Dear Friend
Your campaigning helped to get rid of the shocking practice of providing asylum support through vouchers. But now these vouchers have been replaced with a payment card that restricts where, when and what people can buy.
We need your help to call for cash support for asylum seekers, to allow them to live in dignity.
What Parliament can do
The Home Office is currently carrying out an Asylum Improvement Project, examining ways to make the asylum system more efficient. The government should use this opportunity to end the inhumane system of denying people access to cash support, amending legislation to allow the Azure payment card to be replaced by cash support for all destitute asylum seekers until they return to their country of origin.
We want the government to act now to reverse this unjust policy towards some of the UK’s most vulnerable people. It is in nobody’s interest that asylum seekers are further marginalised, experience ill health and hunger, and are even forced into criminal activity as a result of extreme poverty while waiting to return to their country of origin.
We need parliamentary support to make the government act:Please write to the Minister responsible Damian Green MP, calling for the Azure payment card to be abolished and for legislation to be amended to enable the provision of cash support for all destitute refused asylum seekers until they are given status in the UK or return to their country of origin.
Please sign the parliamentary declaration (attached) in support of the campaign to give asylum seekers permission to work. Members of parliament can sign up to the declaration by emailing mike.kaye@amnesty.org.uk
For more information on the issues in this briefing, please contact parliamentary@refugeecouncil.org.uk
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