Charity named in Home Office guidance on refugees says it was not consulted

http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/sep/15/charity-home-office-guidance-refugees-not-consulted

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The charity named by the government as the point of contact for families wishing to volunteer to host Syrian refugees in their own homes has expressed anger that it was not consulted before the guidance was published, pointing out that it is not equipped to take on the work.

Responding to large numbers of inquiries from the public on how they can assist displaced Syrians, the Home Office has published a document headed: “Syrian refugees: what you can do to help.” The document advises members of the public with a free room in their house to get in touch with Naccom, an umbrella group of small organisations that help destitute asylum seekers to find housing.

The document was widely disseminated by the Home Office, and Jeremy Heywood, the head of the civil service, tweeted it to his followers over the weekend. However, the charity’s coordinator, Dave Smith, said no one from the government had been in touch before the guidance was published, and stressed that the charity did not have the infrastructure to cope.

He said the charity was not working to find homes for Syrian refugees, but tried to help asylum seekers whose applications had been refused by the Home Office (who receive no financial assistance from the government) to find homes with British families.

“The government didn’t even ask us. It’s a little bit invidious because they’re not funding us one penny, and they don’t want us to do what we are doing, in terms of supporting refused asylum seekers, because they want to send them back. And yet they are referring people to us for housing Syrians, which is not what we actually about,” Smith said.

He said he was one of just a few paid employees within Naccom’s network, and he worked only two days a week. “We are a network of fairly small voluntary organisations, some of whom have no paid workers whatsoever, and there is no way we can cope.”

The confusion echoes wider difficulties faced by government agencies as officials race to respond both to the refugee crisis and to the explosion of offers to help from the public. Asylum charities have welcomed the offers of assistance from the public but warned that much of it was misplaced, stemming from a poor understanding of how the asylum system operates, and called on the government to help clarify the situation.

Representatives of other asylum charities within Naccom’s network also expressed unease at the government’s decision to refer inquiries to them, arguing that the government needed to provide housing itself for the thousands of Syrians refugees, and not expect a “big society” initiative to develop without government funding.

Jean Demars, of Praxis, which provides help to homeless migrants, said charities that helped volunteers offer homes to vulnerable refugees did not want to become like food banks allowing the government to transfer the burden of providing support from the state to volunteers.

“A lot of people want to connect on a human level, but it would be problematic if we were seen as replacing what the government should be doing,” Demars said. “I wouldn’t take a referral from a government department. If you are there to provide that human element that isn’t in the government system, that’s fine, but replacing government services is not on the agenda.”

He said offers of help to his organisation had increased tenfold in the past few weeks.

Lizzie Bell, of Birmingham Community Hosting Network, another organisation within the Naccom umbrella, said the organisation was set up to help accommodate destitute asylum seekers and not Syrian refugees, most of whom will come to this country with government funding.

She welcomed the mounting offers of support but said that because the asylum system was so poorly understood, many of these offers were inappropriate. A family offering to give their spare room to a Syrian family could provide a short-term fix if the UK decided to open its doors immediately to thousands of Syrians, but would not represent a sensible long-term solution, she said.

As long as the government was offering to support no more than 4,000 arrivals a year, there was no need for “extreme measures like putting them up in an office block or putting a Syrian family in a spare room – that would be overcrowding”, Bell said.

“We have been swamped for the past 11 days, since the picture of Alan [Kurdi] came out. We don’t want to be seen to be the way to accommodate these 20,000 – that’s the government’s responsibility. We exist to support people with no recourse to public funds, because they are the UK’s most vulnerable group, not the Syrians who will be coming here with recourse [to public funds]. It has been welcome to have all the attention, but just a little bit frustrating that some of is a bit misdirected.”

Naccom’s coordinator Smith said the government had a responsibility to educate people about how the asylum system worked, so they could have a better understanding of how they could help.

“The goodwill has been tremendous across the country – it’s from their heart and sometimes the head doesn’t even come into it because they don’t understand what the situation is, and some people just want to host Syrians now, for four weeks, which isn’t very realistic,” he said.

“People don’t understand that the Syrians are not coming now and that David Cameron has said 20,000 over five years. These people will come direct from refugee camps and it is going to be the local authority’s responsibility to house them. Whether the local authorities will then try to find host families for them, nobody knows because nobody knows how it is going to work.”

He said character checks had to be carried out on people offering accommodation, individuals had to be carefully matched, and timeframes set out clearly. “You have to know how long it is for, there is the question of what happens if it doesn’t work out, there needs to be someone there to deal with it – that’s what costs money. It has to be coordinated by the government, it has to come from the top, it is a massive undertaking.”

Charities continue to report huge numbers of offers of support. Home for Good, a church charity, made an appeal last week for people interested in fostering unaccompanied refugee children, and has had 9,500 expressions of interest.