NRPF, child poverty and health outcomes.

The question of immigration has occupied significant space in policy discourse over recent years, with successive administrations effectively staking electoral fortunes on their determination to ‘stop the boats’, and ‘take back control’ of the nation’s borders. The issue is invariably framed in terms of crisis and overload, with a series of punitive measures put in place to design a ‘hostile’ or ‘compliant’ environment, policy responses explicitly designed to make life in the UK as difficult as possible for people without settled immigration status- and, therefore, by implication, to encourage them to leave.

One of these ‘hostile environment’ measures is the No Recourse to Public Funds (NRPF) condition, a provision within the Immigration Rules which prevents most temporary migrants to the UK from accessing a range of welfare benefits and social housing provision. The rationale for this measure is set out in Nationality Immigration and Asylum Act (NIAA) 2002: “It is in the public interest, and in particular in the interest of the economic well-being of the United Kingdom, that persons who seek to enter or remain in the United Kingdom are financially independent, because such persons (a) are not a burden on taxpayers, and (b) are better able to integrate into society.”

Perhaps remarkably, there is evidence to suggest that many legislators do not, themselves, understand the full implications of these measures, with the then Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, incredulously asking a Parliamentary colleague, during the period of the Covid-19 pandemic lockdown, why a constituent family of his, denied recourse, could not simply claim Universal Credit to prevent their descent into destitution[   That said, it is an accepted fact that many families with NRPF who are living in poverty, without a safety net or access to much of the social security system, face tough circumstances, and that these circumstances can be particularly challenging for children.

There is a clear tension, then, between the electoral imperative to look ‘tough’ on immigration and to make life as difficult and impoverished as possible for people subject to immigration control, and the abundance of research evidence suggesting that child health inequalities are exacerbated by child poverty. In other words, the question could reasonably asked whether children are in fact ‘better able to integrate into society’, as the NIAA puts it, if they are experiencing financial hardship.

One of the few statutory support provisions available to families facing destitution because of their NRPF status is under section 17 of the Children Act 1989, which places a duty on local authorities in England to safeguard and promote the welfare of children in need- potentially including the provision of accommodation and financial support if deemed necessary to meet an assessed need. While successive court judgements dating back over the years have upheld the principle that section 17 provision cannot reasonably be denied to eligible migrant families in need, provision across the country remains patchy and inconsistent, with gatekeeping measures, expressly designed to deny access, endemic.

From a local authority perspective this is perhaps unsurprising. If children and families subject to immigration control are denied  access to mainstream welfare benefits paid by the Department of  Work and Pensions (DWP), but remain potentially eligible for the provision of financial support from local authority children’s services budgets, then what has essentially happened is that financial responsibility for these children and families has simply been reallocated from national to local government- while austerity measures and central government cuts have severely curtailed local government budgets. Local authorities receive no financial dispensation from central government for these costs, which can be consequential for ‘superdiverse’ urban administrations with significant migrant populations.  In the decade between 2010 and 2020, for example, Birmingham City Council’s spending power reduced by 36.3%, and the authority, like several others around the UK, has effectively declared itself insolvent.

Small wonder, then, if some local authority children’s services teams are predisposed to refuse approaches for financial support irrespective of any legal duties.

While the existence of the problem, then, is well established, there is surprisingly little hard data on its scale. The Home Office has faced criticism for its inability to provide reliable statistics on the scale or the effects of the NRPF policy. Estimates, however, suggest that, as of 2019, around 175,000 children were living in households denied recourse.  More, there is little or no information available on the  long-term impacts on child health and development of living without recourse to the basic welfare safety net, or of the provision- or, indeed, the denial- of section 17 Children Act support to those children and young people.

With that in mind, a multi-disciplnary team of researchers from the University of Glasgow, Glasgow Caledonian University, and Kings College, London, led by the University of Birmingham’s School of Social Policy and Society,  has secured funding from the National Institute of Health and Care Research to conduct a study of the longitudinal impacts of the denial of recourse to public funds on the health and wellbeing of children and families in the UK. Over the next three years, we will be working with partners from across the UK to identify and engage with participant families from across the nine English regions to explore the impacts of the denial of recourse, the differing health and developmental outcomes for families in need who have access to section 17 support and those who do not, and the good practice implications which can help bring about improved outcomes