Fighting for the basic stuff
13 March 2025
Have you ever wondered what it’s like doing casework at a refugee centre?
‘The system that’s been created to destroy every ounce of support asylum seekers can get. We (the charity sector) are the last line of defence.‘ – Member of the Support and Immigration Team at St Augustine’s
‘We are literally half the time fighting for basic stuff for people. Stuff they should have. Or we’re undoing mistakes we didn’t do. Or we’re just trying to get someone to be safe. And it’s understanding that it’s wonderful when it pays off but it’s few and far between, and the wider environment is very hostile, and that is almost the entirety of our work, day in day out, 4 or 5 days a week.‘
These quotes, from members of the Support and Immigration Team at St Augustine’s, say it all. Being a caseworker is gruelling, grinding work – but it also can have moments of real joy. For example, as another team member said, on hearing that someone they support had a positive asylum decision:
‘It’s a massive relief…it’s like a breath of relief. You’re safe! You’re not going anywhere! I don’t have to worry that the next call I’m going to get is you’ve been picked up and put in a detention centre!‘
Casework is exhausting, frustrating, maddening and rewarding all at once. Sometimes the anger and frustration outweighs any feeling of reward, but then you remember that:
‘St Augustine’s is a place where people get heard at least… someone sits down, pays attention, listens for an hour or whatever. That’s really important, because [people have] spent a lot of time being not heard and not listened to.‘
The quotes come from a research report produced by one of our volunteers, Professor Emerita Jennifer Mason, who has had a long professional career of research on social issues. She took a close look at the work of the Support and Immigration Team and shared her findings with us earlier last year. For those of us involved in the team, it was very powerful to see our experience reflected. As she said,
‘staff and volunteers reported loving the support and immigration work and feeling that it was vital and invaluable in its impact, whilst also experiencing it as incredibly challenging and stressful to deliver, sometimes impossibly so.’ – Professor Emerita Jennifer Mason
All of us working in the Support and Immigration Team have ended up there because either we have experienced the asylum and immigration system directly ourselves, or we have witnessed others going through it, and we don’t want people to have to deal with it alone. People have made terrifying journeys to get here and are fleeing unimaginable horrors. They arrive in what they hope will be a safe haven, only to be faced with hostility and disbelief from officials and a blank-faced system of forms, telephone lines and online labyrinths that are impenetrable even for those who have lived in the UK all their lives and speak English as a mother tongue.
Our job is to help people understand and navigate that system and, in the long term, represent themselves and start to rebuild their lives. Part of that is as simple as understanding one another – between us we speak 8 languages and we have a great team of volunteers who themselves are seeking asylum help translate for people.
We are faced with complicated challenges, and we have to be quick on our feet, as we never know what will come through the door:
‘You’re immersed for an hour in one kind of problem and suddenly the next person needs something entirely different and you’ve got to start thinking about that, which is a completely different problem with a completely different solution. And then again a third and fourth and fifth. It is a challenge.‘
People come in with all sorts of different issues – anything from getting a GP appointment, to receiving an intimidating letter from the Home Office, being evicted from their homes – and it can take a long time to work out what they are and how to respond to them:
‘Sleuthing, there’s loads of that. Working out what’s going on for someone. Getting clues and putting things together. And you can only do that if you understand the interplay of how it works with other agencies. Because the centre members don’t know that. They’ve never heard of these different agencies. So you work it out with them.‘
However, we try and offer our support in a way that means that people can help themselves too. For example:
‘Often I try and explain what I’m doing with people as I’m doing it, if I think it is something people could potentially do themselves at a later stage, I try and show them what I did. At every stage I try to walk through what I’ve done, why I’ve done it, what responses we’ve got, and why.‘
The hurdles that people face are many. Just getting here is a challenge in itself – you can’t claim asylum until you arrive in the UK, but it is also almost impossible to get to the UK without some kind of official document, which you can’t get hold of until you’re here… Once you arrive, you are then “dispersed”, which means that you are sent off to anywhere within the UK. You have no say at all as to where you get sent. You have to live off a tiny amount of money, less than £50 a week for absolutely everything except your housing, which is usually pretty grim, and, as someone seeking asylum, you are not allowed to get a job. For the first six months, you are not even allowed to attend college, so unless you’re lucky enough to be in a place where accessible English classes are on offer, you can’t even start learning the language.
Eventually, you will be invited to an asylum interview. (Some of the people we meet have been waiting for 2 or 3 years, living in limbo all that time). The interview can be really traumatic: you have to relive the memories of persecution and a horrible journey, often recounting them to someone who patently doesn’t believe you. The ‘hostile environment’ that still operates in the Home Office means that someone seeking refuge is treated as a criminal – the very opposite of innocent until proven guilty.
However, we do have small victories that keep us going:
‘We have lots of success, everyday. Everyday we have lots of impact. Today 33 people came to the Drop-In. We solved all of the issues they came with, so that’s a good success. So for example the last one, it’s easy, school transport. But for her, she couldn’t do it. They keep changing, the Council, first apply online to renew, then they change it so you have to go to the bus station, and then the Post Office to pay it. Now they said to her no. It’s confusing people. Now they’ve put it back online so I logged it in, but someone who doesn’t know that much IT won’t be able to do that. We have many people now for free school meals and school transport. We have some today where I have to challenge, they’ve been waiting 3-4 months to get that copy of their decision and the local authority are requesting the proof because if there is no proof then who’s going to cover that cost of school meals, even though they know they are asylum seekers. So lots of success, everyday. Everyday we have lots of impact.‘
Nevertheless, we meet, every day, people with talent and passion and skills who are stuck in a system that does not want to allow them to share them with others and imposes all sorts of arbitrary constraints. It is a system that is designed to frustrate, to depress, to discourage, to erode the human spirit. At St Augustine’s, we chip away at the edges of it, supporting people to gain individual victories that on a case by case basis are massive: a school place for a child, a move into a house where a family can cook for themselves, a letter that confirms that you have indeed faced persecution and have the right to be protected from that persecution… However, the hostile system remains in place.
I think that a lot of us dream of a time when instead of battling for the absolute basics that everyone should have as a matter of right, instead of forcing small changes and tweaks to a system designed to crush, we could instead be working with the brilliant people we meet to make new worlds that grow and flourish. As one person explained:
‘It feels like there needs to be systemic change somewhere and what we are doing is putting a sticking plaster over the arterial bleed.‘
As we document each huge barrier and each small victory, we share that learning in our team and with other organisations who are doing the same kind of work elsewhere in the country. Working with others, we hope that we can start to create a fundamental shift in how the UK treats people seeking sanctuary. We want to see a world where people seeking refuge are made welcome, where they can start to build new lives and be part of our communities – working, volunteering, making friends, learning together…
In the meantime we are there, waiting on hold on a phone helpline, battling against evictions, reminding officials about their legal obligations, celebrating the tiniest victory and, mostly, listening to people’s stories, fears and hopes. It is those stories and those hopes that keep us all going.
(Blog written by Cath Long, Senior Caseworker at St Augustine’s Centre, drawing on findings from a report by Professor Emerita Jennifer Mason)