UK: Benefits challenge rejected
01 March 1996
A legal challenge to new social security rules denying benefits to asylum-seekers was rejected by the High Court on 26 March. The regulations, announced by social security minister Peter Lilley at the Tory party conference last October and in force since 5 February, remove entitlement to all benefits, including the safety-net benefit of Urgent Cases Payments, to asylum-seekers who don't apply at the port but wait until they are in the country, and to those whose claims are rejected by the Home Office and who appeal. Zairean asylum-seeker "B", who fled Zaire after her husband was killed and she was raped by security forces, and who claimed asylum at the Home Office on the day of her arrival, joined the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants (JCWI) in a judicial review of the regulations on the grounds that denial of benefits would force asylum-seekers to give up appeal rights and leave the country, and would violate the Geneva Convention on Refugees.
The court upheld the minister's argument that the rules, which were designed to save public funds, did not have to comply with the UK's international obligations under the refugee Convention, which was not part of domestic law. It ruled that the effect of the regulations would be merely to 'remove an incentive' to appeal.
Asylum-seekers who have arrived and claimed in-country since 5 February, or who have been refused asylum since then, have no money whatever for food, clothes, rent, medicines, fares or anything else. In addition, those without children and not in priority need so as to qualify for homeless persons housing are now being given blankets and told to sleep on the streets, as night shelters have filled up. The London boroughs of Westminster and Hammersmith & Fulham withdrew their challenge to the regulations (they complained that with housing benefit withdrawn, they had to pick up the tab by virtue of their duty to house vulnerable asylum-seekers), when the government offered grants covering 80% of their lost housing benefit subsidy. But poorer boroughs like Hackney, Tower Hamlets and Newham, which house many poor asylum-seekers, have no extra funds set aside to make up the difference. The judges, recognising the importance of the issue, refused the minister's request that JCWI pay the costs of the case, and granted leave to appeal to the Court of Appeal.
R v Secretary of State for Social Security ex parte JCWI, ex parte B, 26.3.96.