Asylum project criticised for failings
Gordon Carson
Tuesday, June 2, 2009
Children's charities have criticised government failings during a landmark pilot project aimed at improving the experience of asylum-seeking families facing removal from the UK.
Lisa Nandy, chair of the Refugee Children's Consortium, said the government did not set any clear goals for the Alternative to Detention pilot at Millbank, Kent, while an evaluation by consultancy Tribal did not gather the right information to inform future policy and practice.
Through Alternative to Detention, the UK Border Agency (UKBA) aimed to encourage failed asylum-seeker families to return voluntarily to their country of origin.
Families were moved to the Millbank residential unit to consider their options. The unit was run like a hostel and children were placed in Kent schools.
Nandy described Alternative to Detention as "the first serious attempt to do something much more humane in the asylum process". But her own evaluation pointed to problems throughout the project, which ran from November 2007 to October 2008.
However, the government-commissioned evaluation by Tribal said the first families did not arrive until January 2008, two months after the unit opened. Only one out of the 12 families who took part chose assisted voluntary return to their country of origin, a key UKBA measurement.
The government took two months to reply to Nandy's Freedom of Information request to see Tribal's report, sending it to her in March, while UKBA only published the report in mid-May.
A spokeswoman for the UKBA said: "We are committed to finding an alternative to detaining families wherever possible."
