‘No Recourse to Public Funds’ (NRPF) is a UK immigration condition prohibiting access to the welfare safety net, including benefits and housing assistance. Around 3.3 million people in the UK held visas with the NRPF condition in 2023 (House of Commons Library, 2024), over double the number of people in 2020 (Migration Observatory, 2023). In addition to this number, people with irregular immigration status, estimated to be between 594,000 - 745,000 people (Kierans & Vargas-Silva, 2024), also have NRPF by default.
The NRPF policy impacts both people with legal status, including European nationals with pre-settled status, student visa holders, health and care worker visa holders, families on the 10-year route to settlement and people with an irregular status, including European nationals who missed the EU Settlement Scheme deadline, visa overstayers and undocumented people.
Local authorities have a legal duty to provide accommodation and subsistence for certain groups of vulnerable people facing destitution, effectively providing a de facto ‘parallel welfare safety net’ (Price & Spencer, 2015).
COMPAS' Understanding Migrant Destitution in the UK study indicates that local authorities across England supported almost 10,000 destitute, vulnerable people in 2021/22 at a reported cost of nearly £50m. Over 90% of the total number of people supported by local authorities were in England, with over 50% of the total number of people supported by Greater London local authorities.
