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Refugee Council forced to cut jobs in children's services

Finance | Tania Mason | 25 Mar 2009

The Refugee Council is to cut several jobs because the Home Office has reduced the funding for its services to children and young people that are seeking asylum.

A spokeswoman for the charity could not confirm how many jobs were likely to be lost, because a statutory consultation process is now under way with staff, but confirmed that funding was being cut from around £1.3m to around £950,000.

The cuts will affect the charity’s Children’s Panel, a 23-strong team that has been funded by the Home Office since 1994 to provide advice and support to newly-arrived separated children who are seeking asylum on their own in the UK.

Last August, the UK Border Agency (UKBA) advised the Refugee Council that it intended to terminate funding for the Children’s Panel and that it should be wound up by the end of March 2009.

Since then, the charity has been arguing that its work needs to be maintained, and has now secured some funding to allow it to continue to support the most vulnerable children through the asylum determination process in 2009/10.

But the UKBA will no longer fund the Children’s Panel’s work with young people where the sole reason for referral is that the local authorities that assessed them claim they are no longer children, and should be processed through the adult system.

Seeking funding from other sources

In a letter alerting stakeholders to the cuts earlier this month, Refugee Council chief executive Donna Covey (pictured), wrote: “We remain committed to working with separated asylum-seeking children, and remain concerned about the gap that will be left in support for age-disputed children. We are seeking funding from other sources.”

The Children’s Panel currently has three teams of ‘panel advisers’. One is a drop-in team working in the Refugee Council offices in Brixton, London, helping separated children who may have just arrived or are in crisis.

The other two teams concentrate on more intensive casework with separated children in London and outside of the south-east, with one panel adviser based in Leeds covering Yorkshire and Humberside.

A UK Border Agency spokesman refused to confirm the value of the cuts, and said the Home Office was continuing, with the help of children’s groups, “to make improvements to our asylum process to ensure youngsters receive the fairest possible treatment”.

“We're adamant that all children within our asylum system are treated as sensitively as possible, which is why we've introduced a duty of care and code of practice to ensure that all children are kept safe from harm,” the spokesman said.

He added that the UKBA was working with local authorities to develop specialist centres which will have the necessary expertise to deal with children seeking asylum. But Covey, in her letter, said no firm arrangements were yet in place for these.

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