Together With Refugees Report

The campaign coalition Together With Refugees, which is made up of about 360 community groups, refugee organisations, trades unions and faith groups, is publishing a report on Monday. It attempts to calculate the cost of policies such as offshoring refugees – with the bill running into the billions. The Home Office is yet to publish this information itself.

Cost to taxpayer:

• An offshore processing system to send people seeking refugee protection to another country to be detained while they wait for a decision on their claim, based on Australian government costings, which the Home Office said it is modelling its plans on – £1.44bn a year.

• Imprisoning people seeking refugee protection who arrive via irregular routes, such as in a small boat across the Channel – £432m a year.

• Removing people seeking refugee protection from the UK to another country if the government said they should claim asylum elsewhere – £117.4m a year.

Sabir Zazai, a spokesperson for Together With Refugees, said: “This is an astonishing amount of additional public money for the unworkable and cruel proposals in the bill – enough to pay for more than 80,000 NHS nurses a year.“Having fled their homes in fear and struggled to find safety, these measures would leave women, children and men facing further hardship in prison, isolated in another country indefinitely, separated from family and facing insecurity and indecision.”

Makes clear the importance of independent and grassroots organisation, such as Refugee Roots, in supporting refugees and asylum seekers.