I beg to move,
That this House has considered child poverty and no recourse to public funds.
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Dr Huq. I refer the House to my declaration in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests, on the help I receive from the Refugee, Asylum and Migration Policy Project and as co-chair of the all-party parliamentary group on migration.
I would like to start by paying tribute to the organisations in my constituency and across Yorkshire that work tirelessly to help migrant families, including South Yorkshire Refugee Law and Justice and City of Sanctuary Sheffield, and the organisations that provided me with valuable evidence and research ahead of this debate, including the no recourse to public funds partnership, Praxis, COMPAS—the University of Oxford’s Centre on Migration, Policy and Society—and the Institute for Public Policy Research.
Given the spending review today, the recent announcement on the immigration White Paper and the pending child poverty strategy, this debate could not be more timely. According to recent research by the IPPR, there are an estimated 1.5 million children in the UK living in poverty in families with migrant parents, accounting for more than a third of all children in poverty. Children in families with migrant parents are also more likely to be in very deep poverty, amounting to 21% of migrant children, compared with 8% of other children.
The Joseph Rowntree Foundation found that since 2019, there has been a 92% increase in the number of migrant households experiencing destitution. Despite those shocking statistics, the no recourse to public funds policy—which amounts to a blanket ban on access to the social safety net for the majority of migrants in the UK—remains largely absent from conversations about poverty and inequality.
No recourse to public funds is a condition tied to various immigration pathways: those without status, those seeking asylum, those with “British citizen: children” status, and children in families who have not secured EU settled status. It prohibits millions of people from receiving benefits, including universal credit, child benefit and personal independence payment, and from accessing social housing. The policy disproportionately impacts women, people of colour, low-income households with dependent children where family relationships have broken down, including victims of domestic abuse, and those with disabilities and long-term health conditions.
Research by the Women’s Budget Group found that the risk of living in poverty for migrant women with dependent children is particularly high, as they are more likely to be dependent on their partner both for their right to be in the UK and financially, as their ability to work is often restricted by labour market barriers, access to childcare and NRPF conditions. A study by Citizens Advice found that more than 80% of its clients who sought advice on no recourse to public funds and non-EU migrants’ access to benefits were from ethnic minority backgrounds.
Part of the reason that this policy remains absent from the wider conversations about poverty is the information gap. The Home Office does not collect data on how many children are currently impacted by NRPF in the UK, although I hope the upcoming transition to Atlas will allow the relevant data to be released soon. Estimates suggest that at the end of 2024, there were approximately 3.6 million people with no recourse to public funds conditions.