Only a handful of the 1,000 survivors of torture or violence who have arrived in Britain under the government’s Syrian vulnerable refugee resettlement programme have received specialist help, charities have told MPs.
MPs on the Commons public accounts committee said it was “a stark fact” that more than half of the refugees resettled in Britain by the end of June last year had suffered torture or violence and it was critical that such people received specialist support.
Britain pledged to take 20,000 of the most vulnerable Syrian refugees from camps in the Middle East by 2020 after David Cameron and Theresa May refused to take part in the European Union’s plans to relocate thousands of Syrian refugees who had crossed the Mediterranean and reached Europe.
The MPs say in their report, published on Friday, that there are enough indicative pledges of support from local authorities around Britain to meet the 20,000 target but say it is essential these are turned into firm offers of resettlement places for the scheme to succeed.
The committee commended the Home Office, local authorities and others for their efforts on delivering the scheme: “After a concerted effort to resettle 1,000 before Christmas 2015, the programme sensibly took a step back in early 2016 to redesign a more sustainable programme. However, meeting the overall target to resettle 20,000 of the most vulnerable Syrian refugees in the UK by May 2020 remains a significant challenge.”
The MPs have called on the Home Office and the local authorities involved to undertake a full review of how torture victims on the scheme are being identified and supported.
The committee concluded the review was necessary because “it is not clear that survivors of torture are receiving the specialist support and treatment they need”.
They reached this conclusion after being told by Freedom from Torture, the only organisation dedicated to the treatment of torture survivors in Britain, that “just a handful of Syrians” had been referred to them for help and their offers to assist on a bigger scale had so far been overlooked.
Lucy Gregg of Freedom from Torture said: “We know that over half of those being resettled in the UK as part of this programme are survivors of torture or violence. Yet on arriving in this country, there are serious gaps in the process of identifying them and making sure they have access to the specialist services they desperately need to recover from their traumatic experiences.”
The Home Office told the MPs that it was up to local authorities to make sure the relevant support and services were in place and that it could be difficult to identify whether refugees were survivors of torture before they arrived in Britain because of their concerns about revealing their experiences to a stranger.
Meg Hillier, Commons public accounts committee chair, said: “Syrians now make up the largest refugee population in the world and the UK is playing its part in helping people who are truly desperate. While the programme team was right to take a fresh look at the programme last year, more work is needed to make it sustainable in the longer term.”
