After last week’s shambles over the handling of Ukrainian refugees, Michael Gove has announced a big shift in UK policy with his version of the so-called ‘Air-Refugee’ schemes that have sprung up on the continent. It’s an Airbnb-style set up where hosts register online saying they’re willing to sponsor guests. Germany’s version (website here) has so far led to 350,000 offers.
But the UK system is designed with more friction. Hosts will not be paired with refugees but will have to name someone – when they do, both parties will then have to be vetted by the government. Gove says his version, while uncapped, is likely to lead to ‘tens of thousands’ of offers with hosts and refugees vetted by the government – a far-smaller figure than the 200,000 that the Prime Minister had mentioned.
There will be taxpayer-funded payments of £350 a month for hosts (similar to Poland’s £210/month offer) making it about 90pc cheaper than the hotel/BnB route the Home Office normally goes down. But while most UK refugees are (controversially) banned from working to support themselves while they wait months for Home Office approval, Ukrainians who enter under Gove’s scheme will be eligible to live and work and in the UK for up to three years. They can use the NHS and schools but won’t be eligible for housing benefits, a nod to the housing pressures. Gove said that the UK has so far granted 3,000 places to Ukrainian refugees. This compares to Germany’s 80,000 and Sweden’s 4,000-a-day.
It’s striking to see Gove, the levelling-up minister, handling this new ‘Homes for Ukraine’ scheme. Refugees are supposed to be handled by the Home Office. This shows an important decision in No. 10 to create a new system under a new department – rather than expect the Home Office to change its ways. There is precedent for this: the Syria refugee influx was jointly Home Office and DCLG. Richard Harrington, the lead minister under that scheme, has been brought back (ie, ennobled) to reprise this role. No. 10 has decided, quite rightly, that the Ukraine situation needs to be given its own response and under a separate apparatus.
The dilemma was whether to align with EU countries in granting free movement to Ukrainian refugees. Is this an emergency, that requires a bureaucracy-free response? No. 10 has decided that it is not. Checks will be carried out on all refugees, in the belief that this can be done quickly and digitally and is a small price to pay a controlled system that would command greater public confidence. On arrival Ukrainians will be given a six-months ‘leave to remain’, upgraded to three years if another application is made (including biometrics details).
Refugees will be able to have children educated locally with councils paid about £10,000 for each child admitted and have access to NHS – but not housing benefit. The UK’s housing pressures are being cited as a reason why we won’t be offering free movement to Ukrainians, as the rest of Europe has been doing. Phase Two of the Gove scheme (which comes later due to tech needed) will allow organisations – such as churches – to sponsor groups of Ukrainians. It will be a joint venture with the Home Office, but Gove will be in the lead.
This runs alongside the Home Office ‘family’ scheme which requires both visas and a family member resident in the UK but offers no weekly payments. In asking registration and visas, the UK is creating a bureaucratic demand so large that the army has been drafted in to Home Office processing centres in Poland to cope with demand. Britain, whose Brexit powers allow us to do anything, has chosen a higher-bureaucracy path. This indicates where the Prime Minister thinks the political risks lie: he’ll define ‘taking back control’ of the borders as keeping significant checks going, even in the biggest refugee crisis since World War 2.
At £11 a day, the Gove scheme is cheaper than the £200/night that the Home Office has ended up forking out for the refugees often billeted in decaying hotels and legally prohibited from finding work – thus kept in this limbo for months. Some 33,000 are now waiting more than six months, a number that is growing all of the time: some 80,000 refugees are currently waiting for a Home Office decision, equivalent to the population of Bolsover. This costs £5 million a day.
As I disclosed last week, No. 10 rejected Patel’s request to widen the criteria to any resident (ie, students or temporary workers). This might be because No. 10 had simply lost faith in the Home Office and was all along going to hand it to Gove – who once had the job of no-deal Brexit emergency planning and is now, in effect, the Ukrainian refugee emergency tsar. His scheme is financially generous, especially with the £10k-per-pupil offer to councils. But on admissions (and bureaucracy) it seems designed to keep numbers down.
Fundamentally, of course, this is a political decision. Brexit Britain can do anything it likes with our borders – and with 1.4m job vacancies the economy can easily absorb Ukrainians (who, by the way, make up about two-thirds of seasonal workers – they are a proven good economic fit). It has been our choice to make our refugee system the most bureaucratic in Europe. Gove says this is a small hurdle with minimal delays and he might be right. The furlough scheme did show how HMG can whip up a digital system that can cope with a huge influx very quickly. But the experience so far – which Kate Andrews and Max Jeffrey detail in this week’s cover story – is not encouraging.
To confront fleeing refugees with any kind of bureaucracy is, in my view, odd – and another worrying sign of Britain using Brexit powers to be more bureaucratic than the EU. Nations define their reputations in such moments of crisis. The world looks on an asks: how good an ally is Britain? The French and German press has been full of articles about the important principle being demonstrated: when allies flee bombs and starvation, they are accepted immediately and unconditionally. I’d agree that this is an important principle that the Gove scheme – with its box-ticking and paper-trail – still does not observe. We’re worrying about pressures on our housing stock when Ukraine’s housing stock is being demolished by Russian missiles. We’re checking the background of fleeing Ukrainian mothers for the minuscule risk that they might be terrorists when the real terror lies in Putin’s murderous rampage. All while claiming that we’re doing everything humanely possible to help.
There is an uncomfortable mismatch between the UK government’s readiness to arm Ukrainians for war (which we did before any European country) and its panic when a tiny fraction of the refugees of that war come here for shelter. Michael Gove’s system is a lot better than what went before. But it is, still, a disappointing definition of ‘Global Britain.’
Gove told Sophy Ridge on Sky that:
I’m going to make sure that I do everything I can as an individual to support. And again, each individual will have their own circumstances. It is the case that something like one in ten UK citizens, which is an amazing amount, have said that they they want to do something to help. But we want to make sure that people are in a position to help because inevitably it’s a significant commitment and I recognise that we need to operate in in different ways and in different phases to help people who are fleeing persecution.
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