Women and Asylum Seeker Housing Project (W-ASH)

All our services have had a high demand and though we have been effective in providing support to enable asylum seekers to understand their rights, access basic services and improve their access to statutory health, education and other services. This has meant the team has had a high workload and a lot of pressure to support people.

This has been particularly tough in the context of various significant losses the team has had during the project period – a staff member passed away in September 2021, who was coordinating the project, who we then recruited to replace in January. Then in January a further colleague passed away which created a further very sad loss to the team – this person was then replaced in April, though an existing team member increased their hours to cover some of the work during Feb – April.

Many of the people who use our services are already poor and the increasing costs have made it even more difficult for them. We are therefore getting a large number of requests for support with vouchers which we cannot always meet due to lack of budget.

There have been some changes to asylum seekers’ right to work in some shortage sectors (e.g. care), and this has affected the spare time some asylum seekers have and we have struggled to attract as many volunteers with lived experience of the UK asylum system once they have the right to work. Language barriers for referrals from other organisations mean that we sometimes struggle to find volunteers with appropriate community languages and time to support others. We are beginning to see Ukrainian refugees also accessing our information sessions and ESOL classes recently and this has added volume to our work.

It has been challenging to enable asylum seekers to raise their voice and speak out about mistreatment by Mears (the Home Office contracted housing provider), as the majority who suffer poor treatment fear negative repercussions if they make complaints. Such negative repercussions have appeared more prevalent during this period, particularly Mears staff conduct following complaints (both formal and informal).

Initially Mears would not let us have access to run a regular session in the hotel, but in March 2022 they did finally let us start a regular weekly session and have provided information on what they are doing for new arrivals on a regular basis, which has helped.

We have built on the learning materials and briefings that we had developed prior to the project and updated them to take account of the situation that has evolved over the period of the project, where hotels have been used to house asylum seekers for longer than anticipated.

We have developed these in discussion with volunteers who have lived experience of asylum, including new volunteers we recruited during the project who lived for many months at McLays Guest House and so had insider knowledge of what it was like to live there and what needed to be improved and clarified.

We have used these updated briefing materials in outreach sessions both at the hotel but also doing briefings for asylum seekers in partnership with the agencies mentioned above – so for example we have set up a new regular information session for asylum seekers at Maslows community shop, where a lot of asylum seekers go for cheap shopping but have also done a range of outreach information sessions in different community locations around the city, where asylum seekers often go – eg Kinning Park etc.

We have also invited staff and volunteers in partner organisations, and used these materials to brief them on the rights of asylum seekers and on good practice approaches.

We ran an event on 18 November at which volunteers and staff shared experience from the project, which many partner organisations also attended.