QARN monitors Migrant Help strategy
‘It is useful to know what they consider to be their strategy, so that we can do what we can to help them stick to their plan,’ said QARN.
Quaker Asylum and Refugee Network (QARN) has highlighted a new strategy launched by a Home Office-funded charity.
Migrant Help’s new strategy for 2024 to 2029 follows its sixtieth anniversary last year.
‘It is useful to know what they consider to be their strategy, so that we can do what we can to help them stick to their plan,’ said QARN.
The refugee support charity Migrant Help was awarded a Home Office contract in 2019, worth £235 million over ten years. In January it reported a thirty-seven per cent increase in its annual income. Since the contract award, the charity has seen its income more than quadruple from £11.0 million to £45.7 million in the year to March 2023.
According to Migrant Help, its first objective is to provide ‘high-quality person-centred support that meets our clients’ needs and helps them to succeed in the future’. Its second objective is ‘to work in equal partnership with our clients to inform and influence public perceptions and better decision making’. The third and fourth objectives centre around ‘building collaborations to generate and target resources to areas of greatest need’, and to adapt to ‘political and environmental changes’.
Home Office outsourcing to companies including Migrant Help – as well as Serco, Mitie, Clearsprings, and Mears Group – has been a QARN concern in recent years. A telephone helpline for asylum-seekers run by Migrant Help was criticised in November 2022 for long waiting times of sometimes three hours and rated as ‘inadequate’. Its audit at the time was the tenth time in just under three years that it had been found to be underperforming.
Migrant Help responded to the rating saying that it was missing its target of answering ninety per cent of calls on time because of ‘significantly higher’ demand than anticipated, adding that it had expanded its team in order to cope. The charity said it had assisted 81,776 asylum seekers over that past year with an average wait of sixteen minutes, and had received only 275 complaints.
The charity brought together staff, trustees and clients in multiple workshops over twelve months to develop the new strategy. It said that its sixtieth anniversary last year ‘provided the right pivotal moment to reflect on the past, the present and to plan for our future’.
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