"Social services cannot, and must not, be used as immigration enforcement"

*** BASW and Asylum Matters are hosting a webinar on Friday, 29 May on these proposed changes. Register here. ***

What is the issue?

The UK Government is consulting on proposals that could have a profound impact on social work in England, and on children, families, care leavers and adults living without secure immigration status.

A new set of proposals, grouped under the headline “family returns”, aims to restrict the support available for destitute people refused asylum, and others without immigration status and prevent local authorities from supporting them.

As the title suggests, part of the consultation is concerned with the process of removals seeking to pave the way for handcuffing and physical restraining of children as part of removing families from the UK. However, the majority of the proposals look at the support people are able to access whilst still in the UK. The fundamental thrust of these proposals seems to be stripping families of any meaningful support in order to ‘incentivise’ returns despite there being no reliable evidence to suggest that making life harder for people in the UK increases their likelihood of returning to their countries of origin.

Several of these proposals would, if implemented, have a direct impact on the work of many social workers. 

How would the changes under consultation affect social work?

Children in need

Alongside plans to limit what Home Office support is available to asylum-refused families, the consultation proposes to prevent local authorities from providing support to some families and children under the provisions of the Children Act. These proposals create a serious risk of children in the UK being made street homeless.

At the moment, local authorities can support families with no recourse to public funds under section 17 of the Children Act, where there is a ‘child in need’. The Government is looking to move support for families without immigration status away from the core safeguarding and welfare provisions of this act, allowing support only under much narrower circumstances, determined by the Home Office. Under these proposals local authorities and their social care teams would be legally prevented from supporting children in need for reasons of destitution. 

These would make the welfare and needs of the child no longer the primary consideration when it comes to working out whether and how to provide support, with social workers and local authorities only able to provide support to those families who the Home Office deems to have a “genuine obstacle” to leaving the UK, or who have made a human rights claim that is deemed by the Home Secretary to be “not vexatious".[1]

A child’s migration status is completely irrelevant to their safeguarding needs: by expecting social workers to consider migration status ahead of a child’s needs, these proposals would leave social workers in an impossible position, unable to fulfil their ethical duties towards children and the professional standards for social workers as expressed by Social Work England.

It is the position of BASW and Asylum Matters that social services cannot, and must not, be used as immigration enforcement. Leaving ethical considerations aside, these proposals risk increasing pressure on already stretched local authority social work teams. Because the higher threshold of ‘child protection’ concerns will still apply to all children, social workers unable to act to support children in need may find themselves forced to step in only once those same children have been exposed to neglect, homelessness, abuse or other significant harms, having been unable to access the help they need at an earlier stage. This would significantly impact local authority resources, and consequently impact capacity at child protection legal proceedings, including within court appointed expert teams, and family court systems.

The risks to children denied support would not disappear, but would be likely to re-present into other local authority and emergency teams, including schools and healthcare providers who will inevitably be left holding risk without referral pathways. Additionally those teams may feel reticent to engage with social care teams given the clear border enforcement risks this may present, creating clear risks to trust and multi agency working.

Care leavers

The proposed changes would also disapply safeguards to children who leave care without legal status, limiting care leavers to support only in the narrow circumstances described above. They would prevent local authorities from providing care leavers with a personal advisor, education fees or the support to ‘stay put’ in foster care after their 18th birthday. 

All of the proposals run the same risks as those discussed above. They further risk encouraging children in care to leave their safe homes as soon as they lose immigration status or as they approach their 18th birthdays. Unaccompanied asylum seeking children are one of the most vulnerable groups of children in the UK and these provisions will drive more of them into danger and exploitation. 

The provisions of the Children’s Act are built on the fundamental tenements of effective social care practice. Changes to the application of the Leaving Care provisions should only be informed by social care professionals and other experts in the support of children leaving care. They must never be used as a tool of harm to create an environment of hostility around vulnerable children for the purposes of immigration enforcement. 

Local authority involvement in removals

A final significant part of the proposals would require local authority safeguarding teams to maintain contact with children while arrangements are made for their removal from the UK.
Again, these proposals seek to make social services an arm of immigration enforcement. This is a clear conflict of interest and risks undermining the trust children and families have in the professionals they work with, and as such it risks undermining all safeguarding approaches to the child. This will foster significant barriers between local social care support and all families with insecure immigration status and presents a significant risk of harm to migrant children across the board.

What’s happening right now? 

The legislative framework that would allow for these changes are already included in the Immigration Act 2016. The Government is currently consulting on how to operationalise the system - which means the consultation is one of the only opportunities to highlight the risks of these proposals, the harm they will do to children and adults, and the problems they are likely to cause for local authorities and the voluntary sector left to pick up the pieces when people are left without support.

What can social workers do?

It’s vital that the Government hears from the social workers about the impact the proposed changes would have on the profession, and on the people social workers support.

The consultation is open until June 4. You can find a step-by-step guide to the consultation questions and information on how to submit your response here: Family Returns Consultation: Step By Step Guide - Asylum Matters

You can also send an email with your thoughts on these proposals to: HO-Consultation-ChildrenandFamilies@homeoffice.gov.uk

You can read more detail about the proposed changes to local authority support powers and duties here: NRPF Network | Local authority support for families (England)

This piece was written by Asylum Matters and is correct at the time of publication.