BYM backs ‘faster, cheaper’ migrant schemes
‘We long for this country to replace its cruel hostile environment with a supportive environment where people are helped to efficiently resolve their status through positive engagement.’
Britain Yearly Meeting (BYM) has urged the government to roll-out UN-backed schemes to support asylum seekers. The call came after the long-awaited United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) report into a Home Office-funded pilot was released last week. The report found that the pilot, called the Bedfordshire scheme, was ‘more humane’ and less than half the price of putting refugees in detention. Since August 2020, the scheme, run by the King’s Arms Project in collaboration with the UNHCR and the Home Office, has supported seventy-five migrants of twenty-three different nationalities, providing legal advice, mental health support, GP registration, and English language learning. A similar pilot scheme in Newcastle was shut by the Home Office in 2021.
Quakers called for the Home Office to explore these alternatives to detention, saying they are ‘faster and cheaper’, instead of expanding the Home Office’s detention estate, using RAF bases and barges. These include the (re)opening of Campsfield and Haslar immigration detention centres in Oxfordshire and Gosport, which many Quakers are involved in campaigning against.
‘We detest the inhumane and unjust practice of imprisoning migrants because of irregular status,’ Fred Ashmore, of the Quaker Asylum and Refugee Network (QARN) told the Quakers in Britain website.
‘We long for this country to replace its cruel hostile environment with a supportive environment where people are helped to efficiently resolve their status through positive engagement.’
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