Dear Supporters,
On
Tuesday of this week, the Home Office met with representatives of
Bristol Refugee Rights, Bristol Signing Support, Borderlands, local MPs'
offices and the police commissioners' team. They were presented with
our 1000 strong campaign petition to reduce signing frequency for
migrants and bring signing back into town where people can access it
more easily.
Despite
this demonstration of overwhelming support the Home Office refused to
end signing at Patchway. This shows an ongoing lack of respect for the
people who have to travel so far to sign and a disregard for the
community and civil servants who have shown a lot of concern for
signers. We are outraged by this lack of accountability to the public
from a government office. Sadly this reflects what we have seen in the
past with regard to their decision making process on people's asylum
applications.
However,
the Home Office was forced to concede two things as a result of all the
pressure: signing for families will be reduced to every six months, and
people in education will be able to request to sign out of term time
only. The Home Office has agreed to review the move to Patchway again
after another three months.
For
families and students, these changes will be significant. However,
people who are destitute are still having to get themselves to Patchway
with no money. Even those who are entitled to support with travel
expenses are still having to apply for it.
People
are still having to sign weekly, fortnightly or monthly at great cost
to their emotional health and with no reasonable justification as to why
they should have to sign so often. People are still at risk of being
detained despite having committed no crime.
This
is why we must continue to be organised. These two concessions happened
because we were organised. We came together, people signing and their
allies. We believed it was worth naming this injustice and demanding
change. We organised events, petitions, speakers, trained ourselves to
speak to the media and got good coverage; we tweeted and blogged on
social media, getting support from across the country, and momentum
grew. The Home Office was forced to defend its decision publicly and had
to make some concessions. Many more people know about the signing
regime as a result of this campaign. We celebrate this.
Imagine what more could happen if we were louder and stronger....
We
will be reconvening soon to work out our next movements in this
campaign and how we can continue to fight for justice for all migrants.
If you would like to get more involved in the next stage of our
campaigning please email us on asylumisnotacrime@mail.com
From all at Dignity Group