Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what progress she has made on reviewing the No Recourse to Public Funds condition in response to the recommendations in the report by the Equality and Human Rights Commission, published in November 2020, assessing her Department's hostile environment policy.

I would firstly like to address the use of the term ‘hostile environment’ in the honourable Member’s question. This language does not reflect Government policy or our values.

The UK’s measures on access to work, benefits and services have been introduced by successive governments over many years, and these are consistent with legislative frameworks operated by most other comparable countries. The principle of No Recourse to Public Funds (NRPF) forms part of that framework and was established as far back as 1971 and is a condition that is applied to those staying here with a temporary immigration status.

Our review of the NRPF measure forms part of the Home Office’s full evaluation of its compliant environment policies and measures, both individually and cumulatively. This was set out in “Response to the Windrush Lessons Learned Review: a comprehensive improvement plan”, published in 2020. As part of our ongoing review, we also systematically revisit our Equality Impact Assessments, including relating to NRPF, to ensure that policies remain in accordance with our Public Sector Equality Duties.

The Home Office has also set up a national NRPF stakeholder forum to gather information on actual and potential impacts of its NRPF policy. The group meets on a quarterly basis and comprises representatives from central government, local government authorities across the four UK nations, the NRPF Network, and other third sector organisations with a specific interest in the subject. Where appropriate, the trends, emerging issues, and evidence gathered from this forum will be used to inform policy development in this area.

We continue to seek alternative means to secure more NRPF-related data in order to understand who might be impacted by the policy as well as looking at improving the quality and availability of data on protected characteristics.

On 31 August we provided the Home Affairs Select Committee (HASC) with an update on the progress of the review of the compliant environment. A copy of the letter can be found at:

https://committees.parliament.uk/publications/7162/documents/75657/default/