Cook Up is a Quaker Social Action service offering free to use kitchen spaces in central and east London to cook, eat and improve health and wellbeing for anyone who needs it. Many of our participants are seeking asylum and living in temporary Home Office accommodation.
In the past fortnight three of our participants have had their asylum claim accepted, which in many ways is wonderful news, especially after a long wait. However, these three individuals have also had eviction letters and we are worried about where they will live.
As this The Guardian Focus video illustrates so powerfully, as the Government gets through its backlog of asylum claims, many people with new refugee status are not being offered housing and are being forced to live on the streets. While we welcome the government making quicker decisions on asylum claims to give people more stability, there needs to be infrastructure to support people, particularly with such a basic need as housing, while they get their paperwork together, make a claim for Universal Credit and seek work.
In the video, we see the charity Merseyside Refugee Support Network doing fantastic work to try to support refugees as best they can under such challenging circumstances. Asylum seekers should get 28 days notice in which to leave their accommodation, but the video shows their client Armin having only seven days’ notice to leave. As Alhussein Ahmed, their refugee caseworker, says; ‘even that 28 days wasn’t enough. Instead of increasing the days, they decreased the days’. As it usually takes 5 weeks for someone to get their first Universal Credit payment, 28 days is certainly not enough, never mind 7 days. However, we understand that, just like Armin, many other people have been receiving ‘Notice to Quit’ letters which can give them as little as seven days to leave.
We feel disappointed that people receiving their refugee status are having to navigate such an inhospitable system. We hope for a kinder future for those people we support and we stand in solidarity with the work of Merseyside Refugee Support Network.