Dropping off the social radar

The numbers of disabled people seeking asylum in the UK is not known. But, as Sunil Peck reports, what is clear is that those who are here all too often fall between the two stools of social care and asylum support provision

Youcef Bey-Zekkoub is one of a hidden population of disabled asylum-seekers. He has come to the UK to seek refuge from persecution in his own country.

Bey-Zekkoub fled Algeria where he was beaten up and tortured during the civil war. He opted to seek asylum in the UK because he thought he would receive fair treatment from the authorities here.

But Bey-Zekkoub has had to fight indifference and even discrimination to access the support and services which he is entitled to while his application for refugee status is being considered.

“I suffered a lot and I even ended up in a psychiatric hospital because it got too much. I don’t regret coming here though, and I am hoping that something good will come out of this.”

As one example, Bey-Zekkoub is a wheelchair user but he only received a suitable chair three years after entering the UK, thanks to the assistance of the Spinal Injuries Association.

His experiences are typical of many disabled asylum-seekers. When he arrived in the UK in 2003, he sought information from disability and asylum support organisations.

“Asylum organisations see you are in a wheelchair and they get stuck, they can not handle it. I keep emailing and ringing them but they have no idea where to start.”

His local disability organisation was unhelpful and told him that as he was an asylum-seeker he should go back to an asylum support organisation for assistance.

Bey-Zekkoub now lives in a private flat and survives on around £40 a week from social services.

He says that the flat is a “nightmare”.

“I need to transfer myself into the bath and it is not really safe. The toilet is really tiny so once I go inside with my wheelchair there is no room left to transfer yourself. The kitchen as well, there is nothing I can use. Everything is too high, the cooker, the cupboards and the sink.”

He has complained to the council but the landlord will not allow them to adapt the property. Bey-Zekkoub’s status means that he is not entitled to live in social housing.

But he can not understand why, if his local authority is prepared to pay his rent, it will not allow him to find a more accessible property to live in.

When I speak to Bey-Zekkoub, he tells me that his fridge is empty and that fresh food has become a luxury. He is indebted to his college which has given him money to buy food from its hardship fund.

As Jonathan Ellis, director of policy and development at the Refugee Council, puts it: “Provisions for disabled asylum seekers are minimal. Asylum seekers are supported outside the mainstream benefits system, and are not entitled to disability living allowance. In some cases, where there is a need for specialist care, they will be allowed to apply for Section 21 support which is provided by the local authority under the National Assistance Act. However the threshold for this gets higher every year.”

Bey-Zekkoub’s immigration status means that although he does not qualify to receive direct payments to meet his care needs, his local authority does pay for him to have home care. He says that he has had a string of different personal assistants (PAs) which he feels causes a loss of dignity: “I don’t like having to show my bottom to so many women.”

Bey-Zekkoub can not understand why his local authority is happy to pay for him to receive support at home but will not give him the freedom to employ his own PA.

The number of asylum-seekers in the UK in 2007 was more than 570,000 according to the government, but there is no official figure for disabled asylum-seekers in the UK. What’s more, academic research into their needs is scarce.

In 2002, research published by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation found that disabled asylum-seekers were being denied support because of confusion among social services and other service providers about what they were entitled to.

While a second study in 2008 concluded that disabled asylum-seekers in London still encounter significant barriers to accessing statutory services for health, housing and benefits.

Asylum Seeker Claire Glasman, from WinVisible, an organisation which campaigns for rights for disabled asylum-seekers, says that the situation is getting worse and talks of a “climate of refusal” among service providers. Indeed, WinVisible campaigned on behalf of a group of disabled asylum-seekers who were being denied passes for free travel in London. Lambeth Council reversed its position after a legal challenge.

“Because successive governments have had a witch-hunt into so called bogus asylum-seekers, there is discrimination which affects every area.”

She adds that cuts to the legal aid system are also making it harder for disabled asylum-seekers to challenge discrimination.

Another disabled asylum-seeker, Iman Saab, is on the run from her family in Lebanon. They threatened to kill her after she converted to Christianity.

Unlike Bey-Zekkoub, she is happy with the house she lives in but it took months for her to secure the appropriate adaptations.

She does not have the right to take up employment but is desperate to gain refugee status so she can start looking for a job.

She applied for refugee status ten years ago and yearns to work as a fashion designer.

“I would like my papers so I can do what I want to do, I would like to be free. I would like to drive but I can’t because I don’t have disability allowances. I would like to work and do something to feel like I am human.”

She goes to college, but the main reason for doing so is not academic.

“I study because I like to go out and see people. If I stayed at home, I would die.”

She has been told by her local authority that although she finds it hard to propel a manual wheelchair, she is not entitled to an electric wheelchair because she does not claim disability benefits. She can not afford to buy one herself.

She says that she only got more than 45 minutes a week home care after ending up in hospital following a fall at home. She had been trying for seven months. It was arranged by the hospital social worker not the community worker.

Douglas Joy of the Disability Law Service says that this is a familiar story. He says that scant resources often mean that social services will be obstructive and do their utmost to avoid providing support to disabled asylum-seekers.

“In my experience, if a disabled asylum-seeker turns up at social services, they will be told that social services can not help them and that the National Asylum Support Service are the people that should be helping them, and they sort of fall down the middle.”

But although Saab and Bey-Zekkoub face a great deal of hardship, are they deserving of any more sympathy than the thousands of disabled UK citizens who also endure poverty and discrimination?

Claire Glasman thinks that they are. She warns that the demonisation of disabled asylum-seekers could set a dangerous precedent for disabled UK citizens.

“The way that people seeking asylum have been treated has been to attack the basic safety net which we all benefit from. Standards of respectful treatment and entitlement are basic for a caring society. It is a precedent for what could happen with us, because we are fighting welfare reforms where you have to prove that you are doing work-focused activity as a condition of claiming benefit, and if you don’t behave in a way which is prescribed to you then you are facing benefit sanctions. It is an attack on the expectation that vulnerable people should be looked after and not left to beg on the street.”

Angela Nhongo, a disabled asylum-seeker now living in Manchester, became so frustrated by her experiences of trying to secure support, that she decided to set up a one-stop shop to provide information for others like her.

Nhongo spent hours in her local library ploughing through books and leaflets researching the support she was entitled to. But she says that not everyone has the confidence to do what she did, and do things like find organisations who can supply access equipment like screenreading software and wheelchairs.

But while Nhongo is in a position to make the lives of disabled asylum-seekers easier, she is in no position to change the fact that disabled asylum-seekers are often left feeling like second-class citizens by service providers and disability organisations.

Glasman says that mainstream disability organisations must do more to reach out and engage with disabled asylum-seekers. But she says that disabled asylum-seekers need to be recognised as a group of people in need of support in the same way that disabled UK residents are.

“A lot of people are now objecting to the separate asylum support system, and are asking why people can’t be in the mainstream, and why people don’t have the right to work as well.”

She adds: “We would like people to be able to be re-integrated into the overall welfare system and not be treated separately.”