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Refugees: Tightening the Screw 109
saying that without them asylum seekers would starve. Big Issue, the
magazine for homeless people, ran a ‘Stop the Vouchers’ campaign. The
Churches Commission for Racial Justice urged local churches to provide
‘basic subsistence’, including shelter, clothing, food and money for destitute
refugees.
If charities and refugee communities provided support, or if refugees
seemed not to be destitute, some local authorities provided even less. The
June 1999 issue of the Refugee Council’s magazine iNexile relates that:
One London council, for example, refused to give vouchers to a Congolese man
because he was wearing a gold watch and chain. They told him to pawn the items
and live off the proceeds. Only thereafter would he be considered destitute. When he
dutifully visited the pawnbrokers, he discovered that the watch and chain weren’t,
in fact, gold. But he was still asked to pawn them, before he could present himself back
to social services to ask for help.
In another case, a Sierra Leonean man, who was already on vouchers, went to
pick up his weekly £25 voucher from social services. He was told that, because he
was wearing new-looking trainers, he was obviously not destitute and therefore
would no longer qualify for vouchers. Even though he explained that the trainers
were a gift from a friend, he was still refused. He was told that, in order to qualify as
destitute, he would have to give the council his friend’s address so that they could
confirm that the trainers had, indeed, been a gift.
The Labour government’s 1998 white paper said this system was ‘messy’
and ‘expensive’, costing £400 million a year and placing an intolerable
burden on local authorities (but not, apparently, on refugees). Its 1999 act
takes nearly all asylum seekers outside the minimum standards of social
support normally provided to people in Britain. Instead they receive accommodation
and food vouchers, administered by the Home Office through
locally constituted ‘consortia’. Many of them are not be allowed to work (see
p. 106), which rather destroys the point of the argument, in paragraph 8.23
of Labour’s white paper, that ‘social services departments should not carry
the burden of looking after healthy and able bodied asylum seekers’. The
policy began to be implemented under interim provisions in December 1999.
It was intended to be fully operative in April 2000, but the local consortia
failed to come up with sufficient offers of accommodation. The implementation
of the scheme was therefore postponed, with local social services, mainly
in London and Kent, left to administer vouchers and find accommodation
for ‘in-country’ applicants, a task for which they were unqualified.
Initially the Home Office claimed it would require perhaps 100, and no
more than 200, new staff to perform its new tasks. In a written parliamentary
answer on 5 November 1999 it admitted that it would need over 500
staff, at an administrative cost of £11.5 million per year. The marginal cost
of administering normal benefits for the same number of people would be
minimal. Figures published on the Internet by the Home Office research
department are that the unit cost per month of supporting an asylum seeker
on benefits was £405 in 1998/99, rising to £425 in 1999/00. The unit cost