January 2024 Click here to download this briefing as a Word document Summary Significant numbers of new refugees in Greater Manchester (GM) are being forced into precarious housing or street homelessness because the Home Office is intentionally evicting them from asylum accommodation, a situation the Deputy Mayor for Greater Manchester…
To say 2023 has been “challenging” doesn’t really cover it. When we’ve got a government that sacrifices people to distract from its own incompetence, the impact on us as individuals, our families and our communities is disastrous. That’s the truth of it – and we’ve spent the year standing alongside…
Greater Manchester Immigration Aid Unit and Greater Manchester Law Centre have put this guide together to help people in asylum accommodation who are receiving either a grant of refugee status, which includes full entitlement to work, housing, welfare benefits and healthcare, or a refusal of their claim for asylum. There…
In 2023, the Home Office introduced a new process for dealing with children’s asylum claims. The aim was to “streamline” the process, leading to children getting decisions on their claims more quickly. In the place of submitting a SEF form and having a substantive interview the new process consists of…
In October we saw a significant win for the Windrush Legal Initiative, led by Nicola Burgess, our solicitor at GMIAU. Thanks to legal proceedings she brought on behalf of our client, Joel*, the Home Office have amended the rules of the Windrush Compensation Scheme, after we argued that their previous…
In March 2023, GMIAU, IPPR and Praxis launched a report on the impact of the 10- year route to settlement. From that report, we know there are thousands of people in the North West on the 10-year route – they all have the legal right to be in the UK…
Along with many, we watched in horror over recent weeks and months as the government pushed through a new law that will extinguish the right to seek safety in the UK for everyone other than a small number who are mostly from Ukraine, Afghanistan and Hong Kong. Like others we…
This blog series features the voices of those who are housed in hotels in the North West while waiting for their asylum claim to be processed. Previous blogs explored the emergence and context of the hotels policy; food and living conditions in hotels; and the lack of privacy, arbitrary and…
We are writing this as some of the 170,000 people living in the UK, who are on the ten year route to settlement. We have legal status in the UK either because we have family here or because we’ve spent a very long time in this country. To keep our…
This blog series features the voices of those who are housed in hotels in the North West while waiting for their asylum claim to be processed. Previous blogs explored the emergence and context of the hotels policy; food and living conditions in hotels; and the lack of privacy, arbitrary and…