3. Barriers to access caused by the design and operation of public services
Coordination with devolved services CSO10 noted the challenges of working in a policy area with mixed excepted and devolved competencies: “ You know, this is not a simple thing, if it was we would have been able to address it. Some of the stuff is out of our control. Westminster makes the decisions” (CSO10). This meant that there was a need for coordination between the Home Office and devolved services. PB4 commented that coordination with the Home Office had improved but still caused problems, because there was little emphasis on considering the capacity of devolved services to respond: “it needs a more coordinated approach… It would be great if it got to the stage whereby their decisions tie in really with the local capacity to respond as well and be driven by that, rather than at the minute it’s ‘here’s people coming through the system, deal with them’” (PB4). PB5 gave an example of poor communication from the Home Office and the impact this had on devolved health service provision: “[what health services] flagged themselves was lack of information sharing… from the Home Office and from Mears… so there’s a new hotel, there’s a new cohort of people who have been placed in Newcastle… nobody told us about them, you know, they were just, kind of, put there. And they’ve only trickled down to us what their health needs are” (CSO5). PB4 gave the example of when the Home Office started to speed up decision-making in August 2023, which a huge knock-on effect on devolved services: “At one point there was, 275 discontinuous notices was the peak for one month, which was last November. And contextually it would have been an average of about 34 per month for the period before that… So that approach with the Home Office certainly created a lot of challenges… for our departments across Northern Ireland” (PB4). W1 participants also commented on the Home Office’s decision to reduce its backlog, noting it was done with no consultation with devolved services, with no thought given to the impact this would have on devolved provision, and with no resources provided to deal with this impact. The lack of planning and coordination between the Home Office and devolved services was largely a result of the Home Office’s approach, which saw immigration as purely reserved matter, despite devolved services being available to asylum seekers and refugees. W1 participants also suggested that devolved services had adopted a deferential approach of complying with the Home Office even where there was scope to do more under devolved powers.
PB4 pointed out that, in addition to “traditional access barriers” , some barriers were caused by the processes used by public service providers: “… aside from those more traditional access barriers, I think the key thing is actually the process itself and the system itself” (PB4). These are the barriers that are the focus of this section of the report. Issues related to Home Office and Mears policy and practice Although this project was limited to considering access to devolved public services, issues related to the Home Office and Mears have been considered insofar as they impact upon the delivery of devolved services and asylum seekers and refugees’ ability to access them. The hostile environment W1 and W2 participants noted that Home Office policy aimed to create a hostile environment and to make things difficult for people so that they did not want to stay. The system was therefore deliberately designed for people not to settle and to negatively impact people’s quality of life and ability to integrate into wider society. PB8 commented : “… you can’t discuss barriers without recognising the general environment that’s been imposed by British Immigration policy over the last [16 years]… So, we have an environment that is actively hostile to young people, it’s deliberately meant to create barriers for young people within their asylum process… that’s the environment we’re working in” (PB8). PB5 noted that the asylum application process and stresses involved often led families to break up “you see a lot of in-fighting and you see still a lot of families break up within months, within years of arriving; the pressures just become too much” (PB5). CSO3 commented on the mental health and physical impact of going through the asylum seeker process: “It affects us, these asylum seeker requests, seeking sanctuary, mentally, you know, physically, emotionally, even physiologically it affects you… Losing your hair, getting grey, turning to grey, I’m talking with experience, because I spent […] years in this system… You become moody, you get angry easily, you don’t know what to do, you don’t enjoy life” (CSO3). CSO11 commented in similar terms on the effect of being in limbo while asylum claims were being processed: “I think that the waiting time for the decision or the decision making time, kind of, like, places them in a limbo. And… deploys them into abject poverty, because living with £45 a week, that is below poverty (CSO11).
Final report of the of Ombudspersons and the Protection of Refugees and Asylum Seekers (OPRAS) project | 19
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