Friends back new homelessness report
QARN have highlighted the report ‘Destitute and in Danger: People made homeless by the asylum system’
Quaker Asylum Refugee Network (QARN) has highlighted a new report examining the experiences of homelessness among people refused asylum in London.
The report ‘Destitute and in Danger: People made homeless by the asylum system’ by the Jesuit Refugee Service (JRS) showed that rough sleeping is common among people refused asylum. There is also ‘a widespread pattern of couch-surfing punctuated by sporadic street homelessness, and generally unstable accommodation situations’. Around twenty per cent of respondents said they did not feel physically safe around people they lived with. There were also ‘indications of people living in unsafe or exploitative situations in the informal renting market’. Most people staying informally in others’ houses lived in ‘uncomfortable, overcrowded, and often dirty conditions’, the report revealed. Of those neither in Home Office accommodation, nor in JRS hosting or housing, half said they did not sleep in a bed. Parents staying informally with family or friends described sleeping in one room in cramped conditions with their children. There was very limited access to basic amenities like laundry and cooking facilities.
The report calls for a number of measures, including allowing people seeking asylum to work for as long as they are in the UK. It also presses for a simplified route to settled status to help people living long term in the UK but ‘trapped into destitution by lack of immigration status’. It called for the government to ‘extend the move-on period for newly recognised refugees [of twenty-eight days] to at least 56 days from when residence permits are received’.
The report, released on 12 October, is based on surveys conducted in autumn 2023. It was partly to examine the impact of the cost-of-living crisis and Covid pandemic.
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