Ban on allowing asylum seekers to work ‘pushes them into exploitation’

The government must review its ban on asylum seekers working while they await decisions on their applications, an official report has said amid record backlogs.

The Migration Advisory Committee (MAC) said restrictions were “pushing them into exploitative situations by preventing them from obtaining safe and legal sources of income”.

Its annual report said: “Individuals seeking asylum ordinarily have no right to work other than after their application has been pending for 12 months, and then only in a shortage occupation list role.

“The comparative restrictiveness of this rule, and the association between work restrictions and subsequent integration once refugee status is attained, are issues on which the MAC has previously commented.”

Professor Brian Bell, chair of the committee, told a press conference that it took the “evidence-based view that the harm caused by not allowing asylum seekers to work significantly outweighs any possible effect we could see on the other side”.

“We know of no significant evidence of harm that changing the policy would cause,” he said.

“Given the continued failure of the system to process asylum applications promptly, we are now getting more and more people who have been waiting more than six months.”

Professor Bell said the government’s position meant that tens of thousands of asylum seekers who are likely to have their claim accepted were being locked out of the labour market.

“We’re losing their skills and their human capital and that’s a real problem for the economy,” he added. “We continue to urge the government to reconsider that.”

The committee’s 2021 annual report said there was “clear evidence” of the harm the employment ban causes, and “little evidence” that it provides significant benefits.

It found that any migrants without permission to work “may enter the informal economy on poorer wages and conditions”, and be less able to challenge their treatment out of fear of being reported to the authorities.

The report published on Tuesday warned that Ukrainian refugees who were in the UK at the outbreak of the war and were excluded from three official schemes may be “particularly likely to seek work on the informal market and find themselves in an exploitative situation”.

The number of people waiting for asylum decisions has reached more than 140,000, with worsening delays meaning that many are living in limbo for years. Of those, 97,717 asylum seekers have not had an initial decision for more than six months.

Asylum seekers at risk of destitution must be housed by the Home Office, driving up huge spending on hotels, and those in accommodation are given £40.85 a week for all other costs.

A House of Lords amendment to the Nationality and Borders Act would have allowed them to work after six months waiting for a decision, but it was voted down by the government in April.

In August, the UN Refugee Agency said asylum seekers must be able to work after the same time period, finding that prolonged periods of financial hardship can lead them to “take up offers of work in unsafe and exploitative conditions”.

A report contained the accounts of a female trafficking victim who had “gone back into prostitution” after waiting more than a year for a government decision, Eritrean asylum seekers in domestic servitude and a group of young Vietnamese men being targeted by people “trying to re-exploit them in terms of nail bars or cannabis cultivation”.

Ministers have defended their position in the House of Commons, with immigration minister Robert Jenrick saying in November: “It is not wise to enable asylum seekers to work because there are already significant pull factors to the UK as a result of the relative ease of working here, access to public services and the fact that we have relatively high approval rates for asylum seekers. I am not persuaded that it would be wise to add a further pull factor to the mix.”

The MAC report said that migrants’ “real or imagined fear” of deportation and immigration enforcement makes them vulnerable to exploitation.

It said the government’s “compliant environment”, previously known as the hostile environment, policies could be “used as a tool to control or threaten migrant workers and trap them in exploitative working conditions”.

The MAC report warned that the exploitation of migrants is not being detected because “labour market enforcement is not well resourced”, and that checks had become so rare that they had a “weak deterrent effect” on companies paying below minimum wage or treating workers poorly.

“Lack of enforcement, limited penalties and the potential profits to be gained by flouting the rules may also lead employers to make calculations and choose to carry out an ‘efficient breach’ of labour law,” it added.

The committee called for the Home Office to look at funding increased enforcement through fees paid by employers.

The government said it took allegations of exploitation seriously and urged people to report abusive practices through formal channels for investigation.

A Home Office spokesperson said: “The public rightly expects us to control immigration, which is why our points-based system delivers for the whole of the UK by balancing prioritising the skills and talent the UK needs with encouraging long term investment in the domestic workforce.

“We would like to thank the Migration Advisory Committee for its annual report and will consider the findings carefully.”