In 2022, COMPAS and the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities (COSLA) co-designed a survey for local authorities, as part of the Understanding Migrant Destitution in the UK study. COSLA’s annual survey in 2023/24 indicates that the number of people with NRPF supported by Scottish local authorities has tripled from 2020/21 to 2023/24, rising from 578 to 1,868 and for families, the increase was fivefold, rising from 66 to 357. Due to challenges with local authority data collection, these numbers are likely to underestimate the level of need.
Local authorities provide a ‘parallel welfare safety net’ (Price & Spencer, 2015) for vulnerable people excluded from accessing mainstream benefits due to their immigration status. However, this parallel welfare system does not receive any central government support and is increasingly dysfunctional, unable to provide adequate support for the increasing numbers of people facing destitution.
Whilst NRPF is sometimes seen as a niche policy question, the growing numbers of people subject to the NRPF visa condition have more than doubled from 1.48 million in 2020 to 3.3 million in 2023. With growing levels of destitution across the UK, we cannot hope to tackle broader strategic priorities, including ending homelessness, destitution and child poverty, without considering how vulnerable people are impacted by the NRPF policy.
The Scottish Government’s Ending Destitution Together (EDT) strategy provides a blueprint for the rest of the UK in designing a national strategy to tackle migrant destitution. However, with a significant rise in the number of families supported by Scottish local authorities, there is an urgent need to synergise the EDT strategy with Scotland’s tackling child poverty delivery plan and the forthcoming UK-wide Child Poverty Strategy to ensure Scotland can meet its policy objective of tackling child poverty for all children, regardless of their parents’ immigration status.
There are widespread calls from local government, cross-party parliamentary committees and people with lived experience for a significant reform of the NRPF policy, including a call to end the use of the NRPF condition. In the meantime, there needs to be substantial improvements to fix a patchy and dysfunctional local safety net, including providing central government funding to social care departments, developing local leadership to tackle migrant deprivation and the importance of listening to and including migrant voices when designing services, building on the learning of the Windrush Lessons Learned review.
