 Fyelodau i gael i gael i gael i'r ysgolwgrwyddiant a Fyelodau Llywodraeth Cymru. Fyelodau i chi wedi'i gael i gael i gael i gael i Ffoisil Choudhry. Oedden nhw'n cyfrifio'r ffordd i gael i'r perthynau ddweud hynny i gael i ei wneud i gael i gael i 3 i 4 i private. Felly chi'n dweud, wrth gwrs. Mae'r main item of business this morning is an evidence session on refugees and asylum seekers. The committee has been holding some stand alone sessions to explore the breadth of its remit. We will use the evidence heard during these sessions to begin to establish priorities for our work programme over the parliamentary session. Given that this topic is also of interest to the Equalities and Human Rights Committee, we invited members of that committee to join today's session. In addition to Pam Duncan-Glancy, who is a member of both committees, I also welcome Pam Gosall MSP to our meeting, and Pam is joining us remotely. I also welcome to our meeting today our panel, who are also joining us remotely. We have Andrew Morrison, who is chief officer of COSLA's migration, population and diversity team. We have Pat Toker, assistant chief officer of public health protection, complex needs, Glasgow city health and social care partnership. We also have Alistair Dinney, refugee and migration programme manager, City of Edinburgh, Calamacive, director of communities Western Isles Council, and Susan Aitken, leader of Glasgow City Council. A few housekeeping points before we start. Please allow our broadcasting colleagues a few seconds to turn your microphones on before you start to speak. For those who are joining us remotely, witnesses can indicate with an R in the dialogue box in BlueJeans, or simply with a show of your hand if that's not working. I'll try and keep my eyes on all of you if you wish to come in in a question. Everyone should check that they can see the dialogue box right now on the right hand side of their screen. That would be really helpful. Witnesses don't feel as if you have to answer every single question. There's quite a few of you today. If you don't have anything new to add to what's been said by others, that's absolutely okay. You're also welcome to follow up and writing any points that you think you need clarified or that haven't been covered, or supply further information at any points that have been raised after the meeting. I would also invite members to direct their questions to particular panellists because we do have a lot to get through this morning. I'm going to start with our questions and I'm going to start off with my colleague Natalie Dawn, who's joining us remotely, for questions on theme 1, and then I will bring in Jeremy Balfour after that. Over to yourself, Natalie. Thank you. Thanks, convener, and good morning, panel. The first question that I will ask is, what efforts have been made to improve the data on asylum seekers' refugees and people with no recourse to public funds? Sorry, I will direct that first to Susan and Pat, please. Good morning, everyone. I think that Pat will be able to answer this in more detail than me, as the operational issues are very much the expert on that. I would say that the data is owned by the Home Office. Glasgow, in partnership with the Home Office, has been involved in a data pilot to try and improve the flow of data into not just ourselves but to partners such as the Scottish Refugee Council, for example, and obviously the Home Office contractors, such as MIRS, as well. I would say that that has had mixed success. There was an improvement in the flow of data that did allow us to respond and to share information with partners, but it isn't something that we can compel the Home Office to do. It isn't something that we can insist on. It has been an entirely voluntary arrangement, and it is fair to say that it has been a little bit patchy, but it was something that we tried following the previous contractor circle. They announced that they were going to undertake the cessation of around 300 accommodated asylum seekers in the city, and it emerged that, in fact, we, as a local authority, did not have access to a lot of the data on those individual households, and it emerged that a lot of them, for example, hadn't exhausted their appeals process, and that some of them had already left to remain, but that hadn't been shared with us as a local authority. There were all sorts of problems and issues with the sharing of the data, so we have worked in partnership to try to improve that. It has improved, but there is still quite a bit of progress to make to shape our understanding of the status of asylum seekers and people who are transitioning to refugee status in Glasgow. I will pass over to Pat at that point, because he has been more directly involved in that pilot work. He has been directly involved, I have, and that has been entirely officer-led. Thank you, Susan. Yes, just to add to that, Susan had mentioned about the asylum data sharing pilot, and that has generated some improvements for us. What I would say is that it remains, it does remain very much an on-going issue. We do require a lot more data to be able to inform what type of service we want to be able to deliver, and that has been a particular challenge. There are a couple of initiatives. For example, there has been national work done with the Home Office by way of a national safeguarding board, which is about getting underneath particularly great context around adult protection, child protection-type scenarios. That remains very much a work in progress, but it is not yielding any particular positive outcomes for us right now. There is also the work that is happening through the end-and-destitution strategy, which will be leaning in with third-sector partners to sharing information. We have better arrangements in terms of sharing information across local authorities about what the experience has been. As Susan said, it remains a real work in progress for us. We do have better arrangements in Glasgow with Mears. There is absolutely no doubt about that. That has improved. There is much more dialogue that allows us to get underneath, not just necessarily the detail but the individual type of scenario. The communication has improved, and although we have some better reporting on data, it still remains an on-going piece of work. I am going to group a couple of questions together to save for time. Obviously, there is still progress to be made in terms of recording the statistics. What benefit do you think there would be to have more accurate data on asylum seekers' refugees and people with no recourse to public funds? Are there any figures available on the number of EEA nationals who have no recourse to public funds? Do we have any statistics on how many people who have claimed asylum do not have access to housing support? I will put that back to you, Pat, if that is... Okay. If you do not mind, I can answer what the value of the data would be. I would probably defer to COSLA, who has a greater national context in some of the data that you are specifically looking at. Advancing the data and the data information share would enhance that considerably. It would allow us, as I touched on earlier on, to be able to anticipate the type of service delivery better. It would allow us to want to case by case to be able to case manage better. It would inform our decision making. It would inform our budgets better in terms of where we want to shift resources and where we anticipate trends, for example. We have a long, long-established relationship with asylum-seeking refugees in Glasgow, and we are reliant on the figures and trends that we have experienced over a number of years. It would be great to get to a point where we have something really quite accurate that allows us to anticipate where we are going in the future. A breakdown of specific demographics, for example, including age group complexity of need, anything in relation to past areas of trauma that would allow us to inform where we are going, would be considerably helpful as well. It is probably not an exhaustive list, to be honest, but there is a substantial amount of improvements that we could make if the information sharing was much more concise and better, up-to-date and contemporary. If we were able to do that, that would allow us to move forward with a more informed service delivery. I think that Andrew Whittle would probably be better to give the context in terms of national figures, which I know that they have been working on. Just to emphasise what Pat said about the benefits of having more accurate data, I suppose, fundamentally enables councils to better understand who is in their communities and their needs, and then to respond accordingly, as Pat was saying. I think that your second question was about EAA national specifically, with no recourse to public funds. Is that right? There were two further questions. Figure is available in the number of EAA nationals with no recourse. Do we have any stats on how many people have claimed asylum do not have access to any house in support? Okay. In terms of EAA nationals, we can extrapolate from UK figures as opposed to having definitive figures for Scotland. Based on UK-wide data and as opposed to going back at a stage, EAA nationals will have no recourse to public funds, either if they are refused status and remain in the UK, or if they have not yet applied status. Those who have pre-settled status have ambiguity about what their rights and entitlements are. Based on UK-wide data, 205,000 people have been refused as of December 2021, so that was 3 per cent of total applications. In terms of Scotland, as of 30 September, the total number of applications received was 299,720. If we can assume that there was the same number of refusals in Scotland, that would be 3 per cent of 300,000. However, as opposed to having anything definitive on Scotland. In terms of those who are not being accommodated, the Home Office has a duty to accommodate everybody who is seeking asylum, who is destitute or is being assessed as being destitute. On that basis, we do not have statistics to suggest that there are large numbers of people who are not being accommodated. In fact, we do not have statistics on that at all, so I do not have figures on that. It was not to try and sort of ease out large numbers, it was just to see if that data is available. No, that is fine, thank you. No further questions in this team, thank you. Thanks very much. Natalie, I can see that Pat would like to come back in briefly just before I bring my colleague Jeremy Balfour in with his questions. Pat? It is just quickly, I do not know if I said something or not, but certainly in Glasgow, we have around about 90 people with no recourse to public funds in accommodation just now, and we have 132 in EU nationals. We have much more no recourse to public funds that are currently supported by our children's family service, and that comes in around about 130. Pretty much that has been the same figure for the last couple of years, so you can imagine the associated on-courses with those figures alone. Absolutely. Okay, thank you. No, that does help, thanks Pat. Thank you. I will hand over to Jeremy Balfour. Thank you, convener, and good morning to the panel. I wonder if I can just look at the numbers that we have, and clearly Glasgow is taking the overwhelming majority and the central Scotland are doing the rest of it. One of the issues that we looked at in the previous Parliament was whether there should be a greater distribution of individuals across the whole of the Scotland. There are obviously advantages and disadvantages to that, but I wonder if I could just ask on the figures, particularly maybe start with the Western Isles, do you think that it would be more helpful that people who came here were distributed across the whole of Scotland, rather than just in one or two local authority areas? Perhaps, I haven't got my glasses on, so I'm slightly struggling to read names, I apologise. Is it Callum from the Western Isles? It is Callum McEver, yes, thanks for the question. Yes, in general terms, it would be beneficial for refugees, asylum seekers and other economic migrants to be spread across Scotland. I think that the criticality in that would be matching the people to the locality. For example, someone coming to a remote island community who has lived in an urban situation in their own home country, coming to a remote island community might be very challenging. Finding the people and matching the people who would best fit that type of locality would be good. So, in the Syrian programme and the Afghan programme that we've dealt with, we've had good matches. The families that have come to the Outer Hebrides have settled in well and have worked well. On the wider question, yes, definitely a good spread across Scotland would be preferable to centralising in the urban areas. If there was to be a greater number coming to an authority such as yourself, what actual resolution would you require to be able to make sure that the appropriate services and facilities were available? One of the big criticalities for us is housing. We are struggling for housing for the general population. For the local population, our registered social land-road heavy-dain housing partnership has worked well with us to find accommodation. Those ideas around accommodation are absolutely critical. We've had a good experience with ensuring that all families coming to our area have received universal credit, so all have received the appropriate funding that they had. If we had greater numbers, it's questionable whether we would be able to achieve that. Having the appropriate housing, having the appropriate support infrastructure, interpreters around the families will be essential. Again, in a remote island community, access to interpreters and people familiar with cultures isn't quite so easy to attract, perhaps. Making sure that the appropriate support service is there is an absolute criticality. I go back to my previous point that matching the families to the area that their destination is will be critical as well. I wonder if I could put the same question to Andrew Coesler. From a Coesler perspective, is there something that we should be looking to do as a policy decision to have a greater geographical spread? Have you looked at one of the issues that came up again last time was around legal advice that the people that are getting legal help mostly work in Edinburgh and Glasgow? It would be very difficult for, say, asylum seeker who was looking for legal advice if they were in more remote parts of Scotland to be able to have that legal advice. Now, whether a zoom has changed that, I don't know if you're just to get your reflection. But as a policy, do you think that that should be something that we should be striving for, or do you think how we're working at the moment is the right policy? Yes, thanks for that question. I think that it's useful to—I think that the broad answer is yes—that there is support across local government to support the UK's humanitarian programmes, and that's a unanimous support across all 32 councils. The challenge that we have is around the different schemes at the moment. With the refugee resettlement schemes and the new schemes around Afghanistan, all 32 are supporting those schemes. In the case of resettlement, we have all received families. In the case of the Afghan scheme, some have not yet received families, and we'll maybe get on to that later on. The challenge is around asylum dispersal and the differential approach that the UK Government has taken to that. As Callum was saying, around resettlement programmes, there's an infrastructure that requires to be built up, and that includes legal advice, importantly, as you said. Local authorities are funded by the UK Government over a number of years to provide those services. With asylum dispersal, there is no central government funding to local government and statutory services whatsoever. That makes it a much more challenging ask, and it makes it much more difficult for councils to volunteer to support that scheme because they don't believe that there is the necessary resources to help them to support the people who come in through asylum dispersal. That's why there's quite a different picture around asylum. Broadly speaking, there is unanimous support from councils to support the UK's humanitarian programmes, and what we've been looking for is meaningful dialogue with UK Government about how we can reform how asylum works so that it's more akin to how councils work in relation to resettlement. In terms of legal advice, absolutely, that's a major challenge for councils and remains a major challenge for councils, and you're right that it's centred largely in Glasgow, even more so than in the central belt. That causes challenges for accessing that. That is a strand of the work that we're doing around ending destitution. The Scottish Government has funded COSLA to provide some case work support to help councils with some of the challenges that they're facing, but it's definitely a much bigger challenge that still exists, as it did when it was addressed in the committee previously. Jeremy, before I bring my colleague Pam Duncan-Glancy and you, just to stick with that point, can I just clarify if you could perhaps talk to the specific issues that councils across Scotland maybe face when it comes to asylum seeking children and how that differs in the support that is on offer in Scotland versus the rest of the United Kingdom and why that perhaps itself gives councils specific problems? Yes, so there's been significant changes around unaccompanied asylum seeking children in the last six months or so. Just to go back about a year or so, the UK Government instituted a consultation around how unaccompanied asylum seeking children should be supported. Obviously, there's significant pressures particularly in the south coast of England, where so many children are coming in. There's a significant number who are being accommodated in hotels even still, which clearly is far opposed to the optimum that you could probably imagine. What they came up with was a voluntary rota system, which Scottish local authorities further discussed through council leaders. They agreed to participate in that on a voluntary basis and had been doing so. Towards the end of the last year, the UK Government has now made that scheme mandatory. Again, its argument is that it needs more councils across the UK to step up to support those children. I suppose that the argument from a local government perspective in Scotland was that we had stepped up and we were looking to support those children already, and we were playing our part in the voluntary rota. At the moment, we're in a bit of a state of flux moving between what was the voluntary scheme and the full implementation of the mandatory scheme, but that will see every council in Scotland likely that some councils have made representations, but it's likely that every council will receive unaccompanied children, and they do receive funding for them in a way that they don't for adults. I think that there are particular challenges for those who are over 18, because once they're over 18, there are on-going responsibilities that councils have to support care leavers, and there is a significant shortfall in the funding envelopes, particularly for over 18s. I'd be happy to share the figures on that, if that's helpful in the back of the meeting. I don't have them in front of me, but we have done work around the costs to councils around care leavers, but also more generally. Thank you very much, Randy. I think that if you did share those figures with us, that would be really helpful considering in Scotland we do have an obligation to children who are care experienced up to their 26th birthday. I'll bring in Pam Duncan-Glancy and then after that, Miles Briggs. Thank you, convener, and good morning to the panel. Thank you for joining us this morning. I have a few questions on the no recourse to public funds, particularly around the mechanisms that a number of organisations and local authorities and others use during the pandemic to try and support people, for example, through self-isolation support. I'm particularly keen to hear a bit more about the public health legislation measures that were used in order to do that and to consider how else we could use some of those mechanisms to support people who have no recourse to public funds. I have another couple of questions on that as well, but maybe I could just put that to COSLA maybe in the first instance, if that's all right, and then possibly to Pat to talk about what are examples and what were the mechanisms, and then I've got a couple of follow-ups. As we hopefully set out a wee bit of information on that in the brief thing that we provided, we worked with councils to develop a framework to help local authorities to use their public health powers to assist people during the pandemic, and that was about providing accommodation to everybody at risk of rough sleeping who wouldn't typically qualify for support, and also was about considering other needs such as financial assistance, access to food and so on, and Pat and other colleagues will be able to talk about that in a bit more detail about what they have done. Obviously, during Covid, we were aware that some councils enhanced the financial support package on that basis. They looked at things like food parcels, free school meal provision, ensuring that there was phone contact with individuals and families. We also introduced a mechanism around the social isolation support grant funding to enable that to be provided to those with no recourse to public funds as well. That was all on the basis of work that we did to ascertain through Public Health Scotland that rough sleeping was indeed a public health risk during the pandemic, and that was the basis for us to develop that framework. I will leave it there at that point and bring colleagues in for specific information, or I am happy to take any other questions from that stage. If you do not mind, on the mechanism that you used for the self-isolation support grant, can you tell us a little bit more about that? I will pick up the point about housing and homelessness. The increase in Glasgow to 27 per cent that we have heard this week, and the Government has said that that is partly due to the increased number of applications from refugees who have been granted leave to remain. Can you elaborate a bit on why that would have had that effect on the number of homelessness applications? I appreciate that there are two separate questions there, but it was just since you touched on it that I am keen to ask. On the social isolation support grant, we can provide more detail in the back of the session, but my understanding is that it was immediately allowable in terms of no recourse to public funds conditions to pay that to people with NRPF. Therefore, we worked with the Scottish Government to develop a mechanism that allowed us to pay an equivalent amount of money to people who had no recourse to public funds. That was the position around that. Sorry, could you repeat the next question that you had? I apologise. Of course, no problem. Thank you and thank you for that clarification. You mentioned that some of the provision that local authorities had put in place was around housing, particularly during the pandemic. I was just keen to ask the Government to have said recently that the increase in homelessness applications in Glasgow was possibly because of an increase in applications from refugees who had been granted leave to remain, so it was just while you were on the subject of housing, could you elaborate a bit on why that would have had that sort of effect on the number of homelessness applications? I was not aware of what they had said recently around that. Off the top of my head, I cannot think why that would be. I wonder if colleagues from Glasgow might know more about that assertion from the Scottish Government. I am happy to take that away and do a wee bit of digging as to why that might have been the case, but I do not know offhand why that would have been the case. Is there any panel member from Glasgow who might be able to help with that? First of all, the question around the relationship to the increase in housing applications, I cannot comment on specifically what that correlation is. I can definitely get the information to you and I can get that forwarded on, but what I can respond to is your question about the mechanism that was in place in which to support those arrangements around the movie cost of public funds. As Andrew Whittle had already mentioned, Glasgow would work very, very closely with the Scottish Government on the production of the guidance itself, and that provided us with a considerable way forward in addressing what was an emerging significant point of pressure for us right at the start of the pandemic. To give you a little bit of context to that, it relates to our homelessness service provision within Glasgow, our rapid rehousing transition planning arrangements and our rough sleeping agenda and our target to completely eradicate rough sleeping. What the mechanism did for us allowed us immediately to be able to access emergency accommodation through our repurposed hotels during the pandemic. At its peak in Glasgow, we had over 600 people in hotels. The figure has thankfully started to come down. As I mentioned earlier on, no recourse to public funds population takes up about 90 of those places on any given day at the moment, but there were far, far more that have actually since came through. The mechanism that was in place allowed us to negotiate with legal third sector food parcels, phone provision and everything else that Andrew has just described, and really put us on the front foot for the first time in a very, very long time to support this population in transitioning. I do feel that this is very, very important to highlight here the staff within the health and social care partnership and third sector, and all of the partners inherently want to do the right thing. This gave a mechanism to do the right thing. By providing this population with emergency accommodation, it has, to all intents, purposes for this population completely eradicated rough sleeping. Glasgow reports currently five rough sleepers in the city centre of Glasgow for the size, scale and demographics of a city like this. That is considerable progress for us. It is important to point out the pre-Covid levels. We were around about 30. This has been quite a significant shift for us, and the guidance provided the mechanism in which to get underneath it and really promote much, much better cohesive, joined up partnership arrangements and much better outcomes for the service user. I did see Councillor Aitken indicating that you wanted to speak. I do not know if you want to add anything to that, Susan. I cannot get the chat to work for some reason. To reinforce what Pat said, there is a danger here of conflating a number of issues. There is the no recourse to public funds issue, which the public health emergency has allowed us to deal with that in a different way with the outcomes that Pat has talked about, with positive outcomes compared to the position that we were in previously, where, as a local authority, we are very restricted by law in the way in which we can support people with no recourse to public funds. Although there are always groups out around 130 or so, Pat will be able to give the exact numbers of families, particularly families with children, who we are able to support, but large numbers of people with no recourse to public funds are single men, for example. It has been the public health emergency that has allowed us to put a new support structure in place and allowed many of those to transition. I should say that, right now, in Glasgow, there are no negative cessations taking place—in other words, the end of people being evicted from asylum accommodation because they are considered appeals exhausted by the Home Office. That is not the case in the rest of the UK. It is back to business as usual in the rest of the UK. We in Glasgow have been very insistent with the Home Office that negative cessations should not start again while we are in a public health emergency, and we have continued with that. The Home Office is very keen to restart negative cessations, so the systems that we have put in place throughout the pandemic, at the moment, I am not sure how long we are going to be able to continue with those, because when the Home Office decides to restart negative cessations, it will make it very challenging for us, as a local authority, to continue providing that additional support for people with no recourse to public funds, who we would not ordinarily be able to support anyway through social work legislation. There is a real challenge coming up there, potentially particularly with that cohort of, for example, single men who are deemed appeals exhausted by the Home Office. Separately from that, there is our homelessness system, and the pressures that are on that day to day, and in a big city like Glasgow, those pressures are always extremely significant, but during the pandemic have grown considerably. There are a whole number of reasons for that, and we could spend a long time talking about the pressures and stresses that have been put on households. The universal credit uplift and the removal of that will undoubtedly have an impact on the numbers of applications. It has always been the case that once someone has been through the asylum process and if they get a positive outcome and they are given leave to remain in the UK, they then move on from being accommodated by the Home Office contractor now mirrors to becoming our responsibility as a local authority, and we then work with our registered social landlord partners and with others to get those people accommodated. They are citizens of Glasgow at that point, and they become our responsibility, and we take that responsibility very seriously. Since Glasgow has always been an asylum authority, a proportion of our homelessness applications are made up of people who have been given leave to remain in the UK. Whether there has been a significant increase in that recently, I am not aware of that. It may be the case, but it is always the case that Glasgow has that cohort within our homelessness applications that does not exist anywhere else in Scotland, because we are the only asylum dispersal authority in Scotland. It was just to clarify that. That will definitely be an element of our current homelessness applications, but the reasons that homelessness applications have increased are complex and varied and are to do with a range of stresses that are being put on all types of households just now that are pushing them to the point of crisis. I should say to which we as a local authority are responding, and Pat will be able to confirm, but there were not just thousands, but tens of thousands of offers of emergency accommodation that were made to people making applications during the pandemic over the past couple of years, and that continues. It was really just to clarify that there are two different issues going on here, and while they overlap with each other, they are not exactly the same issue. Thank you very much for that, Susan. I can see that Pat would like to come in. If you want to come back and just briefly pat before I hand over to Miles Briggs, thanks. Really, just to confirm that figure, since the pandemic had commenced, the offers of emergency accommodation have been well in excess of 20,000 in Glasgow. Thank you very much. Thank you, convener. Good morning to the panel and thank you for joining us today. I wanted to ask a couple of questions with regard to the pressures that councils will be facing, and the COSLA briefing, which is very helpful, highlighted a number of those on local authorities, particularly the pressures on Glasgow City Council and the City of Edinburgh Council. I wanted to ask the panel if they would comment on how they managed to balance those resources, but specifically what work are they doing with the third sector, which can play obviously a very important role to help assist, especially people who have no recourse to public funds. I will maybe start with Callum and then go to Susan. Thank you. Yes, resources are a huge challenge to councils at the moment, and we are having to take very difficult decisions and make very difficult choices about how we utilise available funds. The third sector for us are a critical partner, and we work closely with them to help across a range of different services. We are lucky in this area—refugees, asylum seekers—in that our numbers are very, very small, so we can put in place very bespoke services and get very close to the families that we have. We have worked in close collaboration across the health services with a registered social landlord in the third sector to ensure that appropriate supports have been in place. However, if the numbers for us began to get any bigger, it would be a real challenge to finance that, to resource that and to work with families in the very bespoke way that we are able to do at the moment. Would anyone else like to come in on that? Yes, I am happy to come in a wee bit on that as well. I think that Andrew has already said that, from the point of view of being an asylum authority—sorry, my dog has decided to burst in just at this point—we are not funded for that at all, so Glasgow receives no funding from the UK Government, the Home Office, for being an asylum authority because that is deemed to be provided through the private contractor who provides the accommodation. In actual fact, as Pat has already indicated, there are very significant costs. Where we support families with children who have no recourse to public funds, for example, that is a cost that is significant because those are often very complex needs that we are dealing with. The whole of the asylum seeker and refugee population is a traumatised population who have complex needs. We have to emphasise that. Those are people who, to a greater or lesser degree, every single one of them requires support of some kind because they have come from a very traumatic situation. Indeed, the whole process of removal and going through asylum itself is traumatic. There are very significant costs associated with that, which we carry entirely as a local authority, because, as Pat has already indicated, we believe that it is the right thing to do. We want to have those services in place for people. We are funded for unaccompanied asylum-seeking children, but not to the extent that it is always the case that Glasgow has more unaccompanied asylum-seeking children than we are directly funded for by the Home Office. Again, that is an additional cost as we support those children through our children's services or through foster care or wherever they are placed. It is a significant challenge. I want to make a point quickly that I want to make sure that it is not lost in this discussion. For all of the challenges that we will talk about and the nature of the discussion is that we probably will end up focusing on the challenges and the difficulties that being an asylum authority has caused for Glasgow and does right now. I want to emphasise that we believe in Glasgow City Council and I think that the population in Glasgow believes that having been an asylum dispersal authority has been of enormous benefit to Glasgow and indeed to Scotland, that it has been a social good that has benefited the diversity that is brought to our city, to Scotland as a whole, to Glasgow's communities has been something that we absolutely welcome. I need to make that clear and we are committed to being and remaining an asylum dispersal authority, but the challenges that are put in our way by the way that the system operates just now are significant and at the moment we do carry those pretty much in their entirety. The refugee settlement programmes are different, they are funded, now I think that there are questions over whether they are funded to the extent that they require to be to make them as effective as possible. Our repeated message though and it goes back to an earlier question about the difference between where every local authority in Scotland takes part in the refugee resettlement schemes, but only Glasgow is an asylum dispersal authority. Our repeated message has been that if the asylum system were treated as the Syrian and now Afghan resettlement programmes have been treated and funded from the outset and local authorities provided with that resource, then the local authorities responses at every right across Scotland would be able to be much more effective and the outcomes that we seek both for asylum seekers and refugees and receiving communities in terms of successful integration would be delivered much more effectively. It is that lack of upfront funding for local authorities in the asylum system that is the barrier to other local authorities joining Glasgow and being dispersal authorities but also continues to place very significant challenges in our way as Glasgow City Council in ensuring and trying to direct the best possible outcomes and the best interests both of people seeking asylum in the city and the receiving communities as well. Thank you for that. I know that Andy, Alistair and Pat all wanted to come in so I will bring in Andy and specifically just to refocus my question with regard to the third sector. Just to emphasise a couple of points that Councillor Aitken was mentioning and then I will mention the third sector as well. It was just to say in terms of asylum we together with our partner local government associations across the UK and local government across the UK and the devolved government have been trying to work with the UK Government to demonstrate the costs of support in asylum dispersal specifically and we are continuing to do that work just making that point that Councillor Aitken made about the need for resource to support the work that is done in asylum. I was just going to mention as well in terms of NRPF cases and this comes on to your question as well. I think there's a couple of actions in the ending destitution together strategy that are probably worth flagging here. First of all in terms of councils having the resource to support people with NRPF and specifically destitute families with children and vulnerable adults, we've been doing a couple of things. One, we've been working with local authorities to try and get a clearer picture of what the costs are to them and then in the back of that what we want to do is work with Scottish Government to agree a future funding model that actually supports these people appropriately. The other action that's maybe of particular interest to you in terms of your question is another action in the strategy around developing an action plan with what's called the Everyone Home Collective and that's about creating a route map to ending destitution and that's working directly with third sector partners and with academics and it's about trying to scale up community-based accommodation provision in cases where local authorities won't be able to accommodate people due to the immigration rules. So that's a piece of work that's under way, the charities that are involved in that and there's a number of charities that are involved in that are looking to scale up models and work with major funders to try and bring in resources so that they can as well as the support that's provided by local authorities and by government that they can kind of step in to fill that void that currently exists in terms of supporting people who aren't entitled to statutory support. Whilst we can and do liaison with the wider third sector and other partners to support people with an RPF, the single biggest financial impact on City of Edinburgh Council is housing costs and whether we are supporting people under public health legislation and just briefly the impact of Covid has been to see the numbers and cost of supporting people with no recourse to public funds increase sevenfold in Edinburgh or whether it is under social work legislation the housing cost is one entirely borne by the council and the third sector's ability to help us with that is limited. Thank you and finally Pat and then I'll merge my other questions into one convener just for time. Quite specifically in relation to third sector I think that if the pandemic has taught us anything over the last couple of years in Glasgow is that the partnership arrangements with third sector are more important than ever before and slightly to reiterate what other people have already said but there is a way of mitigating risk and mobilising third sector partners in a really quite a cohesive way that can produce really the outcomes that we want and what I mean by that is where there is a non-statutory requirement for example where there is not a requirement for statutory social work services to be involved third sector play an absolutely critical vital role within that and during the earlier days of the pandemic we stood up a city centre risk meeting within Glasgow given the complexity and need in the city centre with the influx of over 600 people in hotels. We were only able to properly mitigate that risk with the relationship with third sector partners so I think that it's important to highlight just the role really that they play within that and that if we are to genuinely be trauma informed in our approach in the way that we work we have to accept that there is a role for everybody to play in that where there is not a statutory requirement. Thank you very much for that. I wanted to move on in terms of budget pressures specifically this coming budget. We know in terms of the concern which is being expressed around council cuts to funding. Specifically at the local government committee we had Martin Booth who colleagues from Glasgow will know as the executive director of finance at Glasgow city council. He was representing the society of local authority chief executives and senior managers but he did express concern around support for English as a second language which would undoubtedly come under challenge during these budgets. Now we know that amongst the school population in Glasgow around 100 different languages are spoken so I wanted to ask how is that specific issue around the need for language assistance to access services prioritised by councils and I'll maybe ring in Susan and if anyone else wants to answer that can they put an R in the chat as well. Yes so that is an education service in Glasgow. English is an additional language which obviously is for the reasons you see some very important. Our schools are very diverse I don't think there's a single school in Glasgow which doesn't have pupils who have English as an additional language but there are some where there are dozens of languages represented within the school so it is an incredibly important service. It is when budgets are tight because it is not necessarily seen as a core service in terms of teacher numbers it is one that comes under challenge. What I would say is that it's a priority for us in Glasgow where we're going through our budget process just now and that it will be another three weeks or so before the outcomes of that. It is certainly from the point of view of the administration we will do everything that we possibly can to protect that service because we do think it's absolutely essential and that the loss or the reduction of that service would have a detrimental knock-on effect in a number of areas. It is absolutely crucial. Obviously there are also EAL services for people who are older than school age many of which are provided through the further education sector through our colleges for example but the specific service that we provide in our schools is one that is particularly important for Glasgow and one that we certainly want even in the face of budget pressures to retain and ensure that it isn't diminished. I'm not sure if anyone else wants to come in on that. No, I'm not seeing anything in the chat. In that case can I go back on my word and ask another question which I'll do very briefly and it follows on from that. It's with regards to access to healthcare services often the language barriers around that are critically important as well so I wondered in terms of directing this question towards Pat what work is under way around that because it's often we know barriers to access to healthcare already exist for homeless people but people who don't have English as a first language and again if anyone else would like to come in on that question can they put an R in the chat. Thank you. I can't comment on the education part of it that's happening there within the schools in place of the first question but we do have a really comprehensive interpretant services within Glasgow and we have constantly customised that service in relation to the different languages that's required and also the increasing prevalence of the challenge as well and it's something that we're particularly proud of in Glasgow that we've managed to achieve. It will remain a challenge moving on but remains very accessible. Thank you very much for that Pat. I'm going to hand back over to Pam Duncan-Glancy for a question and then I'll move on to my colleague Marie McNair. Thank you convener for indulging me on a further question on this particular issue. I'm just keen to understand a little bit about the support for women who are experiencing domestic violence in particular in the refugee and asylum seeking community. I note that there's concerns around a lack of clarity and funding gaps in support for women in these circumstances. Perhaps Pat and Councillor Aitken can set out what their understanding of that is and what they can do to support women in those circumstances and can I just also put on record my thanks to Glasgow Women's Aid and Women's Aid organisations across the country for what they've done in this year but also in many others to support women. Yes, I can answer that. There is an enormous amount of work going on just now in relation to domestic abuse in Glasgow. Glasgow HSCP will be producing their first whole system strategy later on this year with a target date of April. We are consulting with everybody involved, including Women's Aid and all our key partners, but principally they are a lived experience population in Glasgow and that extends clearly to the asylum seeking refugee population within Glasgow as well and drawing on what their experience has been. We are currently engaged with Professor Breach Featherstone from Huddersfield University and have been for the last couple of years in producing what will be a very contemporary strategy. As I have mentioned, it will be a whole system, it will be children, it will be families, it will be adults, older people, alcohol, drug recovery services, mental health services and really everything else in between. It has been, as I said, a fairly substantial piece of work. To be fair, it was stood up at the beginning of the pandemic. There was a very reasonable assumption that, with lockdown conditions, domestic abuse would, in its own right, be more hidden than it already is. It would become more complex and then, with the aftermath of that, we would be picking up the pieces, if you like, but what we have done is mobilised all of that around all of those services, principally through justice services, mostly through child protection services and children and family services. Clearly, that brings in this entire population. To answer your question, we have been really keen to cut across what the interdependencies are and the complexities, not least around the trauma associated with domestic abuse in the asylum seeking refugee population but also people with disabilities, for example, people with experience and mental health, alcohol drug recovery services across the entire piece. It is something that we are very excited about, because, as I said, it is an entire whole system approach. Up until now, our approach has mostly been delivered by the respective care groups that I mentioned. It will go out to public consultation for a three-month period, and that will likely take place around March, April. I do not know if Councillor Aitken would want to come in on that. I know that I thought Andy did, but he was for the point beforehand. No, I do not really have anything. I am past outlined the work that is going on in Glasgow very well. It will be a significant step change in the way that we approach domestic abuse and gender-based violence services in the city. It has been one of the priorities that is identified by our social recovery group, which was established. It is multi-agency. All the partners around the table, which the council convened quite early on in the first lockdown. Violence against women, gender-based violence, is one of the priorities that has emerged from that and the work that Pat is describing. I think that he is right. I think that it is exciting. We could really see a big step change in a new era for partnership working across those services and accessibility and reach for those services, improving considerably as a result. Thank you very much for that, Susan. I will now hand over to my colleague, Mary McNair, and then that is followed by Natalie Donne. Good morning, convener. Most of my questions on the theme have been covered, but I know that you have highlighted the problems already with access and data, but do you have any indications of the level of unmet need? I will pose that to Pat and Andrew Possible. Andy also wants to come in on it. I am sorry, but can you repeat the last part of the question again? I am just asking, do you have any indication of the level of unmet need? I know that you have already spoken highly to the problems with access and data, so we could maybe answer that. That would be great. I think that to answer that and probably to do with justice, we have an acknowledgement that what we want to do is drive forward more service delivery with the lived experience. I touched on that earlier on around domestic abuse, but it is particularly important for this population. We know that we are not always aware of past trauma, and it is touched on earlier on for us to be genuinely a truly trauma-informed organisation. We need to understand that better. The way in which we engage, extrapolate and obtain information from service users and agree on who is the correct person to do that is not necessarily always social work, for example, perhaps more advocacy support for the third sector, to drive forward effectively where what service users are telling us against what we already know in terms of the research or what we think that we already know will continue to shift and develop the services we move forward. A large part of that was generated from the aftermath of the parking shooting in Glasgow, where we had, engaged and consulted with everybody that was affected by that. We engaged with everyone for the coming week after. It was a very intense piece of work. We were assisted greatly by Mears and by the Scottish Refugee Council and by the health and social care partnership in sitting down with individuals. That gave us a sense of the unmet need that people were describing. Mostly impacted by poverty, in fact, almost all of it was physically related to poverty, and some of it was fairly straightforward. We touched on access to mobile phones earlier on and all of that accessibility. We have made changes to that for people to make sure that their access and contact with their own family and identifying unmet needs will be a continued piece of work for us. I hope that that goes somewhere towards answering your question. No, that is absolutely fine. You have highlighted that someone has been available in Scotland to assist. What other ways do you think there are to provide financial support to people with no recourse to funding and public funding within the devolved powers that they have? Yes. We have spoken a lot today about the role of third sector. I think that, for this population, the statutory services and social worker and the local authorities are somewhat constrained with opportunities and greater opportunities for third sector to do that. It would be helpful if there was a further consultation on what is a realistic financial budget for third sector to pick that up, especially when we know that there is a substantial proportion of that population that does not require that on-going statutory type of engagement, touched on earlier on in relation to the children and families aspects of that. However, when it comes to adults, it is not as clear in relation to how we can intervene, notwithstanding adult support and protection legislation, for example in the mental health legislation. However, there is a requirement to mitigate the impact of past trauma in a different way. I think that there are greater opportunities for a third sector to find their role and for them to be funded in that regard and funded on a more recurring basis. That is just one example. I could think of that would be a greater assistance. Clearly, any other alternative arrangements that would mitigate poverty have touched on throughout the discussion. The subsistence that is provided is not necessarily to have any parity with what is the welfare benefits, which is already at minimum. There is a gap in between that, so any way that we are able to mitigate the impact of that and make sure that we remain as poverty aware as we possibly can. I am going to bring in my colleague, Natalie Dawn, who is going to speak to the Afghan Citizens Resettlement Scheme and ask questions on that for a moment. My first question is to Alistair and Councillor Aitken. If anybody else wants to come in, please let me know. How local authorities are supporting Afghan families that have already arrived and how they are prepared to support future Afghan families? From Edinburgh's perspective, we have only so far supported families in bridging accommodation. We have been working with some 30 households in September in bridging hotels. The support that we are providing is largely based on the model that we developed on the back of our Syrian resettlement support for school placements, language learning, but, of course, it is temporary support and we do not know how long these families are going to be with us. There is a limit to the wider support that we would offer in terms of, for example, supporting towards onward and permanent accommodation employability. We have those links, but we just have not been able to bring them into place for that population as yet. However, we are on the point of having discussions with the Home Office directly about some households with a view to getting them permanently accommodated in Edinburgh, so our support for Afghan families at the moment is necessarily limited by the temporary nature of their stay in Edinburgh. We are currently supporting 37 Afghan families through the current scheme, but Glasgow has been supporting Afghans to resettle since 2014. We have a substantial Afghan population in the city, which is a very active population and is a very proactive community, very mobilised. I know that that is providing a lot of informal support and putting a lot of activating their networks to support people. However, as it was said for Edinburgh, the experience is there from the city and resettlement scheme. Although it is a different system and approached in a different way from our asylum dispersal experience of supporting people through the process into accommodation, the challenge at the moment is that the process has been very slow. We are working very closely with our registered social landlords in the city. They have been superb, as they always are, in making offers of accommodation. However, the matching process from the Home Office has been very slow. People are being left in hotels for far too long. That means that there is very limited information on the complexity of the need or their associated trauma to allow us to prepare for supporting them when they are finally matched and arrive in the city. Currently, we have 13 offers of properties not matched. We could have higher numbers of people in the city than we have already. We have real concerns about that, because ultimately, there is the pressure on accommodation. We have already talked about the pressures on the homelessness system and on housing more broadly. It is very difficult in our case—Glasgow is not the landlord—to leave those offers open indefinitely while we wait for the Home Office to do the match. That puts some real challenge on the system. We know from bitter experience that leaving people in hotels for any longer than is absolutely necessary is very detrimental to their wellbeing and to having good outcomes in transitioning them into support. Ultimately, we want to do transitioning them to recover from trauma and to be able to approach having normal lives wherever they have been resettled in the UK. We have a number of issues just now, but in terms of the people that we have in the city, I suppose, our experience and the long-standing systems that we have in place kick in, supported by colleagues in the RSLs in the third sector, particularly Scottish Refugee Council, and in that thriving and active Afghan community that we have in Glasgow. Thank you, councillor. You answered my second question, which was about issues between the bridging hotels and the permanent accommodation. I will pass back to the convener just now. Thank you very much for that, Natalie. I think that Pat wants to come in on that point, Pat. Yes. It was just to give a little bit of more operational context as well, to add to what councillor Aitkins has already provided. It has already touched on. We have been doing this very established and experienced in this in 2014, and we continue to do so. However, the support and promoting the stability for the Afghan fans coming into Glasgow is supported by our asylum-bridging health team in Glasgow, which, in the past couple of years, has seen quite a considerable enhancement. We have commensured it with the increase in the proportion of families coming in, and that makes sure that there is that community connectedness that is connected to the health provision that is necessary, that is required, the connection to on-going legal advice, and, critically, that support that we have already spoken a lot about here today with third sector partners to make sure that the experience is as seamless as it possibly can be. We are, as we have touched on, really quite established in Glasgow. The infrastructure of support that is wrapped around that is really strong. However, as councillor Aitkins has pointed out, the challenges in relation to the existing pressures with registered social landlords, particularly in Covid times, have been challenging. It has absolutely been difficult, and where there has been voids created as a consequence of that, it has culminated in substantially more costs to the local authority. Thanks for that part. I do understand that Natalie Donne has one further question that she would like to ask on the back of that. Thank you. Apologies. I thought one of my colleagues was coming in there, but I do have one further question just on that, and thank you for your answers. I direct that question to Andrew McLean. In terms of the Afghan citizen resettlement scheme, the Scottish Refugee Council has criticised the limitations and that the UK Government is counting refugees already here within that 20,000-person limit that they have put on. What are your views on eligibility to the scheme? Is there not a real risk that people who should be accessing the scheme will not be able to, because they cannot apply independently as a result of the referral requirements? In that light, do you think that the UK Government aims in terms of the numbers are high enough, or could we take more people than that 20,000-limit? Okay. Thanks, Natalie. I just go back just a wee second. I was just going to put a wee r in the sidebar there before I came in, just to build on what Councillor Aiken was saying around the matching challenges and just to emphasise that what she was saying in relation to Glasgow is replicated across the country. There is real concern from local government, not just in Scotland again, but across the UK around a large number of properties that are sitting empty awaiting Afghan refugees. The longer people are in hotels, the more problems manifest themselves for the families as Councillor Aiken set out, but there are also challenges for local authorities. They cannot indefinitely hold on to properties when there is a requirement to house other people as well. That is something that we are seeking urgent dialogue with the UK Government on, as are our colleagues across the UK. In terms of Scottish refugees' criticism, I am not 100 per cent sure what the specifics around their criticism are. I wonder whether they are saying that the limited number of people that are going to come into the UK through the scheme because they are already counting people that are already in the UK. That is something that they have said before. Was that the specific criticism? I can read the quote out to you. We are concerned about the strict limitations around who is eligible to apply for help under the scheme and that it will leave many thousands of people still at risk of harm in Afghanistan and neighbouring countries. We are also shocked that the UK Government plans to count people who are already in the UK from Kabul, along with British forces in August, within the 20,000 new places offered by the scheme on the limitations. I am not sure that COSLA would have a particular perspective on that. I think that our concern is a broader one about knowing who is in the country, because there are still questions around the rights and entitlements of those who the UK Government has brought into the country and which scheme they fall under. There are lots of complexities across the different schemes, and that comes on to another issue that we have around the rights and entitlements of people depending on which scheme they come into the UK on. The most perverse example in a way would be that you could have somebody who has fled Afghanistan and has come into the UK by clandestine means, perhaps in small brotes across the channel, who would be treated quite differently from somebody who has come in through the evacuation because they were fortunate enough to get on one of the evacuation flights. There are real concerns about the differential statuses and the differential treatment of people depending on how they come in. Obviously, we know that the 20,000 was the UK Government figure. I can understand what the Scottish Government is saying. It is obviously saying that this is diluting the commitment kind of thing. However, we have never taken a position as to how many people the UK, as a whole, should support. The causal position has been that the Scottish local government will step up and support as many people as they can. I would not say that we have been focused on targets and saying that the X number of people is the right number. I do not know if that helps. I have a follow-up question, sorry. I did ask if there were concerns that people who should be accessing the scheme cannot, because of the referral requirements for it, so that they cannot independently refer themselves. I am not sure whether you picked up on that, but I am not sure if anybody else wants to come in on that. That is a challenge with refugee resettlement in general. There is a tiny minority of the people who are in need that manage to get in refugee resettlement schemes for the UK and across the world, so there are real concerns. That leads on to the point that I was trying to make. That forces people to take other routes to get to the UK or to get to safety wherever that might be. Our concern is more about the differential treatment of people who come through different routes to get to the UK. There are different levels, and we have concerns around the nationality and borders bill, in terms of accentuating those challenges in that respect. I will now move on to theme 4, because we still have two themes to get through in our times running short. Theme 4 is about the nationality and borders bill. I will bring in Maria McNair, then on to Pam Duncan-Glancy and then my colleague Emma Roddick, who is joining us remotely. Thank you, convener. The Scottish Refugee Council has referred to the nationality and borders bill as the anti-refugee bill. It argues that it is the biggest threat to refugee rights in decades. Do the panel share that view and what are the biggest concerns about the impact that will have on migrants, refugees and asylum seekers? I will throw that out to the whole panel. Anyone who can answer it, thanks. Okay, so we need somebody to start us off, so I will go with Susan who's hand, I can see. Susan, thanks. I think that this is obviously a political question, and as the only politician in the panel, I think that I should probably—it's maybe not fair to ask officials to comment on this, but I agree entirely with the Scottish Refugee Council's assessment. It is a draconian bill, and it's not just the Scottish Refugee Council. There are many others who understand the laws, international laws and obligations around refugees far better than I do, who are of the view that this undermines the UK's commitment and obligations under international treaties to support refugees. The differentiation between the way that people enter the country, which Andy's already touched on as causing a whole number of operational challenges, is also something that is very questionable in terms of how it tries to create categories of good and bad refugee and asylum seeker. It chooses to be ignorant of the circumstances in which desperate people flee trauma and are fleeing threats to their lives and their families' lives, the desperate circumstances in which they find themselves and the lack of choice that they have in their ability to seek refuge, to remove themselves from life-threatening situations. People don't always—in fact, very seldom—have the choice to leave their countries of origin and seek asylum elsewhere through kind of ordered and formal routes, and desperate people will take any route that they can, and they will clutch at any straw that they are able to save themselves and their families. There is another element to it that has perhaps been given less attention. I am certainly very grateful to the Scottish Refugee Council for briefings that it has provided, which has helped to clarify the issue for me, but there are other elements in that bill that, if they were to take full effect, would lead to the dismantling of the asylum dispersal system in the UK, as we understand it just now. Although I have criticism of the way that system operates, particularly around the chronic underfunding of it and the UK Government's insistence on running it through private contracts, that is another argument and discussion. The asylum dispersal system fundamentally has allowed Glasgow, for example—I do not think that we are blowing our own trumpet to say that Glasgow is an example of a very successful asylum authority in terms of the outcomes that we have achieved in terms of integration between asylum seekers and the receiving community and, indeed, outcomes for asylum seekers themselves as individuals and individual households, but it would massively undermine our ability to achieve those outcomes, which should be the point of an asylum system. The ultimate point should be to provide support to people to recover from trauma, to be able to go on and live as close to normal lives as they are able to do, given the circumstances from which they have come, and to live within the community in which they have resettled as members of that community and to make a contribution. Hundreds and thousands of people in Glasgow over the past 20 years have been able to do that. We all know of some very prominent individuals who are great success stories in the city and others whose names will never be known, but they will just live decent and good lives as members of their Glasgow community. The bill hugely undermines our ability as an authority to support those positive outcomes for people by bypassing the local authority and our ability to, for example, educate asylum seekers in our own schools, which has been enormously important. The Home Office would, through that bill, reserve the right to completely remove asylum-seeking children and have them educated separately in the equivalent of the Napier Barracks, for example, that we have seen the issues in England more recently. Or indeed, Dungavel, to use a closer-to-home example, which is, as we know, not only reinforcing the trauma that people have been through and adding to it, exacerbating that trauma. It absolutely prevents the delivery of those outcomes that we want to see for people. It is an even greater conflation of the asylum system with a hostile approach to immigration than we have already in the UK. That absolutely militates against what I believe the asylum and refugee system should be about, which is achieving those positive outcomes for people who have fled trauma and violence. Our ability as nations to provide them with a safe space to then live their lives safely and securely as part of their new communities puts all of that at risk. That is something that we need to be aware of. A lot of the questions that we are discussing today around the challenges that Glasgow faces as an asylum authority would become moot points, to be honest, because the asylum dispersal system, as we understand it, with all its weaknesses but also all its successes, would be pretty much dismantled. Thank you very much for that. Mary, do you have any further questions on that? Thank you, convener, and thanks, Susan, for that response. Siobhan Malali, the UN special rapporteur, said that the bill fails to acknowledge the Government's obligation to ensure protection for migrant and asylum-seeking children and greatly increase the risk of stateliness and the violation of international law. Causal suggests that the bill might affect devolved safeguarding and protection duties. Andrew Cymru, can you further explain that on that one? Yeah, yeah, happy to. I suppose that our fundamental concerns before just coming on to that, and I think that councillor can explain that better than I can, but our concern is around the creation of a hierarchy of rights for people, where people are treated differently depending on the way that they have come into the country. Following on from that, another key concern for us is that our fundamental belief is that local services are the best place to make decisions about the needs of individuals and families in their communities. What we are trying to get at at this point is that some of the provisions in the bill will create a situation in which that is no longer the case. For instance, in relation to the age assessment process for young people who come into the asylum system, or young victims of trafficking for that matter, local services undertake age assessments as and when they deem that to be appropriate, and that is being overridden potentially by what is being proposed in the bill with the creation of a national age assessment board. We have concerns about how that will play out. I am aware that the Scottish Government has highlighted its concerns, and there is now a legislative consent motion about that particular age assessment work. I think that, in terms of what Councillor Aitken was saying around the asylum system specifically, there are intentions around the establishment of reception centres. Again, we would have safeguarding concerns about how women, men and children are accommodated in those and whether they are appropriately protected in those situations, especially those who are particularly vulnerable. We can provide examples of where there is positive work with the Home Office that feels as though it is being undermined by the overarching approach of the bill. To give one example in relation to human trafficking, there is a pilot under way involving the Home Office, Glasgow, Scottish Government and COSLA, working together to see whether we can improve mechanisms around the national referral mechanism for victims of trafficking. At the moment that the process is pretty cumbersome, we saw a really positive move in which it is acknowledged that the best people to make decisions are those who are on the ground, who know the children, who know the cases that they are dealing with. The bill seems to set that type of work aside and create a top-down approach, which causes the concerns around safeguarding and protection, so that helps. A number of the questions that I had around the national team borders bill have been answered, but I would like to put on record that I believe that it is a cruel and impractical bill that does not achieve what it set out to achieve, even if we do not agree with what it was meant to achieve in the first place. I think that it is important to put that on the record. I thank the panel for their answers. Thank you, convener. This one is really for Alistair. Overall, in your view, how does the Scottish Government's approach in the new Scots refugee strategy differ from the UK's approach towards asylum seekers and refugees? I necessarily welcome to that question without entirely understanding the comparison, my experience being entirely within Scotland and within the context of the new Scots strategy. The primary difference, as I understand it, is the Scottish Government's focus on integration from day one. That provides an opportunity and an obligation on those of us in the local government and the third sector to work with people from the point of arrival. The strategy is comprehensive and brings in all of the players who would wish to play a part. In the five years that I have been working in this field, I have found it to be a very helpful underpinning. I do have a further question. Just around the legislative consent motion that has been put down this week, Scotland has established age assessment practices that are carried out by trained social work professionals, in line with getting it right for every child approach. What is your view on the UK Government's proposals on reforming age assessment processes? I think that I will ask others that, seen as we are looking for a UK vision. I think that that might need to be a question for Susan. I think that that might be a better place to answer in terms of the operational impact. I am not familiar with the particular detail of the suggested policy change approach in England and the UK. I would say that the approach in Scotland is about trained professionals who are coming to it with social work values or health service values, assessing the needs of a young person so that we can meet those needs. If there is a shift towards age assessment as a way to try to catch out a young person, to try to say that they do not have needs or entitlements, I think that that is entirely the wrong approach and is completely from the wrong direction. The way in which we approach it in Scotland is about trying to understand how we best support a young person. That should be the underpinning of how we work with children and young people in the system. I will add to that. It picks up on the conversation, but we were having earlier on in relation to the Borders Bill. In terms of specifically the age assessment, the pilot that is under way in Glasgow is precisely what we have been looking for for really quite some time. The national referral mechanism, as has already been pointed out, is hugely cumbersome and takes a considerable amount of time to really get any proper final assessment on. It is right and proper that it is front-facing, qualified social workers who undertake that assessment, just as you had pointed out, in relation to GERFEC, in relation to the Children and Young Person Act 2014, the Children and Scotland Act 1995, and it runs a considerable risk of confusing the entire landscape. There are other questions that we have in relation to that, and that is the role of the national age assessment board. Do they supersede the decision, the assessment, from the local authority? It is further compounded by any potential appeals process and who we are appealing against, and, indeed, legal aid for all of that. There are a number of questions that we have. There are quite significant operational practice issues that we still have to continue to work through. We are in close contact with Scottish Government working our way through this just now, and we will continue to ask and probe those types of questions. However, what we have at the moment is a pilot that is what we have been looking for and what we have been asking for really for quite some time and has been a substantial amount of work that has went into this with the Home Office and ourselves to get where we are just now. It feels as though it is a bit of a backward step in relation to the whole age assessment profile. I am just going to group my questions that I was going to ask later on just now for the sake of time. I am not sure if Callum is back, but I will ask Susan within the Scottish Government guidance that it has made clear that people seeking asylum can and should be entered on to social landlords lists if they apply for social housing, even though they are not entitled to the housing until their granted refugee status. Do you feel that there is anything more that can be done both to encourage people to get on the list early and to widen social landlord awareness of that guidance? Certainly in Glasgow, the partnerships that we have with RSLs of which there are over 80 in Glasgow network of community-led housing associations, I think that awareness is very good. RSLs have their own challenges in terms of supply. We talked earlier about the Afghan resettlement scheme. There is the ability to plan when a plan ahead, given the amount of time that someone can spend in the system, is challenged. The issue is very much about trying to get decisions for people, much, much faster. That is something that is very much in the hands of the Home Office, obviously. It is not something that we have any control over in Scotland. The principle of planning as early as possible for ensuring that the person, and we hope that they will reach the positive outcome when they get that positive outcome, is able to move as quickly as possible to get all of that support in place, to transition them smoothly out of the asylum accommodation that is run by the Home Office contractor into a home in Glasgow, whether that is with an RSL or through another route. All of that principle is absolutely correct. Certainly the relationships and partnerships that we have with RSLs in Glasgow will focus on trying to have that happen as much as possible. However, the uncertainty and the often very protracted timescales in the process and people, as you know, will be in asylum accommodation for years sometimes as they go through the process and as they work their way through appeals. That makes it challenging for RSLs to be able to plan, particularly the smaller ones, out of whom we have a number in the city. That is an issue. Shall we say that we have an on-going discussion with nears and previous contractors in the city? We are keen in Glasgow that we have city-wide integration of people who have come through the asylum system as well and that there is not an over-concentration in one neighbourhood or another. That has been an issue where the contractor has tended to focus their purchase of accommodation where accommodation is cheapest and rents are cheapest. That has meant putting an over-concentration of asylum accommodation in parts of the city where there is already an over-concentration of deprivation and an SIMD levels. We would want exactly the same outcomes to be achieved when people have come through the system. We want them to be able to have access to a range of accommodation across the city because that is genuine integration and that is what we want to encourage as much as possible. Dan, we do not have Calum back. I do not know whether it would be helpful for us to get that information from Calum. You could write into the committee. Do you have any further questions? We are getting into our last few questions now. I am going to bring Pam Duncan-Glancy in and then Jeremy Balfour and then from the Equalities Committee perspective Pam Goswell after that. Pam, go to yourself first. Thank you, convener. I have three short questions. I will try and be brief. Maryhill integration network, who I want to put on record to say thank you for the incredible work that they are doing for the people who they support in Glasgow, have highlighted that they are concerned to hear about Glasgow City Council's withdrawn from the UK Government's dispersal scheme. However, I think that I have heard today that that might not be the case, so I was just seeking a bit of clarification from Councillor Aitken before I go on to my further two questions. Yes, absolutely. It is not the case. This has been widely mis-reported. It is very, very frustrating. Not only has Glasgow not withdrawn from the asylum dispersal scheme, we are, by some distance, the biggest asylum authority in the UK, both in terms of the numbers of asylum seekers in Glasgow per head of population, but also just in terms of actual overall numbers. We have over 5,000 asylum seekers in Glasgow and have done for some time. As it happens, that is more than double the number that the Home Office's own assessment says that proportionally to the size of our population Glasgow should host. We are extremely active members, an extremely active asylum dispersal authority. What we do have is an agreement with the Home Office, which has been put in place, really hosts the parking incident. It was there before that, but I think that the parking incident emphasised how important it is that we do not—there is a pause on essentially unlimited dispersal of certain types of asylum seekers from Glasgow to the UK. We still have asylum seekers coming into the city on a daily basis who are accommodated in Glasgow. We also still have dispersal from other parts of the UK of families with children, for example, but we do have a pause on dispersal of primarily single male asylum seekers, which is a very large number, a very large proportion of the asylum seeking population in the UK. The reason for that is because of very significant concerns about the impact on the welfare and the wellbeing and the best interests of both asylum seekers coming into the city, but the asylum seekers who are already here. While we still have asylum seekers living in hotel accommodation in Glasgow, which, as a local authority, we are on the record as being fundamentally opposed to that. We want to see an end to that, and we have been pushing the Home Office very, very strongly, particularly since the park incident, for timetables and for an end to the numbers of asylum seekers being accommodated in hotel accommodation in the city, until we have a clear end in sight for that and also a clear reassurance from the Home Office and from their contractors that they will be able to accommodate people coming into the city safely and securely. With the focus on their best interests, we would prefer that pause to stay in place. That is entirely about the best interests of asylum seekers. It is very important that we do not fall into the trap of talking about an asylum authority and the numbers of people coming in as a numbers game. It is not about how many folk we can cram into the city, it is about the outcomes that we achieve for them and about their best interests. In Glasgow City Council's gift, I need to emphasise that the Home Office contractor was not at that point accommodating people coming in in accommodation certainly that we would consider to be appropriate, then we expressed those very, very significant concerns. We were expressing concerns. Indeed, Glasgow historically has not accommodated people in hotels and that is because Pat and his colleagues in the HSCP have, as much as they are able to, put their foot down on that and said to the contractors, no, we do not agree with that, we do not believe that it is appropriate. We do not have the power to force them to not put people in hotels, but we have used our influence, if you like, as strongly as possible. It is pretty common in other parts of the UK for asylum seekers to be accommodated in hotels. We agreed temporarily with miers that they could use hotel accommodation as an emergency measure once the pandemic set in a response to a public health emergency, because clearly getting people into accommodation and giving them the ability to self-isolate, for example, was extremely important at that point, but we always saw it very much as an emergency measure. We did not agree to people who were already in asylum accommodation being removed from their asylum accommodation and put into hotels, that was not something that we agreed to and that we strongly opposed and have made our views on very, very clear to the Home Office repeatedly. I cannot emphasise enough not only has Glasgow not withdrawn from the asylum dispersal system, we are the biggest contributor to that system in the UK by some distance. We continue to receive and accommodate asylum seekers in the city, but we will also continue to do as much as we can to try to ensure that the system operates safely within the city as much as we are able. We have examples that we are all too well aware of of where it did not operate safely and where the use of hotel accommodation by the Home Office contractors ended in appalling tragedy. Those are the reasons why we have the agreement with the Home Office just now to place some limits on the numbers of people who are dispersed to Glasgow until we can have that assurance around the best interests of people coming into the city being served. Thank you for that considerable length and detail to answer. There are a couple of points that I will follow up with this session if that is all right in the interest of time, but thank you for that. I appreciate you putting that on the record. An organisation called Bridges contacted us ahead of today and explained their concerns around a number of changes that happened during the pandemic that maybe did not take into account minority groups in the way that it could have. We know that that is seen across minority groups, and it did not perhaps consider the experience, for example, of the people who were living in those types of accommodation. How important do members of the panel think that asylum seekers and refugees, as a result of that, are included in the Covid-19 inquiry in Scotland? I think that it is important, because the response to, as we have already heard, the Covid situation and the public health emergency significantly changed some of the ways in which we support asylum seekers and refugees, particularly people who were no recourse to public funds. I think that it would be very important to capture that experience and that response in all of the lessons to be learned, not just in Scotland but across the UK. One of the meetings that I had with a UK minister back last year when we discussed the restart of negative cessations, at that point where we were starting in other parts of the UK, we had started in other parts of the UK, but we in Glasgow were doing everything in our power to insist that we did not start in Glasgow precisely because of the public health emergency. It was very clear at that point that the Home Office was placing a distinction between people who were homeless or potentially rough sleeping because of no recourse to public funds and an indigenous homeless population. They saw that they should be treated differently and that the powers, the emergency response that we were using for homeless people in Glasgow should not continue to apply to people with no recourse to public funds. We strongly opposed that and said that the public health emergency was a public health emergency. Covid did not react to somebody in a different way because they were an asylum seeker or because they were an appeals-exhausted asylum seeker. They were just as vulnerable to catching Covid if they were placed in an at-risk situation to someone who had been in Scotland for a long time. There are some issues around teasing out where there were attempts to make distinctions between the two. Distinctions that we have up until now, as I say, strongly resisted in Glasgow successfully up until this point, how long we are able to sustain that and how long it will be before the Home Office restart negative cessations. In Glasgow, I do not know at this stage—I think we are expecting it to be soon—but we will continue to argue that we are still in a public health emergency and that that public health emergency applies just as much to asylum seekers and people with no recourse to public funds as it does to the rest of the population. For those kinds of reasons and issues that have emerged during the pandemic, I think that it would be important to capture that experience in any lessons learned exercise. Very briefly, to add any thoughts to that, we are significantly over time and I am conscious that I still have to get to Pam Gossel as well. Andy, did you have any thoughts? Sorry, I am just aware that Pam Gossel had asked me as well. It is really just to echo what Councillor Aitken had said, so I agree with everything that she had said. Across all policy considerations, refugee and asylum seekers should be considered, and I suppose that is the central aspect of the work that we are trying to do through both the new Scotch refugee integration strategy but also ending the institution together. It is trying to ensure that that takes place, so it was really just to emphasise that. Many thanks. Pam, did you have? Thank you. I did, but in the interest of time I will save it for another day. If it is something that you want to have in writing, we will make sure that we do get it for you. Jeremy, I know that you have further questions and then Pam Gossel. Thank you. I will be brief. The first question that I was going to ask was to Alistair Diney. I should just declare for record that Alistair and I worked together when we were at the council, so I do know Alistair. Alistair, we are running out of time, but I think that one of the things that worked really well in Edinburgh was the Syrian project. I wonder if you would mind just writing to the committee to give us some information around how that worked and why did it work so well, and lessons learned. There is a lot there, I know, and perhaps it would be easier rather than giving a brief answer if you could put that in writing to us if that would be okay with you. I am happy to do that. Thank you. My second question is, obviously, some of the issues that we have been talking about have been reserved, but there are issues that are devolved. I was slightly surprised to see in one of the submissions that the free bus travel for those under 22 has not been extended to Assyriam Seekers. I wonder whether Cosler Andrew could give us a brief discussion. What discussions did you have with Scottish Government around that, and what reason did Scottish Government give not to grant that to Assyriam Seekers? Thanks for the question. I was going to come on to Pam's question, and I thought that I would not have the time, but thanks for raising it. I think that that is an example of what I was saying about the need for refugees in Assyriam Seekers to be considered at the outset of all policy making. That example shows that it did not happen. We became aware of that only recently in the last couple of weeks when it was announced, because my immediate question was, does that apply to Assyriam Seekers? Obviously, the likes of bridges and Scottish refugee council have flagged strongly and rightly that it does not apply to Assyriam Seekers, so we have been feeding into Scottish Government around the position around Assyriam Seekers. I am not sure whether it has been resolved in recent days, but I certainly would hope that it is going to be, and I am happy to follow up with you in writing on the latest position that I have not heard in the last week where we are on it. I think that the other issue would be helpful for us. Obviously, things like health and education are devolved if there are other policy areas that you feel have either just been forgotten about or missed in regard to Assyriam Seekers, if you could provide us in writing with that so that we can maybe follow up with Scottish Government around areas where more can be done on devolved issues, but again, conscious of time, if you could maybe do that in writing, I would be obliged. That is fantastic, and I think that we will look forward to receiving that information, Andy. I am going to hand over to Pam Goswell, who has a few questions. Over to yourself, Pam. Thank you, convener, and good morning, panel. It has been really interesting and very informative listening to all the responses. As the convener said that I am from the Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee, we have been discussing a human rights-based approach to the budgets. Do you think that the local authorities would benefit from looking through an intersectional lens when it comes to distributing and balancing resources to support those with no recourse to public funds provision? My question goes over to Andrew. Okay. Thanks for that, Pam. Again, this is maybe something that we can follow up with you in writing. I think that, obviously, a human rights-based approach to all work is something that we want to achieve, and I know that that is going to be a key element of work in relation to the human rights bill. I think that the biggie for us in this will be ensuring that local authorities are equipped to do that. Staff across councils and across the statutory services are equipped to know what it means to take a human rights-based approach, whether it is to budgeting or to provision of services. I think that there is a significant body of work that will be required to support councils in that regard. In terms of the approach to budgets, I probably do not have an immediate response around that, but I am happy to go away and provide something to you in writing about what if there is a particular position that we have taken on that. Thank you, Andrew. I have another question, just one quick one for Alastair. The Home Secretary has announced £14 million of funding to support newly-granted refugees to learn English, move into work, access housing and build links with local communities. Do you think that this is a sustainable approach to reducing destitution among refugees? If not, or if so, what more do you think has to be done? Thanks for the question, and it may be that I do not entirely understand what is meant by the announcement. In my experience, there is a big difference between the ability to support inverted commas refugees, where the funding that comes via the UK Government is generally appropriate for the support that we want to give, and particularly around things like full support for English as a second language and easel training for adults. The difficulty comes with those who do not benefit from that counter-home office funding, whether that is people who are inverted commas asylum seekers or, for example, households that have come together because a family member has come through the asylum system and then has been joined by other family members under family reunion. In that situation, we can certainly see a situation where we have two households, very similar profiles and very similar experiences, but treated very differently because of the funding that one can access and the other cannot. I think that I would like to know a bit more about exactly what the Home Secretary meant by her announcement, for which I expressed an awful opinion. Thank you, Alasdair, and that's me, convener. Thank you very much. Thanks for your questions, Pam. We did have some questions around the Scottish Government's lodging of their legislative consent memorandum, but in the interest of time, I think that we will write out to witnesses and ask for their thoughts on the two specific clauses that are in the devolved competencies. What I would like to do is thank witnesses for their evidence and Pam Gosel for joining the meeting. You are welcome to follow up on any points that you think we need to have fleshed out. Thank you for offering where you have already done so to do that. That concludes this morning's public part of the meeting. Next week, we are going to continue taking evidence on refugees and asylum seekers. We are now going to move into private session to considering our remaining agenda items. Members who have been joining us online, I will ask you now to move into the teams link that you will find in your calendar. I close the open session of this meeting. Thank you.