Greater Manchester Immigration Aid Unit 25th Anniversary Publication

Greater Manchester Immigration Aid Unit (GMIAU)

The ďŹ rst 25 years

1990-2015

This is a short summary of the first 25 years of Greater Manchester Immigration Aid Unit.

It has been written by Ursula Sharma who has

been a member of the Board of Trustees since 2002.

We are very grateful to Ursula for the time and effort she has committed to this project.

Inevitably some people and events may have been

missed but all contributions to GMIAU, in whatever way, have made it the organisation that it is today and for that we are all grateful.

Contents

1

The beginnings: Viraj Mendis and anti-deportation campaigns in the 1980s

3

Anwar Ditta

4

Steve Cohen’s vision – The need for an immigration aid unit

5

1990s: In the midst of the community; Cheetham Hill Road

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Drawing on community experience/empowering the community

10

Florence Okolo

12

Community leadership

14

Carry on campaigning

15

2000s: Hybrid no longer? The shift to legal aid funding and greater regulation

17

Going the extra mile

19

Farewell to Cheetham Hill Road

21

Preparing for a tougher climate

23

2010s: Access to justice – under threat

25

Last law centres standing?

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2

Manchester march in aid of Viraj Mendis

The beginnings: Viraj Mendis and anti-deportation campaigns in the 1980s Who was Viraj Mendis and why

start this story with his campaign to resist deportation? It is significant

that the people whom we spoke to

about the beginnings of the GMIAU nearly all remembered it as a key

event, a campaign which mobilised resistance to immigration controls and opened the eyes of many

who would not have regarded

themselves as political activists.

V

iraj was a Tamil who had overstayed his visa and had claimed asylum on the grounds that his life would be in danger if he returned to Sri Lanka. In 1986 he sought sanctuary in a church in Hulme in Manchester where he stayed for two years with the support of the vicar and many other well-wishers and activists, until he was forcibly removed and deported. Thousands of people in Manchester and other cities in England supported his cause, marched and campaigned on his behalf.

Both local communities and anti-racist activists were becoming aware of an increasingly hostile political atmosphere where immigrants were concerned and there was an active National Front presence in Manchester. But there was still a lot of support for individuals affected by immigration controls and there were many other high profile anti-deportation campaigns around this time. Some (like the Mendis campaign), had a national impact.

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Greater Manchester Immigration Unit did not owe its inspiration solely to the Mendis campaign. But it was a defining event that highlighted the way the state was closing in on the options of black people and the way that immigration controls were being enforced in the pursuit of a basically racist agenda.

For many, this campaign and the solidarity it generated were crucial political experiences.

Anwar Ditta

4 The tightening of immigration

controls did not only keep people out, they affected people who

were already here. Take the case of Anwar Ditta.

There was a very active community around these issues … out of these campaigns came the idea that we needed a permanent unit to channel both the legal work and the campaigning side.

Finn Jensen, development worker and caseworker in the early 90s

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nwar Ditta was born in Birmingham but when her parents separated she went back to Pakistan where she eventually married and had three children. She and her husband returned to the UK leaving their children for the time being in the care of relatives. They went through another marriage ceremony in England, in the belief that their Islamic marriage in Pakistan might not be recognised by the state. However when the time came to apply for entry for her children the Home Office did not believe that they were really her children since they had been born before her marriage in England. In fact they refused to believe that she had ever lived in Pakistan. The decision was only overturned when blood tests showed that the children were indeed hers. (The beginnings of the culture of disbelief that people seeking asylum are only too familiar with today?) Like the Viraj

Mendis campaign, Anwar Ditta’s struggle got a lot of support in Manchester and opened many people’s eyes as to where immigration controls were leading.

In many of these early campaigns the issue was family reunion. In the 1960s and 70s many immigrants had come, like Anwar Ditta, leaving children and other dependents in the care of relatives while they established themselves in the UK. By the 1980s they had settled and were in a position to bring their families over, but tightening immigration control made this harder and harder. Campaigns on their behalf drew activists and members of black and minority communities together in common purpose as they rallied to help those affected.

Steve Cohen’s vision: The need for an immigration aid unit Local law centres did their best.

South Manchester Law Centre,

where Steve Cohen, a well-known

activist and barrister, was working, was the main place for people in

Manchester to go for immigration advice at that time.

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teve, who had already dealt with many high profile cases and had been involved in many campaigns, proposed the setting up of a specialist immigration advice unit. A lifelong socialist and a dynamic activist, he saw present day immigration controls as only the latest in a history of legislation to restrict immigration and keep out those regarded as ‘alien’. The Aliens Act of 1905 had been passed to stem the flow of Jewish refugees from the pogroms of Eastern Europe. In the thirties further legislation restricted the entry of Jewish victims of Nazism. In the 1960s and 70s legislation was primarily directed at the (non-white) migrants from Britain’s former colonies who sought work in UK industry and public services. Racism has a long history in Britain and Steve Cohen saw immigration legislation as the manifestation of this racism at the level of the state. Fighting the cases of individual people affected by immigration controls was a form of resistance to this racism, but was not sufficient in itself – it needed to go hand in hand with community resistance to the very principles on which all such controls were based. (When the GMIAU was eventually set up the title of its original newsletter was to be ‘No-one is Illegal’).

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His vision was of a legal unit which would not just provide advice and representation but also provide a base where people could get advice and information on setting up anti-deportation campaigns, a pooling of experience so that each new anti-deportation campaign did not have to start from scratch, but built on community experience.

Steve had a great capacity for communicating this vision and mobilising action. Speaking of Steve’s work to mobilise local support for the Viraj Mendis campaign, one of the first caseworkers at the Unit says the following of him (see quote on this page).

Energetic campaigning took place. Activists in the Labour Party pushed for the setting up of an immigration aid unit to become a matter of policy for the Manchester City Council – then as now controlled by Labour. Many Labour Party members had been involved in the Viraj Mendis campaign and many Labour councillors were seeing individual cases of people threatened by deportation in their constituencies. Trades Unionists were also very much aware of the issues, especially as they threatened their members. And of course there were many who had been involved in anti-deportation campaigns on behalf of a friend, colleague or neighbour and who had become aware of the issues through such experiences. So there was a good deal of background support for such a project already.

Steve was so respected and he brought the community together. What I saw was disaffected people in a deprived area of the inner city, … no disrespect to them but because of their life experience their attitude to non-white people would have been a whole lot different had they not respected Steve. [The Viraj Mendis campaign] politicised people.

But Steve Cohen, I think he was born politicised.

Rena Wood, one of the first caseworkers at GMIAU

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As a result of much footwork on the part of Labour Party supporters and much campaigning by others, in 1986 Manchester City Council agreed in principle to provide £150k per annum for the funding of an Immigration Aid Unit. A steering committee was formed, development workers were appointed for the project and the Unit had an address at the Town Hall. When the time came, Steve Cohen was appointed as its co-ordinator.

However, agreeing in principle was not the same thing as finding the funding in practice. Councillors like John Clegg, John Nicholson and Marilyn Taylor ensured that the council kept the issue on its agenda, and a good deal of lobbying from supporters seems to have been necessary to keep the ball they had set in motion rolling at a decent pace.

The need existed not just in Manchester but in the entire Greater Manchester area. All Manchester’s ‘satellite’ towns had substantial immigrant populations, and later people seeking asylum would be ‘dispersed’ over the whole conurbation.

But by 1989 Greater Manchester no longer existed as a unit of local government. This was a result of the abolition of metropolitan county councils by the Thatcher government in 1986. However the Association of Greater Manchester Authorities

(AGMA) still had a small quantity of money in its gift in the form of grants available for projects which served the whole of the former Greater Manchester local authority area. Members of the steering committee and other supporters lobbied AGMA councillors, urging the case for funding a unit that would benefit communities all over the Greater Manchester area. Many were convinced, but not enough to get an overall majority when it came to voting.

Besides Manchester City Council, three other councils – Tameside, Rochdale and Bury – did pledge funds, on condition that the Unit would provide outreach surgeries in their communities.

Nonetheless the Unit kept to the name ‘Greater Manchester’ Immigration Aid Unit since in its own eyes it was, and still is, committed to supporting people from the whole area.

All in all, it was three years from Manchester City Council’s initial endorsement of the project of an immigration aid unit before sufficient funding was in place and work could begin.

Instead they gave the money to a dog sanctuary.

That’s where the money went, to our big disappointment.

I can’t remember exactly what we applied for but I think the dogs’ home got £55,000.

Finn Jensen

8 … the rented Cheetham Hill Road premises belonged to Manchester City Council. It got a bit crowded as we got busier but it was a lot better than New Mount Street.

We used second hand furniture, the building was completely refurbished, so it looked nice and welcoming but it was a bit cramped.

The caseload just kept growing and a lot of desperate people kept coming, even from outside Greater Manchester, saying they felt their solicitors hadn’t dealt properly with their cases.

Finn Jensen

1990s: In the midst of the community – Cheetham Hill Road Initially GMIAU operated from temporary premises in New Mount Street, off Rochdale

Road. It started to produce a

newsletter reporting on progress and campaigns, it published information leaflets and it

was already providing training

sessions for immigration advice workers.

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ut to be able to offer regular advice and representation for individual clients, it needed premises that were easily accessible to the communities it served, properly equipped with interviewing rooms to ensure privacy for the clients. Not only must the premises be suitable for service delivery but it was very much part of the original vision that the Unit should work in the midst of the community it served. Eventually a suitable building was identified in Cheetham Hill Road and in January 1990, the date we take as the anniversary, GMIAU opened its doors to the general public for the first time.

By all accounts 400 Cheetham Hill Road was an exciting place to work in.

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It was a fabulous working there every kind of case was coming through – visitors, family reunion, asylum cases.

Yvonne Prince, caseworker

It was exciting in the sense that we took on all kinds of fights for our clients … all you could do was keep fighting.

Finn Jensen

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From the beginning, legal advice and legal casework went hand

in hand with campaigning and

it was established policy that as well as representing clients on

the basis of whatever their legal

Drawing on community experience/ empowering the community

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or this, the Unit needed workers who had connections to the local black communities and had experience of what it was like to be subject to immigration control. They often also had language skills that were very useful to the Unit when it came to dealing with people who had limited English.

But caseworkers also had to understand the nature of the law and how decisions could be contested. This

combination was not always easy to find, as Marilyn Taylor (Management Committee Chair for several years in the 1990s) recalls on these pages.

Anti-deportation campaigning became less of an expectation of workers as casework became the main raison d’être of the Unit. By about 2000 the Unit was not directly involved in this kind

claim was caseworkers would

give the same emphasis to antideportation campaigns.

I remember having discussions after a job interview where we had interviewed two people, one of whom was a very grass roots person and one had a much more legal background – because they were both in their way really good. Are we going to have this community person who probably isn’t as good in terms of legal stuff – or are we going to have this technical legal person? … so we were aware of the tensions at the time.

Marilyn Taylor

11 … because there had been such a strong campaign to set up the Unit, everybody felt they had a piece of it in terms of trying to create an accountability for a Management Committee … it was and perhaps still is quite a hybrid organisation.

Marilyn Taylor

of campaigning (although for some time it provided office space for the National Coalition of AntiDeportation Campaigns, now renamed as ‘Right to Remain’). As we shall see, the GMIAU was to fulfil its campaigning mission in other ways.

The Management Committee embodied similar tensions. Its founding members always saw GMIAU as belonging to the community it served and accountable to it, and believed therefore the community should be involved in running it (It was and technically still is a membership organisation).

In the early days the Management Committee

tended to be large – thirteen places in 1992 plus ten co-opted places for representatives of bodies such as the local councils who were funding the Unit and local Trades Unions.

Steve Cohen’s job title was ‘coordinator’ and not ‘director’. He certainly saw himself as primarily responsible for service delivery, a lead caseworker rather than a manager. Indeed he would probably have liked the Unit to be run as a cooperative and had occasionally described it as such. At that time the Management Committee had a lot of business to get through in setting up

structures, employment contracts and procedures.

Inclusiveness did not always make it easy to do this quickly. Marilyn Taylor recalls on this page that in the early days some Management Committee meetings were open to community supporters.

While GMIAU always aimed to draw on the specific experience of people who had been subject to immigration controls, this has been done in different ways over time. And some people were very keen to give something back.

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Florence Okolo, middle

Florence Okolo Florence faced deportation in the early 1990s when her husband abandoned her and her two

children and left the country

(she had come to the UK on his visa as a dependent).

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he GMIAU took on her case and helped her mount a campaign – and eventually she won her right to remain. She recalls below when she was invited to join the Management Committee in August 2002.

Florence worked with Save the Children to produce a teachers pack ‘A fight to belong’, the story of the Okolo family from 1993-1997. Florence is still a member of the Board of Trustees.

It was like giving something back to the community … I didn’t know quite what to expect but it was about contributing, giving courage to people facing the same problems that I had faced, and also I got a sense of belonging. Over the years the Unit has changed quite a lot but the staff are still united in terms of helping people … they don’t look at the clock, they are there to help people survive, to make a difference. Now I have a busy job as a social worker and I don’t have so much time to come to meetings as before, but I know that there are still people out there in the same situation I was in, because I see them in my work.

Florence Okolo

14 More recently other means of involving the skills and

experience of former clients

or channeling that experience into the community have been explored.

Community leadership

F

or example, we are currently running a leadership training programme for people who have leave to remain and who were former clients of the Unit. Its purpose is to recognise the skills and experience which many people bring but which may have been lost during the process of claiming asylum or waiting for a positive outcome to their case. The project aims to involve people more centrally in developing and improving services, campaigning, and decision-making.

Empowerment also came through training.

From the beginning the Unit has had a tradition of ‘growing its own’ caseworkers, even though the qualification requirements of immigration caseworkers (demanded by government as well

Every Thursday we would have a meeting and the training would not necessarily be formal, but there would be a topic that was identified and each member of staff had to talk through it. So once you were prepared you were able to deliver, you could learn immigration law in practice.

Yvonne Prince, case worker

as the Legal Services Commission, now Legal Aid Agency, and professional bodies) became more and more rigorous and expensive. Yvonne Prince, one of the first caseworkers to be appointed, originally had a background in community activism and experience of anti-deportation campaigning and had worked at the Town Hall.

She talks about her impressions on this page.

As well as providing in-house training for its staff and specialised training for other professional groups concerned with immigrants, GMIAU provided accessible training in issues relating to immigration law that were open to the community. For instance, in the summer of 1990 it was offering non-legalistic courses for all advice workers on ‘Divided families and DNA testing’, ‘Basic immigration law’ and ‘1992 and immigration controls’ (No One Is Illegal, no 2 Spring 1990). GMIAU cannot take on as many cases as there is need for but still works with groups like Women Asylum Seekers Together (WAST) to provide workshops and training so that people can equip themselves with a good understanding of the processes and what they need to do.

Carry on campaigning Another important aspect of

GMIAU work in the 1990s was

publication. The Unit produced many pamphlets providing

information and commentary on aspects of immigration

controls, keeping the issues

that had provided the initial impulse for the founding of GMIAU alive to the public.

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any of these pamphlets were published in community languages as well as English.

Some important publications on health and immigration controls came out of a collaboration between GMIAU and Manchester Metropolitan University Department of Applied Community Studies, funded by a grant from the King’s Fund. One such was ‘They make you sick; essays on immigration controls and health’ written by Steve Cohen and researcher Debra Hayes (1998). This covered the history of exclusion from the UK on health grounds, the racialisation of disease and attempts to limit access of non-residents to health care (still an issue today, though at that time the issue of HIV was the crucial driver of public thinking).

… my placement is of significant value within the social work field as it provides an in-depth understanding of the difficulties faced by migrant families and heightens the importance of social work practice within the immigration sector, which is an area I feel is undervalued within the profession.

Rosemary Magaya, student at Salford University

15 Another important issue addressed by GMIAU in the 1990s which continues to be very much alive today was that of convicted foreign national prisoners.

Many people convicted of a criminal offence were liable to suffer the ‘double punishment’ of being deported at the end of their sentence, even if they had British partners or children. GMIAU joined with Partners of Prisoners (POPs) and the Manchester branch of the National Association of Probation Officers to launch the Campaign Against Double Punishment in 1991. GMIAU collaborated on the production of discussion documents and information leaflets for prisoners and their families. As a result of this campaign Phil Tarbuck, a Manchester probation officer, was brought into contact with GMIAU – an encounter which was to prove very fruitful. Phil was later to serve for many years as Chair of the GMIAU Management Committee until his death in 2008. George Brown, Steve Cohen’s successor as director of the Unit remembers Phil (see following page).

In 2004 Phil was instrumental in extending the training offered by GMIAU to social work students from Salford University who would undertake placements at the Unit as part of their degrees.

Later students were also accepted from Manchester Metropolitan University.

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He was a brilliant chair, always supportive, you could phone him up at any time of day. Phil’s approach made my job a lot easier.

George Brown, former director of GMIAU about Phil Tarbuck

Phil Tarbuck left, and Ursula Sharma, centre back

2000s: Hybrid no longer?

The shift to legal aid funding and greater regulation Funding has always been an

issue for GMIAU and probably

always will be. Even at the start, the core funding did not cover

everything the Unit would have

liked to do. By the mid 1990s the appointment of more staff with

a legal training and qualification

meant that the Unit could attract more public funding.

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T

an indication of the quality of GMIAU work and its national standing that our caseworkers themselves now deliver training for these very OISC exams).

1999 also saw the passing of the Immigration and Asylum Act which created the Office of the Immigration Services Commissioner (OISC). The OISC had powers to regulate immigration advice services. Anyone giving immigration advice who was neither accredited with the OISC nor exempt would be committing a criminal offence. For accreditation special examinations had to be passed, so of course all the caseworkers at GMIAU had to take these exams in order to continue to practice, even if they had been giving immigration advice for years. (It is

Former director George Brown comments on this shift from community organisation to specialised law centre on the following page.

he Access to Justice Act of 1999 created the Legal Services Commission and now almost all legal aid was delivered through contracts between the LSC and solicitors’ firms, law centres and other advice agencies. To qualify for such a contract an agency had to conform to certain standards and structures, so in order to compete the Unit had to move from a relatively informal and community based entity to a more formal, regulated, and hierarchical system. Official policies were required and regular appraisal systems.

The rationalisation of legal aid delivery was motivated more by government concerns about levels of legal aid spending than concern for clients but the increased formalisation of structures stemming from these changes was no bad thing in itself and the introduction of OISC regulation did weed out some of the unscrupulous immigration advisors that preyed on desperate clients. However it marked a shift from an ideal of accountability to the local community to a reality of accountability to a number of statutory bodies.

Working at the Unit had always been stressful just because of the sheer volume of cases brought by people affected by immigration legislation. It

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became even more pressured with the explosion of asylum cases in the late 1990s – largely as a result of wars in the Balkans, the Middle East and Africa.

Not only were the numbers of people seeking refuge in the UK increasing, but more people were being located in the North West. The 1999 Immigration and Asylum Act set up a dispersal system to relieve the pressure on the London area and the South East. People seeking asylum were given no choice as to where they were to live in UK while they were waiting for their cases to be settled, and no regard was taken of prior connections someone might have or the presence of family members in the UK who might support them. Greater Manchester was second only to Glasgow in terms of the number of people it was allocated for dispersal in 2001, with the result that organisations like GMIAU saw increased pressure on their services.

I think it is fair to say that we did become a more professional legal organisation … it was a difficult balance because the cases also became more legalistic as the law became more complicated. And then there was the issue of accreditation – dealing with that and also exams, that affected some people more than others.

I certainly felt that some people had difficulty going from core funding to depending on legal aid work, in making that transition.

George Brown, former director of GMIAU

Going the extra mile One of the problems with legal aid funding has always been that the

funds made available by the Legal Services Commission (LSC) and its

successor the Legal Aid Agency have

seldom covered the actual hours that a committed caseworker might need to spend on a complex case (and

many asylum cases are very complex).

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herefore to serve its clients well and maintain its reputation for excellence in this kind of work, the Unit has sought additional funding to cover the work that legal aid does not cover. In 2004 the LSC imposed limits on the number of hours that could be paid for in respect of immigration and asylum cases. This was especially difficult in the case of complex asylum claims as former senior solicitor Permjit Loomba recalls on this page. In 2007 the fixed fee system was introduced for immigration and asylum cases, further discouraging law firms from spending more than the minimum time on complex cases.

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However the willingness to ‘go the extra mile’ has been part of the ethos of GMIAU, as has been noted and appreciated by clients. A good example is the case of Prossy Kakooza who fled Uganda after she had been arrested and tortured by police because she was lesbian. She describes on the next page her relief when, having had great difficulty in finding any competent solicitor to represent her, her case was accepted by GMIAU. Prossy now has refugee status and has found employment with the Red Cross. Happily she has been reunited with her partner who is also now in the UK. Not every case can be won, but good legal representation can turn lives around.

And it is not just among clients that GMIAU earned an enduring reputation and respect as George Brown recalls on the following page.

We were constrained in terms of how much time we could spend on cases and that had an impact, certainly on me. It was quite difficult for me to limit myself to only two or three hours on a statement for example.

Naturally many of our clients were not English speaking and we had to work through an interpreter. This added new dimension to our work administratively in that we had to find and book the right interpreters … I also remember having to do greater and more indepth research into the conflicts and oppression in the countries clients came from in order to try and understand as fully as I could the client’s story.

Permjit Loomba, former senior solicitor

20 That was the point at which I felt that someone was actually doing something to help. I felt that someone was feeling my frustration, someone was frustrated on my behalf and it felt good … I don’t have enough words in the English language to say how good (my caseworker) was. She was so good. One time she had to take a statement, it sticks out in my mind how she went out of her way, she stayed behind after hours until after 7 o’clock to take my statement. You won’t get many professionals who are going to stay after their working hours like that. … She supported me, and when we went to court (she) got me a really good barrister. … She put so much work into it. When I look back on it now I think that someone chooses what is good for your case, not just what is going to look good for them.

Prossy Kakooza

We did have a regional and a national profile. Our training was always well attended. And when we went to court we were always well respected and that remains the case. The power and reputation of the Unit was illustrated to me when during one of the ‘surgeries’ two policemen tried to come in to arrest a guy who had come in for advice. He had come in to get advice on making an application to regularise his stay. … The police had found a letter we had sent him with the time of the appointment so they knew he would be there and had come to arrest him with a view to deporting him. Someone called me and I remember going out and explaining to the police who we were and the purpose of the Unit. And surprisingly rather than arrest him they said, ok, let him make his application. And it turned out that once he put the application in everything was OK. It was partly me that persuaded them, but partly respect for the organisation.

George Brown, former director of GMIAU

Farewell to Cheetham Hill Road By around 2000 it had become clear that the GMIAU had outgrown the premises at Cheetham Hill Road.

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he Unit had expanded, and GMIAU’s third director Gary McIndoe rightly described them as ‘cramped and labyrinthine’. Those who served on the Management Committee at that time will remember meetings where one of their number had to perch on the photocopier. Phil Tarbuck, by then chair of the Management Committee, led the search for a more spacious home and eventually the Unit moved to Crumpsall. This was a considerable upheaval but everybody had more space as Gary wrote in the annual report of 2003 (see box on the following page).

But there was a concomitant loss of ‘atmosphere’.

At Cheetham Hill Road the Unit had seemed part of the community, at the hub of a busy shopping area used by people of many races, religions and cultures. (There had been a proposal to retain a lease on 400 Cheetham Hill Road and to develop

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it as a refugee resource, but the Manchester City Council did not agree to this). The area lacked that ‘buzz’. But if the area lacked the curry houses and Asian sweet shops of Cheetham Hill at least it had a branch of Slattery’s (now – alas – closed) which provided cakes, sandwiches and delicatessen for caseworkers’ lunches and GMIAU events.

Not everyone in the neighbourhood welcomed an ‘immigration aid unit’; in 2003 some local well wisher heaved a brick through the glass of the front door and in 2008 a lad from a local racist group poured petrol through the letterbox and tried to ignite it. This happened in broad daylight on a Saturday afternoon, so the very amateurish arsonist was arrested and sentenced to prison for three years.

Mostly however the area could be described as fairly peaceful apart from the sounds of ambulances on their way to the North Manchester General Hospital.

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The new offices offered staff and clients an infinitely better environment in which to give and receive advice. We have accessible interview facilities … we have a calm and welcoming casework area, we have a meeting and training room.

We even have a library room.

All things that seemed distant dreams at 400 Cheetham Hill Road.

Gary McIndoe, former director of GMIAU

If we ever worried that people would not find our new ‘off the beaten track’ location such fears were unfounded; the need for our services was stronger than ever. Successive immigration legislation had ensured that people seeking asylum and undocumented migrants remained in an impoverished limbo. The Asylum and Immigration Act of 1996 made it a criminal offence for anyone to employ a person who did not have permission to live and work in the UK. The Immigration and Asylum Act of 1999 removed benefits from people seeking asylum , who now had to rely on the pittance dispensed by National Asylum Support Service (often in the form of vouchers). The right to work has been removed from asylum applicants

so that they have no option but to rely on the meagre support provided by the state. Most so-called ‘failed’ asylum seekers ( i.e. those whose claims have been refused) would not even qualify for this. The result has been a massive rise in destitution among people coming to this country to seek refuge, a matter of increasing concern not just to organisations like GMIAU but to city councils, church groups and voluntary organisations who deal with the needs of people fleeing persecution. If a person does not have a roof over their head and struggles to feed and clothe themselves and their children, they are going to be ever more reliant on agencies that can provide free advice and representation, such as GMIAU.

Preparing for a tougher climate Caseloads were expanding and there was greater uncertainty about local authority funding.

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y 2007 both Bury and Rochdale had withdrawn their funding for the Unit under coalition government massive cuts in local authority spending was to reduce that kind of funding further. In 2007 the decision was taken to apply for charitable status, which our fourth director Beate Dasarathy had been urging for some while. This was not a decision taken lightly, indeed it was hotly debated. Whilst charitable status would allow us to apply for funding from a wider range of agencies, it would mean abandoning the Unit’s principled opposition to all immigration controls, enshrined in our original constitution (a charity cannot have as its purpose changes to the law of the land; there was and still is a suspicion of charities that are too ‘political’). However the opportunities which charitable status would give us were persuasive and GMIAU became a charity in 2008.

Without this the Unit might not have survived the funding cuts that were to come, and we do not think it has compromised our ability to do the kind of campaigning we do best.

Another profound change came about in 2007.

Up to this point the director had always been a caseworker, with his or her own caseload, supervising the other caseworkers, and leading by example. This was a more than full time job; what with managing caseworkers and an increased support staff and accounting to our funders there was little time for the director to search out new forms of funding. The Management Committee had authorised a reduction in Beate’s caseload so that she could spend more time on seeking funding but it was difficult to get a satisfactory balance. When Beate left to work at the Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture (now Freedom from Torture) it was decided that it was time to recruit a director who was not a caseworker and who therefore could devote their energies full time to management and fund raising.

The job description of the director was completely rethought and Denise McDowell, who took up post as director of GMIAU in 2008 and remains as director today, was the first who was not also a lawyer. This changed the Management Committee’s role which, GMIAU now being a charity, became a Board of Trustees concerned with governance rather than management.

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This was a difficult period when a lot of work went into bringing GMIAU onto a firmer financial footing, improving its resilience and its internal structures.

However this work is paying off. While core funding remains an issue, GMIAU has been successful in attracting funds for important projects which have enabled it to enhance its services to particularly vulnerable groups of people. For instance GMIAU has at different times received funds from the Diana Princess of Wales Memorial Fund and Lloyds TSB for work with unaccompanied children; from Comic Relief to support women who are seeking asylum and who have been subject to violence; from Lankelly Chase to support people who are destitute; from MAC Aids Foundation for people with HIV; and from AB Charitable Trust to advise refugees to make family reunion applications when this area went out of scope with LASPO in 2013. All these help us to sustain the organisation and continue to ‘go the extra mile’ for our clients.

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2010s: Access to justice under threat Even with the advantages that

charity status provided, conditions

still required continued adaptation to ways in which legal aid was

funded, not to mention the knock on effects of government cuts in other areas. One could say that

during GMIAU’s lifetime there has hardly been a time when legal aid spending has not been a concern of government.

L

egal aid was introduced in 1949 under the Legal Aid and Advice Act. Although means tested, it has generally been regarded as an integral part of the welfare state, though it has never had the popular support that the NHS enjoys. As we have seen, GMIAU has had to constantly respond to new requirements and new reductions in funding.

Tendering for legal aid contracts in 2010, and the chaos that followed, almost closed many smaller notfor-profit organisations. We faced a substantial cut of 70% in anticipated legal aid funding – but survived when the national organisations who won most of the work went into administration. Worse was to come in 2013 as result of the Legal Aid Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act (LASPO) when most immigration work was removed entirely from the scope of legal aid. This includes Article 8 cases, deportation, refugee family reunion, and entry clearance applications and appeals.

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The residence test, which was to have been introduced in August 2014 and would have wreaked further havoc, was successfully challenged and has been ruled ‘discriminatory and unlawful’ by the Administrative Court. The government says it is going to appeal.

The campaigning energies of GMIAU have more recently been focused on the issue of access to justice and other policy issues, such as the detention of children, rather than to individual campaigns.

This isn’t to say that we don’t still support individual campaigns – we do, but not as much as we did in the past. The climate is different and it’s harder to sustain some of this work now. Our banner has been present at demonstrations against detention and deportation of people seeking asylum, and against progressive cuts to legal aid. We work closely and have collaborated with other organisations

26 who share our concerns. GMIAU is part of the Manchester based campaigning group Access to Advice which campaigns for public funding for advice services, and we’re an active member of Justice Alliance North which brings together groups concerned with the crisis in legal aid.

Denise McDowell has spoken at various public meetings and recently gave evidence to the Justice Select Committee about the impact of the cuts to legal aid and the harm this is causing to families and individuals.

Another response to this crisis has been to inform and train people so that they can take whatever steps are within their power to help themselves or help others. In 2013, GMIAU, working with 5 local advice agencies, set up a volunteering project to increase advice provision in the city. Outreach sessions and workshops with community groups enable GMIAU caseworkers to disseminate information about, for instance, making fresh claims, gathering evidence and documentation.

However the Coalition Government explicitly pursues a policy of making life hard for immigrants in the expectation that this will deter people from coming here. The Immigration Act of 2014 prohibits those who are not ‘lawfully’ in the UK from opening bank accounts or entering into rental agreements with landlords, and restricts access to NHS healthcare. Remember the infamous vans emblazoned with the slogan ‘Go home or face arrest’? Yet many of our clients did not ‘choose’ to come to the UK; they came because they were desperate to leave a situation where they were abused, persecuted or tortured, or perhaps because they were trafficked. Successive governments have cut away at their capacity to access justice and lead a dignified life. They are supported in this by a public climate which is ever more inclined to demonise immigrants – at the present time we see the main political parties competing with each other in a disgraceful ‘Dutch auction’ as to how ‘tough’ they are going to be on immigrants in future.

Pandering to the perception that our legislation inhibits the deportation of ‘undesirable’ migrants,

the Conservative party plans, if elected, to withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights , which has been a crucial tool in getting justice for so many of our clients!

Austerity and continued welfare cuts encourage the poor to blame migrants, while insecurity of employment and the shrinkage of the welfare state make for an atmosphere favourable to xenophobia.

The British National Party have been eclipsed in GMIAU’s lifetime, but the United Kingdom Independence Party now have a strong presence in Greater Manchester.

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Denise McDowell, current director of GMIAU

28 The law centre movement

burgeoned in the 1970s when

many local advice centres were set up to provide provided free

legal advice and representation

on a variety of issues, especially

welfare, housing and immigration.

Last law centres standing?

T

hese initiatives were staffed by community workers and trained lawyers and volunteers (the lawyers usually earning far less than they might have earned in the private legal sector).

As a result of the cuts in legal aid spending and increasingly restricted scope of legal aid which we have noted, only a minority of these are still in operation – in Greater Manchester only two other law centres, Bury and Rochdale, now remain beside the GMIAU. All this in spite of the present government’s celebration of ‘localism’ and ‘ the big society’ and its lauding of volunteering and the voluntary sector!

Increasingly organisations in the voluntary sector are obliged to compete with each other for funds available from charitable foundations in order to plug the ever widening cracks that are appearing in the welfare state. Voluntary sector organisations which are also charities are likely to come under ever tighter regulation and scrutiny if the draft Protection of Charities Bill ever comes to be law. This need not be a bad thing in itself of course but one has to suspect the motives of a government that has also introduced the so called Charities and Lobbying Act of 2014 (the so called ‘gagging bill’) which allows the government to regulate charities’ spending on campaigning during the run up to a general election. In 2002 David Blunkett, Home Secretary

at the time, caused a furore when he attempted to freeze lottery funding to the National Coalition of Anti-deportation Campaigns (now renamed ‘Right to Remain’) on the grounds that ‘the Home Office would have serious concerns if the cash was being used to undermine its crackdown on illegal immigration’. NCADC rightly got its money in the end. We may see more of this sort of thing.

Nonetheless GMIAU has survived, adapted and grown without, we think, compromising our original overall values. When GMIAU opened in 1990 it had six members of staff (co-ordinator, administrator and four case workers). Now it has a staff of nineteen, of whom eleven are caseworkers. It has remained faithful to its original impulse whilst of necessity changing with the times. It has contested the injustices suffered by those subject to immigration controls all the way. The motivation of its staff is strong as ever – on the following page are some of their observations about working at GMIAU. So, in spite of everything , there is much to celebrate!

The future is in our hands.

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… at the end of the day our clients are people, they don’t have a voice and when they do have a voice it is often shouted down … So it’s quite nice to try and help them get their side of the story told.

It is a high pressured job with low recognition … but when you get those good results, when you give the client the status papers, when you tell them that they can relax, it feels very good .

I tell my family that I really do enjoy the work I do because of the ultimate change that you can make to someone’s life, I wouldn’t do anything else.

That level of satisfaction does not come with doing, say an IT job or being an engineer somewhere.

Greater Manchester Immigration Aid Unit (GMIAU) 1 Delaunays Road Crumpsall Green Manchester M8 4QS Telephone: 0161 740 7722 Fax: 0161 740 5172 Email: info@gmiau.org Web: www. gmiau.org @gmiau_northwest Immigration.Aid.Unit

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