BASW General Election Blog: Asylum & Immigration
Aspects of the wider UK immigration and asylum system are increasingly at risk of breaching both international law and conventions on human rights. Human rights are central to social work and are embedded in the BASW Code of Ethics.
This blog looks at three specific policy asks around asylum and immigration.
Scrap the National Age Assessment Board
The Nationality and Borders Act 2022 brought in the National Age Assessment Board (NAAB), which is a team within the Home Office staffed by social workers to carry out age assessments on age-disputed unaccompanied asylum-seeking children.
Age assessment is an activity undertaken by social workers in local authorities when an unaccompanied young person seeking asylum claims they are under 18 and therefore a child. The purpose of age assessment is to meet the needs of the child, this includes care needs as well as health and education needs. If a person is not a child responsibility passes to another agency. Age assessment is also used to inform decisions on asylum and immigration status - since people under 18 and people over 18 have different rights under law. Therefore age assessment has major consequences and requires a high degree of professional independence and objectivity.
The age assessments undertaken by social workers are used by immigration advisors, solicitors and barristers acting on behalf of their clients, Border Force officers and the independent Tribunal System. Consequently, age assessment has important implications for the rights of refugees, the rights of children and by extension the implementation of human rights. A proportion of age assessments will lead to the conclusion that the young person is not a child and therefore not the responsibility of local authority children’s services. Children wrongly assessed as adults risk losing vital rights and their needs not being met. Adults wrongly assessed as children can present safeguarding risks for other children.
Local authorities have had budget reductions year-on-year since 2010. Further they face increasing problems in recruiting and retaining social workers. BASW acknowledges that transferring an ever-greater number of age assessments to the NAAB may well be attractive to some local authorities. However, the NAAB is part of the Home Office. It is therefore accountable to the Home Secretary. Leaders shape the ethos of their organisations and given the political rhetoric of previous Home Secretaries in recent time, the challenge is for managers and their staff to retain their professional objectivity.
In contrast, local authorities are not part of central Government and therefore have a degree of independence from central government. The independence of local authorities allows social workers to make professional judgements, with appropriate support and guidance that allows them to assess age – and all that that implies - with 3 a greater degree of objectivity free from the constraints and priorities of the Home Office.
Given this risk of political priorities intruding on professional objectivity BASW is informing social workers that currently the context for professional decision making risks being compromised by working for the NAAB and this has important consequences for human rights. BASW made a statement in March 2023 encouraging social workers not to apply for these roles at the Home Office. We will be asking the next UK Government to scrap the NAAB.
Abolish ‘scientific methods’ of age assessment
Under the 2022 Nationality and Borders Act the government can require the use of ‘scientific methods’ as part of the age determination process for those asylum seekers who are children or who are claiming to be children. This was furthered with the Illegal Migration Act and the UK Government is now able to use x-rays and MRIs as part of the age-determination process. BASW has opposed these proposals since the Nationality and Borders Act was introduced and continue to do so.
There has been on-going concern about the use of ‘scientific’ methods from a range of professional bodies. This includes uncertainty about the reliability of such techniques, the diversion of specialist resources which are normally dedicated to health care, and issues of medical consent.
An independent scientific committee appointed by the Home Office reported that biological methods are imprecise, offering only an estimation to between three and five years – not much use to the assessor if a young person is claiming to be 17.
The Illegal Migration Act contains a clause that makes provision for the Home Secretary to introduce measures whereby an individual’s refusal to participate in a ‘scientific method’ of age assessment will lead to the possibility of that individual being viewed by the Home Office as being aged 18 years or over and therefore able to be deported to a ‘safe country’.
There are many reasons why a young person might not wish to undergo a biological assessment. They may not understand the process or suffer from trauma. There is also a right in the UK which requires informed consent before undertaking any biological / medical intervention. Further there is a long-standing position of not undertaking medical interventions for non-medical purposes.
To date the Home Office has given scant regard to the practical implications of delivering biological assessments including the diversion of scarce resources dedicated to health care (for example, MRI scanners) for non-health care purposes, the sequencing of biological methods in relation to Merton compliant age assessments and the relative weighting between biological methods and Merton compliant methods in any age assessment.
In short, the adoption of biological methods violate long-standing rights in relation to informed medical consent, offer no real advantages in assessing age and produce a procedural quagmire of unallocated responsibilities. In future, failure to comply with a biological assessment could automatically lead to a determination of being aged18 or over and detention and deportation.
We believe that these ‘scientific methods’ should be abolished, and we will campaign for them to be so.
Review of No Recourse to Public Funds
No Recourse to Public Funds (NRPF) is part of immigration legislation, introduced by the UK Government in 2012. It is a category of individuals who, as the name implies, have no recourse to public funds.
The legislation, policies and practices of NRPF have a profoundly negative impact on the most vulnerable in society. Those with NRPF cannot claim income-based benefits which includes (but is not limited to) Child Benefit, Housing Benefit, Universal Credit, Income Support, free school meals, Disability Living Allowance or Tax Credits.
NRPF status may interact with other aspects of immigration law, for example, the ability to take paid employment legally. It also has the effect of preventing individuals and families accessing social work services to which they have a legal right. While the social work organisational response towards individuals with NRPF can vary in the four nations (since social work is a devolved matter) the overall restrictions on the services that local authorities can legally offer are at the discretion of the UK Parliament.
In short, the legislation has contributed to an intentionally created hostile environment for immigration. The instruction for BASW to challenge this oppressive, inhumane legislation was passed by members at BASW UK Conference in 2019.
It goes without saying that no individual or family should be destitute, or near destitution, as a result of NRPF. It is a direct breach of human rights and can have widespread consequences to a person’s mental and physical health, safety and welfare.
During the COVID pandemic, BASW called for the NRPF condition to be suspended by the UK Government so that all vulnerable individuals could receive essential financial support. We now believe that the time is right for the next UK Government to carry out a comprehensive independent review of the model of NRPF in relation to those who are destitute, or who face destitution, with a view to replacing the model with a system that is both adequately funded and resourced and is compliant with the UK’s commitments to human rights.
This call is firmly in line with BASW’s ethical principles, code of ethics and values to uphold human rights and social justice.
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BASW has published ‘NRPF: Statement and Guidance’ which aims to both explain the complexities of the NRPF status and provide guidance for social work practice.
