Last month a nationwide Migrant Champions Network was launched to encourage local authorities across the country to each have a designated elected Councillor responsible for promoting the rights of asylum seekers, refugees and migrants. Sue Lukes, Islington Councillor from 2018 to 2022, and Cllr Dr Hosnieh Djafari-Marbini, Oxford City Councillor from 2018 on, helped launch the initiative and explain some of the background.

Sue: I became a Councillor only in 2018, but I had been working with migrants and their access to local services for a long time. Islington Council has an Armed Services Champion, a Reading Champion, a Mental Health Champion, among others, so I felt we needed one for migrants, especially given the recent background of the Government’s Hostile Environment policy, the Windrush scandal and the looming problems of the EU Settlement Scheme.

We need local Champions because it’s in our communities that migration actually happens. Governments may make immigration policy- (although in fact migration is driven by economics and human rights in any case – but local authorities and the communities they serve are where people make their homes, start their new lives and get involved. 

There was unanimous backing in the Council for the role and the local press was supportive too. So since we had demonstrated the possibilities in Islington, I felt Migrant Champions in every local authority in the country would be a great idea.

Hosnieh: I too became a Councillor in 2018. Before that, I had been working on improving health access at the local migrant Detention Centre. My involvement has also been shaped by my own family’s experience of being new migrants here in the 1990s with my father having received refugee status when I was a teenager. 

As new migrants, the local council affected all aspects of our life – the B&B we started in, the council house we were lucky to call a home, the benefits assessments and school placement. While still a teenager, our life was tied up with local councils and local communities, although I had no idea what a Councillor did!

The idea of Champions was well established in my council and it was clear to me as a new Councillor that a Migrant Champion was needed, with a need for advocacy and for linking up local and national campaigns. I organised and mobilised with migrant groups, local third sector organisations and campaigners to reaffirm the principle of Oxford as a City of Sanctuary via a council motion and I became Migrant Champion at the same meeting.

Sue: Once in the role, I worked with Hugh Myddelton primary school, where the pupils had set up a refugee committee to campaign on the rights of migrants and child refugees in particular.  The committee persuaded the council to commit to taking 100 child refugees as a way to press the government to let more “Dubs children” in.

I advocated for Windrush cases: one had thousands of pounds of rent arrears because she was barred from work and benefits, another was not allowed on the local council waiting list because she had not been resident long enough, because she was illegally prevented from returning home by the government.

I worked to get the council to stop using the private operator NowMedical for housing medical assessments.  Their assessments have been roundly criticised in many court cases, and they also assess migrants’ “medical fitness” for deportation for the Home Office.

I worked to get council officers to provide evidence to support important legal cases, for example on EU residents’ voting arrangements and the exorbitant charges for citizenship for children. But I had the role for only two years as I was then appointed onto the council executive: I stepped up to work on the Covid pandemic in a community safety role.

Hosnieh: As Migrant Champion, I work with migrants, asylum seekers and refugees and third sector organisations helping reduce inequalities in being able to access and connect with local services, be that health or housing, or help from advice centres, and ensuring migrants’ needs are considered and their voices impact council policies. I have dealt with Windrush cases and have worked with Syrians, Afghans, Kurds and more recently Ukrainians.  

We are now working with our senior council officers to make the City of Sanctuary a practical reality locally. We’ve implemented “firewall” policies, so that our residents’ data is not shared with the Home Officer — our advice centres and homelessness services are hence not part of the Hostile Environment. The aim of such policies is to provide a safe environment and ensure equality of access for all residents.

I initiated the very popular Sanctuary Wheels project which provides free, refurbished bikes and tuition for hundreds of young asylum seekers and refugees across Oxfordshire and we have supported two Oxford colleges to become Colleges of Sanctuary.

During the pandemic: we worked to ensure vaccine access for all migrants, including those with No Recourse to Public Funds, a strategy which was informed by our work with local mutual aid groups. We got a national unanimous Labour Party motion passed against charging migrants for maternity and antenatal care and we have campaigned against the Immigration and Borders Bill and the Government’s plans to deport people to Rwanda, at both local and national level.

Sue: Why do we need a national Migrant Champions Network? Well, Home Secretary Suella Braverman has refused to have a migrant commissioner, so let’s create hundreds of them! We can hold councils and Government to account, an example of which has been our work on mobilising large numbers of Councillors to sign letters protesting against the Rwanda deportation scheme and the treatment of migrants in poor quality hotel accommodation.

The treatment of migrants is so interconnected with all areas of council policy that it is in the best interests of councils to be active on these issues. For example, Home Office contractors are involved in the detention process and in running asylum hotels, but they are also trying to get into social housing markets, and they can build up a track record for this because there’s no accountability exercised over Home Office contracts. 

We also find that the Government often try out housing and benefit cuts on migrants first before rolling them out against others, for example, regulations on benefits conditionality and housing homeless people in the private rented sector.

We need to support a mix of people becoming Champions, some with knowledge, some with experience, but all with a commitment to sharing their experience so we become a formidable force!

Hosnieh: A network is necessary because we need national coordination led by local voices, as we saw with our campaign of letters on Rwanda and against outsourced corporations benefiting from keeping people in limbo in unsuitable hotel accommodation.

So much work is needed, especially in asylum seeker hotels, many of which have been purposefully placed in deprived areas; the network facilitate the replication of life-saving locally-led work. We are working with our local refugee organisation, dedicated healthcare workers and medical  students to ensure health access, with appropriate public health oversight. We are even planning to be able to offer haircuts for people in the hotels in time for the Iranian/Kurdish festival of Nowruz.

The way hotels are being allocated and ‘managed’ illustrates the many threads of fostering division which dominates our daily politics. Instead of linking in local services and communities, outsourcing is mainstream with people treated as demanding clients and commodities rather than residents and scant attention paid to inequalities, which places more stress on public services in already deprived areas. The result is that blame is heaped on the individual asylum seeker for fleeing persecution, the low-paid worker for trying to make ends meet and the often-labelled ‘under-delivering’ public service worker.

For us the right of our residents to live in dignity is not a far-removed political football, but a daily reality in which all our residents count. Dignified living requires certainty – uncertainty erodes everything – our lives at home, in the workplace, children’s education and our mental health.

The job of decreasing this uncertainty falls on us all. The Migrant Champions Network will give us the local tools to resist this government sanctioned inhumanity, for the benefit of our new and old neighbours, our families, our workers and future generations trying to be at home.

Sue: It is clear that the desperate and failing Tory Government has decided to ‘play the migrant card’ and we face new legislation yet again.  Our communities are under attack from the far right and their allies in Government, and we need our councils to defend us.  If your council does not yet have a Migrant Champion the Network, it’s time to help you push for one.  Do it now!

Image: c/o Mike Phipps