What is being proposed

Current Central Government proposals suggest that asylum seekers could gain an “earned route” to settlement or citizenship by participating in ‘approved’ volunteering.

Proposals currently include increasing the ‘wait time’ for gaining settlement (indefinite leave to remain) – to up to 20 years. Individuals will be able to ‘earn’ reductions in this time, through high earnings, working in certain roles, and ‘contributing to the community – such as through volunteering and other ways.

Our response

Asylum seekers are already permitted to volunteer freely – there is no ‘barrier’ here that this proposal aims to address. In Bristol a significant number of asylum seekers are already volunteering in many different ways, within many different communities locally and alongside many different people. This is something we will always strive to encourage and support.

We believe that:

• Volunteering should be a choice – an altruistic act, strongly aligned to autonomy and balanced reciprocity.
• Volunteering should never become a mandatory requirement tied to immigration status.
• Volunteering should not be politicised.
•  VCSE organisations, and volunteers, are the experts in how to sustain an inclusive and impactful voluntary sector.

National bodies and VCSE organisations working with refugees, asylum seekers and migrants understandably all have multifaceted and significant concerns with the plans in their entirety. The VCSE sector as a whole has specific concerns about the inclusion of volunteering as a part of this proposal – moral, ethical, logistical concerns. As well as concerns about the pressure this could place on volunteer managers.

In short – the volunteering part of the proposal in particular would create additional workload and ethical issues for the VCSE sector, without adding any benefit to organisations or our communities. 

What you can do

Whilst the government have a consultation open on this, we recognise that the consultation process itself does not easily give VCSE sector organisations the opportunity to fully highlight their concerns and share their insight.

However, it is important that VCSE organisations and individuals consider feeding into it. There are multiple open text fields where we would encourage people to share their thoughts on both the proposal and feedback on the structure of it.

The deadline to respond is coming up on 12th February.

For now, we call on our local VCSE Sector to:

• Respond to the Government Proposals here: Earned settlement – GOV.UK 
• Continue to welcome asylum seekers as volunteers, support them and reduce barriers to their engagement (we have a helpful resource on EDI in volunteer management here: https://voscur.org/diversity-and-inclusion-in-volunteer-management/)

We call on Central Government to rethink the politicisation of volunteering, the linking of volunteering to earned settlement and the changing of volunteering in the UK to be transactional and pressured.

If you would like to read some guidance documents produced by other organisations we are aware of the following:

• Praxis ‘follow along guide’ – click here
• Green Parties Guidance – click here
• Migrants Rights Guidance – click here

If you would like more info on understanding the proposals, the approach national bodies are taking and some of the detail around specific concerns Voscur and others have, you can email ian.hm@voscur.org.

We are in communications with both NAVCA and NCVO and is feeding in views locally, and has reached out to both volunteer managers and the Bristol Refugee and Asylum Seeking Partnership. Some campaign work is ongoing from organisations such as Asylum Matters, and NCVO and NAVCA.