Child Poverty and No Recourse to Public Funds
Debate between Chris Murray and Kirsty BlackmanWestminster Hall is an alternative Chamber for MPs to hold debates, named after the adjoining Westminster Hall.
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Kirsty Blackman (Aberdeen North) (SNP)
It is a pleasure to take part in the debate and I appreciate your chairing of it, Dr Huq. I congratulate the hon. Member for Sheffield Hallam (Olivia Blake) on securing such an important debate. The subject has been one of my hobbyhorses for a significant number of years.
In Aberdeen, we have seen a massive increase in the number of people who have no recourse to public funds. Despite the fact that Aberdeen is not a dispersal authority, a few years ago, third sector providers and those who provide licensed support found that they were struggling with new issues that we had not seen before. We started a volunteer group called the No Recourse North East Partnership, which is now run by the Grampian Regional Equality Council, whose purpose was to see what support could be provided to people who have no recourse to public funds. It looked at issues mentioned by the hon. Lady, including what local authority support is supposed to look like and the consistency of that support. I agree that there is still inconsistency in local authority support. Local authorities are often not being funded for the support that they provide. In some cases, they are terrified that they will upset somebody’s immigration status and the person or family will be deported because the local authority has provided them with some level of housing or financial support.
The landscape is incredibly messy. It would be great if the Local Government Association and COSLA in Scotland could get together with the Government to agree what pathways should be in place. Local authorities have a responsibility to protect children and to ensure that they are not suffering from the extremes of poverty, for example by being homeless, but they are unsure exactly what action they can take when somebody has no recourse to public funds. If we had an agreed pathway, everybody would get a consistent level of support, but we would also need funding to flow from the Government for that to happen. Although I do not think it should be down to local authorities to have to fill that gap, such an agreement would be a step in the right direction.
If it were up to me, I would get rid of no recourse to public funds entirely. I do not think it is a status that anybody should be faced with. As the hon. Member for Sheffield Hallam said, none of us wants any child to be living in poverty. That is not the future and that is not why any of us is here in Parliament; we are here to make our constituents’ lives better. I do not see how having the status of no recourse to public funds, which ensures that children are growing up in poverty, is a good thing for anyone. As the hon. Lady said, it does not discourage people from coming here from other countries, and those children are not responsible for which country their parents were born in.
Chris Murray (Edinburgh East and Musselburgh) (Lab)
I thank the hon. Lady for giving way and I apologise that I was not present at the start of her speech. I understand what she says about children, but no recourse to public funds applies to people who arrive in this country to work or to contribute to the economy. Is she saying that anyone should be eligible to claim any benefit in Britain from the moment they arrive, even if they have literally just stepped off the aeroplane?
Kirsty Blackman
I would be quite happy with that. I have no issue with it. I think that no recourse to public funds should not apply to anyone. I especially do not think that it should apply to any family with children under five. So many issues are created by no recourse to public funds.
Obviously, there are eligibility criteria for other social security funds. You cannot get universal credit if you are earning a hundred grand a year. Eligibility conditions are in place, and in some cases those conditions make a huge amount of sense, but if a family is here and has not been here very long, why should they not be able to claim PIP if they are working and need a bit of extra support in order to work? Personally, I do not see a problem with that, but then I think that migration is a good thing. I am not standing up in the main Chamber telling my constituents and the general public that migration is terrible and we need to stamp down on it.
Aberdeen is a significantly better city thanks to the number of people who have come from different countries to live in it. I love the education that my children are getting about how different cultures work, because of the number of people in Aberdeen who have different backgrounds. I think that is a good thing that we need. We need migration. Scotland has a very different landscape. We are in favour of migration to Scotland, particularly for some jobs. For the economic growth that the Government are striving for, we need migration in Scotland.
To return particularly to NRPF and child poverty, as I said, if we cannot get rid of no recourse to public funds entirely, getting rid of the situation in which families with children under five are subject to no recourse to public funds would be a good step forward.
As the hon. Member for Sheffield Hallam stated, there is a significant issue around the numbers. I do not have much faith that the Government will be able to produce any numbers on how many people have no recourse to public funds. I have asked a string of written parliamentary questions about this issue in the past. The previous Government were very clear that they had no idea how many times they had stamped “no recourse to public funds” on somebody’s visa. Trying to find out that information may be incredibly difficult. The No Recourse North East Partnership really struggled to identify the number of people in Aberdeen who needed our help and support, or who could potentially fall into a situation of poverty if they were, for example, made redundant or homeless, or had similar issues. We would like to know the number who could potentially be in that situation, and whose children could be in extreme levels of poverty as a result.