severe on those with particular needs, including children, pregnant mothers, and disabled people and the elderly. As a Sri Lankan man in his 60s put it: ‘I am diabetic and cannot afford to buy the special food I need. I suffer from arthritis. I need more heating and more warm clothing. I need thermal underwear, but cannot afford it.’ Four days after leaving hospital, one pregnant Congolese woman was reduced to using newspapers to clean her newborn baby. Her vouchers had been delayed and she had no money to buy nappies.
Another serious concern is that vouchers, together with the forced dispersal of asylum seekers to designated accommodation outside London, are undoubtedly having a negative impact on race relations. Vouchers mark out asylum seekers within the community, making them potential targets for racism and harassment. While racial violence in northern cities has recently hit the headlines, asylum seekers are routinely subjected to horrendous attacks which rarely get reported in national media: the three-year-old Lebanese asylum-seeker struck on the head and knocked unconscious by a brick thrown through his window; the Rwandan woman housed in Scotland stoned in the street; the Kurd seriously beaten and hospitalised in an attack by a gang of young men in the centre of a Midlands town. These attacks may not have been a direct consequence of vouchers, but vouchers undeniably increase the chance of victimisation.
Vouchers also send out negative messages to society about asylum seekers at a time when there is already much ignorance on asylum. One young refugee, a girl from Afghanistan, described vouchers to a group of MPs as ‘like getting a stamp saying you don’t belong’. In scenes being replayed in Sainsbury’s, Tesco’s, ASDA and Kwik Save supermarkets all over the country, the sight of asylums seekers paying for their shopping with vouchers elicits from other shoppers contempt, comments about what they should and should not be buying and reinforces views that asylum seekers are coming to the UK for reasons other than humanitarian. Just imagine how stigmatising, if not humiliating, it would be for the unemployed if they had to use vouchers when they went shopping.
The point about ignorance is an important one. Despite the fact that the issue has consumed innumerable newspaper column inches and has been a standing item on the political agenda for many months now, the public have been deprived of a genuine, informed debate on asylum and therefore do not know even the most basic facts. A MORI poll last year, for example, asked people how much government support they thought an asylum seeker could receive each week to meet basic living needs. The average of the responses was £113 – more than three times the actual answer.
The government’s main justification for introducing vouchers is that they would deter unfounded asylum applications. Yet even here, on the government’s own terms, there is no evidence that the system works. Applications remain somewhere between 5,000 and 6,500 a month. And the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees has found, after examining the pattern of asylum claims made in Europe, that the most likely reason for lodging an asylum claim in a particular country is not the level of benefit support available, but the presence of established refugee communities.
The thinking behind the system also ignores that the simple fact that the main countries from which the UK receives asylum claims have appalling human rights records – Iraq, Sri Lanka, Iran, Afghanistan and Somalia.
Until relatively recently, the government also argued that asylum seekers have made very few complaints about vouchers. But the mounting evidence of hardship has led ministers quietly to drop this claim. There is no doubt that asylum seekers are fearful that making a complaint will jeopardise the decision on their applications for asylum. Indeed, the police say that asylum seekers do not even report physical attacks for the same reason. As a result, asylum seekers have made their views known through refugee community organisations, faith groups, children’s charities and trade unions.
It is not easy to find anyone, even in government, who privately thinks the voucher system is a good idea or is a fair and efficient basis for supporting asylum seekers. But it is almost impossible to find anyone outside government who thinks the system is defensible.
The coalition against the system now includes not only refugee groups, but also children’s organisations, health professionals, anti-racism groups, local government, trade unions and churches. Even supermarkets are voting with their feet – Safeways have refused to take part, some shops are giving change up to £1 in the form of their own store vouchers, local Co-ops are seeking to return the profits from asylum seekers’ change to refugee groups. One could be forgiven for thinking that virtually the only supporters of vouchers left are the French multinational Sodexho Pass, who continue to profit from their government contract to administer the scheme.
All the signs are that vouchers have lost public credibility and calls for a return to cash benefits are increasing in volume. There are clear advantages of such an approach. A letter published in The Guardian newspaper on World Refugee Day this year from Barnardo’s, Save the Children, The Body Shop, the BMA, the Local Government Association, Oxfam, the Refugee Council, and the TGWU argued that: ‘A cash-based scheme would be the most effective way of providing support … It would also help to focus government resources on eliminating delays and improving the quality of decisions in the asylum process.’
A cash system would be cheaper to run too, as ministers admit and official figures show. According to RDS, the unit cost for supporting a single adult asylum seeker on DSS benefits was £425 a month in 1999/2000. Under the new support arrangements the figure stands at the far higher level of £700. Even taking into account the fact that the latter figure includes the cost of travel from dispersal accommodation to immigration interviews, the overall cost of a voucher scheme are clearly far greater.
So what’s to stop David Blunkett, the new Home Secretary, from taking the bold step of abolition? In truth, not much. The Conservative Party is still recovering from the turmoil of a second electoral defeat. What is more, the asylum issue failed to take off for them in the election campaign. There is also evidence that the ceaseless and often misleading attacks on asylum seekers by rightwing papers, such as the Daily Mail, are increasingly out of step with the views of their readers.
As to dropping a central plank of the government’s asylum policy, ministers can justifiably claim that they were not responsible for a policy which has not worked, and that a second term allows space for a rethink. Moreover, it would be a straightforward and risk-free way to diffuse the opposition from campaigners and party members and prevent another public row at the Labour Party Conference.
Even in philosophical terms, the charge that ditching vouchers represents a retreat from ‘get tough’ policy is seriously undermined by the government’s steep projected increase in the numbers of failed asylum seekers they are intending to detain and remove from the country. While there is significant opposition to these plans too, the accusation that abolishing vouchers would mean the government was ‘going soft’ simply does not stand up to scrutiny.
More positively, the immediate abolition of vouchers, together with any move towards allowing asylum seekers wider access to work opportunities, would chime with David Blunkett’s long-standing support for the virtues of self-help. It would also be one practical way in which the UK could reaffirm its commitment to the Refugee Convention as it reaches its 50th anniversary, and to building a more inclusive Britain.