How do I survive now? The impact of living with No Recourse to Public Funds
Click here 977 KB to download the full report. A summary of the report is below.
Serwa was pregnant with her second child when the government announced the second lockdown in January 2021. She was advised to shield because she was clinically vulnerable. She asked the care home where she had been working for 18 months to furlough her. Her employer refused.
When she sought advice from Citizens Advice she was at home, not knowing how she was going to be able to pay her bills for weeks. But because she had no recourse to public funds, we couldn’t help her claim Universal Credit - the bedrock of our country’s safety net.
NRPF is a condition attached to temporary visas which prohibits people from accessing most state benefits and services, including Universal Credit, Child Benefit and social housing. It’s intended to protect the welfare state from short term visitors taking advantage of it. But it’s a policy that, in its scope and its harm, has gone far too far.
There are over a million people who, like Serwa, are affected by NRPF in the UK. This is the first nationally representative study of the harms caused by this policy. It confirms what migrant groups and front line charities have long known: Serwa’s story isn’t a rare hard case. On the contrary, we find a comprehensive picture of hardship:
81% of people with NRPF are behind on at least 1 bill, compared to 1 in 5 (20%) people in the UK at large
3 in 5 (60%) people with NRPF are currently behind on rent, compared to 8% for the UK population at large. And just under half (48%) of people with NRPF report living in overcrowded accommodation
Nearly 1 in 5 (18%) have been unable to feed themselves or their household because of the policy
Over 4 in 5 (83%) people with NRPF say that NRPF has had a negative impact on their mental health, with 1 in 2 reporting that it has had a very negative impact
Around 1 in 7 (15%) parents with NRPF said their children couldn’t keep up with school work as NRPF meant they didn’t have access to the internet or a computer.
The pandemic also shone a brutal light on the precarity of life with NRPF - and the gaps in our social security system. Although they had access to some of the coronavirus protection schemes such as the Job Retention Scheme, they were - and remain - unable to claim Universal Credit. Because of these gaps, 1 in 10 (11%) people with NRPF told us that they were unable to afford to shield or self-isolate during the pandemic.
The policy is also not serving its policy objectives. The NRPF condition is meant to ensure that people who have recently arrived in the UK do not receive support from the state before they have contributed.
But far from being a burden on the state, over half (53%) people with NRPF are in work (60% pre-pandemic), and therefore paying into a welfare system which they are denied access to. Almost 2 in 5 of those currently in work are key workers, working in industries like health care, delivery and food preparation, which kept the country going during lockdown.
And due to the lengthy qualifying periods before people can apply for permanent residency, people with NRPF have typically been building their lives in the UK for a long time. 2 in 5 people have lived here for over 5 years, and nearly 1 in 10 have been here for over a decade. People, many of whom are on the long, hard road to becoming citizens, therefore spend years without access to the support on which most other people in the country can depend.
Many are also forming and raising families in the UK. 329,000 people with NRPF are parents who live with their children, many of whom will have never lived in any country other than the UK. The effects of the policy extend so far that even children who have British citizenship are unable to receive basic entitlements, because of their parents’ immigration status.
With limited and inadequate exceptions, NRPF places a blanket ban on these long term residents claiming state support when needed. Some of the harm could be mitigated by reforming the policy - for instance by ceasing to apply the conditions to families with children. But the best way to address the damage caused by the policy is to give people who are building their life in the UK the access to the safety net they need, by removing the condition from all those who are habitually resident in the UK.