Alison Thewliss – 2022 Speech on Asylum Seeker Employment and the Cost of Living

The speech made by Alison Thewliss, the SNP MP for Glasgow Central, in Westminster Hall, the House of Commons, on 14 December 2022.

It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Mr Davies. I thank the hon. Member for Bury South (Christian Wakeford) for securing this debate and being honest and courageous enough to say that he has changed his mind. Many people get stuck in the position of thinking, “I’ve said something once so I have to stick to it forever,” so it can be difficult to do that. I thank him very much for doing that; it is incredibly powerful.

I also thank my hon. Friends the Members for Cumbernauld, Kilsyth and Kirkintilloch East (Stuart C. McDonald) and for Glasgow North East (Anne McLaughlin), who fulfilled this portfolio role with great ability over the past couple of years. I am honoured to take it up following them; I have large shoes to fill.

I thank Refugee Action for its action on this issue and its campaigning over many years as part of the Lift the Ban coalition. More locally in Glasgow, I thank the Maryhill Integration Network and the Red Cross VOICES Network, which have done so much to bring this issue to light.

We all agree that, regardless of our constituency, political party and ideological position, there is a case to be made for allowing asylum seekers the right to work. The Migration Advisory Committee is giving the Government the same advice, so they really ought to be listening to it. I am desperately sad to hear the news that some people may have died in the wee small hours trying to cross the channel this morning in perishingly cold conditions. It highlights that we urgently need safe and legal routes to come to this country. People need to be able to apply for asylum from abroad. The only reason that people are crossing the channel in that way is that there is no safe way to do it, and I urge the Minister to give great consideration to that.

Article 23 of the universal declaration of human rights recognises that the right to work is a fundamental right, yet the UK Government’s restrictive approach to asylum seekers leaves people in limbo while the UK labour market suffers chronic shortages. All Members have spoken about the need for people to fill jobs in their constituencies and the frustration that many of us feel. My hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow North West (Carol Monaghan), who had a private Member’s Bill on that very issue, said that people could be living above the shop that is closing and not be able to work in it. The situation is absolutely ludicrous.

Many of the constituents who come to my surgeries week in, week out have skills that they wish to use, but the longer they are away from the labour market, the more difficult it is for them to get back into it. They feel themselves daily losing their skills, languishing, as the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) said, in hotels and guest houses, unable to do what they wish to do.

There are organisations in Glasgow working on this problem. The Bridges Programmes helps people such as doctors get back into employment in the UK, wherever they have come from. Radiant and Brighter does a brilliant job of helping people to gain skills in business. Many people have had businesses in the places they are from and want to get started here, but it is difficult to navigate that path. I spoke to Pheona Matovu, who runs Radiant and Brighter. She came here unable to work and did not want to let her children know, so she kept herself busy. She started the organisation and trained other people to give the appearance, at least to her children, that she had a job with dignity and was not sitting waiting for something to happen, because she was not that type of person. Many asylum seekers are not that type of person. They want to get on in the world and contribute. For many of my constituents, that is incredibly important, and their frustration at the Home Office is palpable.

My constituent Sandra was able to study. She has been training as a nurse, and the call went out to all trainee nurses on her course that people were wanted to help with vaccination during the pandemic. They were to do that as volunteers—they were not fully trained as nurses, so they were not employed—but she could not even get an answer from the Home Office about whether she could go and volunteer with everybody else on her course. Despite the shortage occupation list, and despite the shortage of healthcare workers, she was not able to get the assurance from the Home Office that she needed to do that. Nobody wants to fall foul of the rules, because of course that counts against their application.

Shortly after I became an MP, I spoke to a gentleman who had been volunteering with the Red Cross while waiting for his citizenship application. The Home Office took that to be almost akin to work, and that counted against him as a mark of bad character. Working for the Red Cross is a mark of bad character according to the Home Office, even though he was not being paid for it. We were able to get that case resolved, but it illustrates the ludicrous situation that many asylum seekers are in. They want to keep their skills up and they want to do more, but they know it might count against them because some civil servant in an anonymous bunker in the Home Office might decide it is a bad thing.

The next generation of people coming along is also affected. A family of seven came to my surgery some weeks ago. They have been in Scotland since 2014 and are now eligible to apply for leave to remain, because they have been here so long. They have kept their children in school and supported them. The parents have not been able to work throughout that time; we can imagine the financial pressures of supporting five children on so little. They travelled across the city so that the children could stay at the same school, even though their accommodation changed quite regularly.

Two of those children are now at university, doing incredibly important courses, in engineering and medicine. The children cannot work while they are studying, and the parents cannot work to support the children. It is incredibly difficult for that family to keep going. They should have a decision; they should not be waiting in Home Office limbo forever. Just think of the contribution that their children are going to make to this country. It is incredible. We should thank them, not make life more difficult for them.

In this cost of living crisis, the cost of food, of heating a home and of essential items such as nappies and infant formula, as the hon. Member for Strangford said, has soared, yet the amount that people have to survive on has gone up by 14p. Nobody can be expected to survive on that. We see the impact on the charitable and third sector in all our constituencies, because it picks up the pieces when the state has failed people.

Organisations such as Refuweegee in Glasgow face increasing demands on their services. People cannot clothe themselves, feed themselves and heat themselves, and the Government are doing nothing to help. People are stuck in Home Office limbo for years, unable to work, unable to contribute, and having to depend on services. That is not good for anybody. As hon. Members right across the board have pointed out, that costs the economy, when asylum seekers could instead be working and contributing to the economy in so many valuable ways.

The hon. Member for Bury South mentioned remittances, which is an important point. A gentleman from Afghanistan came to my constituency surgery a few weeks ago. This man was in pieces. He has been through a very difficult time. He worked with US forces in Afghanistan, and he has been here for a few years; he did not come in the most recent iteration. His family managed to get out of Afghanistan and are now in Pakistan, waiting for the family reunion visa. They do not know when they will get it.

That gentleman is having to send the very limited money he gets from the asylum system—all of it—to his family, to make sure that they do not starve in Pakistan while they are waiting for the UK Government to make a decision on their case, which means he is reliant on charities in Glasgow to try to get by. He is not even able to access the tiny amount of money that the Home Office gives him; he feels he has to send that to his family, because he does not want them to starve. He is going without.

I think the Government miss that sort of situation entirely. Perhaps the constituency surgeries of Government Members do not look like ours and they do not see the people that we see, but I assure them that people in Glasgow and across the UK are really struggling just now. The UK Government need to do a great deal more to address these issues.

I could talk on this subject until the cows come home, because I have so many cases that I could mention. It is desperately important that the Government recognise the peril that people are in and the reasons why people come here. As others have said, they come here because of family ties. They come here because of the English language. As Afghan interpreters told me, “We are here because you were there.” The Government should remember that. They should support people properly. They should make decisions sooner, rather than wasting fortunes on the failed Rwanda deportation programme. They should listen to the Members who are here today. We want our constituents to flourish, to do their very best and to contribute in the way they know they can.