Asylum seekers with children to have support payments cut

Thousands of asylum seekers with children will have to live on £73.90 a week from August as a result of cuts of up to 30% in their support payments, the UK Home Office has announced.

Ministers said the cuts, which would affect more than 27,800 destitute asylum seekers, were being made because the current payment system resulted in families with children in particular receiving “significantly more cash than is necessary” to meet their essential living needs.

The Refugee Council described the cuts as “utterly appalling” for families who were not allowed to work and said they would plunge children further into poverty: “We suspect the only place that families can live on this amount of money is in the imagination of government ministers,” the council’s policy officer, Judith Dennis, said.

The changes will see the support for a single parent with two children claiming asylum fall from £149.86 a week to £110.85, for a couple with one child from £125.48 to £110.85, and for a couple with two children from £178.44 to £147.80. A single parent with one child will receive £73.90, down from £96.90.

The cuts were first proposed by Conservative ministers in a little-noticed statutory instrument in March but were revoked without explanation within 24 hours. It is believed they had been put forward without the approval of Liberal Democrat ministers in the coalition.

Under the current system, state support for destitute asylum seekers awaiting an initial decision on their refugee claims is paid at different rates depending on the ages of any children and the kind of household.

Conservative ministers have decided that all destitute asylum seekers awaiting a decision will now receive the same weekly allowance of £36.95 per person. For a single adult the new standard rate is 33 pence higher than their existing payment. But this is 30% less than the rate of £52.96 currently paid to cover the living costs of children under 16.

It follows a Home Office internal review carried out earlier this year, which looked at the impact of the support payment levels on families. It is said to have identified all their essential needs, including the need to eat healthily, based on the spending patterns of people in the lowest 10% income groups.

“The conclusion of the review was that the payments provided under the current arrangements result in families receiving significantly more cash than is necessary to meet their essential living needs,” said the Home Office.

Ministers said the review found that the £52.96 usually paid for every child in the household was more than enough to cover their needs and “takes no account of the economies of scale available to the household as a whole”. They said families would be left with sufficient funds to ensure parents cared for their children safely and effectively.

The Refugee Council said the changes would mean a significant cut to the levels of support received by families with children under 16, with single parent families being hit particularly hard.

“Asylum seekers often arrive in Britain with only the clothes on their backs and the hope they have reached safety, having suffered unimaginable horrors in their home country. As people waiting for their asylum claims to be processed are not allowed to work, they are usually forced to rely on the government to provide them with money to eat and somewhere safe to sleep at night,” the council said in a statement.

“It’s utterly appalling that the government has chosen to exacerbate the suffering of people who are already living in desperate situations,” Dennis said. “It’s vital that the government abandons its planned cuts until it has commissioned an independent review into the fairness of current asylum support levels.”

A Home Office spokesperson said: “Asylum seekers requiring our support are provided with an essential living allowance, which is in addition to free accommodation, including all utility bills and council tax, and access to free healthcare and schooling.

“The changes we are making have been drawn up using a tested methodology designed to ensure support levels are sufficient to cover essential living needs.

“They also bring the UK more closely into line with other EU countries. Among those with comparable systems, only Germany provides higher support payments to families.”