No Small Victories - Lucy Nabijou, Haringey Welcome

I am talking to Lucy, one of the co-founders of Haringey Welcome, a local strategic campaign group in the field of migrant justice. I think it is both interesting and upsetting to find out what has been happening both on a national and local level that many of us have not been aware of.

As promised a few links:
the fundraiser: https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/prevent-refugee-homelessness-in-haringey
their website: https://haringeywelcome.org/
their twitter (I am refusing to call it anything else): https://twitter.com/HaringeyWelcome
their podcast:  https://nosmallvictories.buzzsprout.com/

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pod instagram: https://www.instagram.com/anybodyeverybodytottenham/
pod website : https://www.anybodyeverybodytottenham.com/
pod twitter: https://twitter.com/AnybodyBody 

Transcript

Jamila  0:10  
Hi I'm Jamila and anybody, everybody Tottenham is a monthly podcast introducing the good people of Tottenham to you. Happy 2024 my friends, we've got the first episode of the year if you haven't listened to the update, so just a thing to be aware of - the episodes are coming out monthly now rather than bimonthly. I don't know if I can edit the intro. I will see later. I'm gonna do this after this one. So I'm talking to Lucy from haringey welcome. And I think it's always really interesting to hear what is going on locally and how that actually reflects something that's going on nationally and kind of puts a spotlight on a situation that maybe a lot of us are not aware of. Okay, so that is super interesting. I hope you're gonna enjoy it. Learn something. Today on the pod, I've got Lucy Nabijou from Haringey Welcome. Welcome, Lucy.

Lucy  1:08  
Thank you, Jamila. It's a real pleasure to be here. I love your podcast.

Jamila  1:12  
Wow. Thank you. Alright, let's see. Let's talk a little bit first about you. And then the history of Haringey Welcome. So what is your connection to Haringey more than Tottenham, I think?

Lucy  1:24  
Yeah, sure. Well, I mean, it goes back a long way. I think my connection with Haringey started when I was two. So I grew up in Haringey mainly I went to school, Hornsey School for Girls, we're talking a long time ago.

Jamila  1:24  
I think you're the third or fourth person now on the podcast

Unknown Speaker  1:45  
Alright Yeah, so I have lived here most of my life mostly in different parts whether it's Muswell Hill Crouch End , I'm now in Wood Green. So, you know, with little moments of living in other places.

Jamila  1:59  
Yeah. So what do you think makes Haringey special? is it special?

Unknown Speaker  2:05  
Is it special? (laughs) Well, I mean, I guess and probably you've heard many of your guests saying this as well. One of the amazing things about Haringey is the diversity and the amazing culture and vibrancy and all of that, which I think most people who live here find wonderful. And of course, it's not exclusive to Haringey, it's, that's a London thing as well. You know, there are sort of specific places and spaces that I have enjoyed over the years. And it just feels like home. I guess I've got a lot of friends locally. And yeah, I really liked the community here.

Jamila  2:46  
Would you have said over the many, many years that you have lived in Haringey, you've seen changes in the borough? Oh, gosh,

Lucy  2:56  
well, yeah, I mean, for sure. But, you know, I guess I'd have to kind of say that, in my younger self, I was probably less aware of the local stuff. I was more of a kind of Londoner and kind of international person wanting to look more widely. And it's probably for me over the last 10/15 years that I've become very focused on the local and I think I took it for granted a lot before that. Having said that, for sure. I mean, I think the demographics have changed, you know, Haringey has been impacted, like so many places by changing global and national policies that have impacted right down into the community and, you know, the sort of problems that many, many people face with housing and poverty and work and bills and everything, which clearly has a massive impact on on everybody in the community, and particularly those who are most marginalized. So those sorts of changes are very evident over the years and not just in Haringey. But again, London wide. I mean, I can remember back in the 80s and the 90s, where street homelessness was very prevalent (in Haringey?) yes. And across the whole of London, and then you know, it became less of an issue as it was addressed in the probably in the naughties, but here we are again, and we're seeing massive street homelessness and massive problem with housing. All very predictable, but you know, 

Jamila  4:43  
okay, so let's talk about Haringey Welcome. So you are officially a campaign group. Tell me a little bit what are the main focuses maybe first of all, and then we talk about the inception of it.

Lucy  4:57  
Okay, well, I mean, Haringey welcome sort of just to in a nutshell, we are a strategic campaign group focused on resisting the hostile environment legislation that we've seen over the last decade or so. And we are a grassroots group of sort of collective of residents, and we're all volunteers. And we're focused on making Haringey a more welcoming place. 

Jamila  5:27  
You know, like within the Migrant Justice Community, you use the term hostile environment a lot. Where does this term come from - was it official policy, or is that just what campaigners describe policies as? What is it?

Lucy  5:43  
That's good question. I mean, the person who is renowned for using the phrase, first of all, is Theresa May, when she was home secretary. And back in 2012. I mean, there's a famous quote of hers that she - I paraphrase, but something along the lines of, she intended to create as hostile an environment as possible for, quote, unquote, illegal migrants. I mean, I don't use the term illegal to label people. But she did. In fact, that term hostile environment had been used before, under a Labour government. But it really stuck when Theresa May used it because what she was doing at that time, from 2012 onwards was introducing a whole raft of legislation across many different government departments, was designed to basically create a kind of internalized borders within the UK. So it had a really detrimental impact on people. I mean, many people have now heard of the Windrush scandal where many people who had come here as children, some people even born here, but from background from often the Caribbean, but also other former British colonial spaces in the world, and had lived here quite, you know, perfectly legally and legitimately for many years and have normal lives suddenly found that they were asked to prove that they were here legitimately, by presenting documentation, that meant that suddenly a lot of people who had been living here working here or studying here, born here, whatever, found that they were excluded from the system. And not only that, but some people were detained, some people were deported. And some people actually died as a consequence of this treatment. And that was all as a result that had been predicted in advance. And Theresa May herself was warned. It was all a result of this hostile environment legislation. So it's a very wide ranging policy. And I mean, I would say that it continues to this day. So we see policies like the Rwanda plan, for example, the endemic sort of detention of people in the immigration system, and then the treatment of asylum seekers, which is just a sort of cruelty by design. And it's very divisive in communities and in society. And it's, it makes people isolated and marginalized and unable just to get on with leading a normal life.

Jamila  8:27  
So what happened then, with the foundation that people came together and said, We want to act against this,

Lucy  8:36  
Well I think it was being quite organic, and it's been a nationwide response at very local level, many different parts of the country. And what happened in Haringey actually was almost sort of accidental, in a way we started our first campaign in 2015. And you'll probably remember back at that time, many refugees were arriving from Syria and there was an awful war happening in Syria, many refugees and David Cameron when he was Prime Minister had created this resettlement scheme for Syrian families, vulnerable Syrian families, I think it was called VPRS, the vulnerable persons resettlement scheme. And that was working with the UNHCR, the United Nations Refugee Agency to resettle families who were particularly vulnerable, either because they had disability or single women with children or whatever. And so Cameron had agreed this policy under pressure, and the way it worked was that local authorities needed to step up and say, Okay, we will resettle X amount of people. So there was a grassroots campaign in different areas, refugee welcome campaign to lobby local authorities and ask them to resettle Syrian families. And funnily enough, I mean, the way it worked was I went to just sign a petition for Harringay. And I discovered that there wasn't one. So I thought, okay, easy, I'll just create the petition, then it was one of those 38 degrees things created a petition. And then of course, you think Well, I gotta get some people signing this. So I started kind of promoting it and sort of asking people to sign and in the end, we got several 1000 signatures from memory. But, but more importantly, it kind of started a movement. If you like a local grassroots movement, we actually lobbied Haringey council at that time for 14 months before they agreed finally, to resettle 10 Syrian families. So it was a successful campaign. But it was - we were sort of surprised and shocked at the response at the time that the Council were not open to the idea. And it took quite a lot of persuasion. But we did win that campaign. And at that point, we'd formed a kind of core group of residents who felt very strongly about this, and we decided to carry on as a campaign group, as you I'm sure know, Haringey is rich in community, voluntary and community sector organizations and many sort of wonderful community hubs and places that were up for - and faith groups that were up for welcoming the Syrian families. And we've also felt that there was a duty on the local authority to do a lot of that work. And we didn't really feel we had capacity to get sucked into that. But what we did feel there was a place for was a movement to campaign - not to provide services, but to campaign on behalf of migrant rights within Haringey, and we noticed the impact of the hostile environment at that time, on local services, on families with no recourse to public funds, for example, who were really struggling to access support and services when they needed it.

Jamila  11:59  
I mean, here is that was another term that is being used a lot what does that mean no recourse to public funds.

Lucy  12:06  
So again, that's a policy and government policy, which has been around for a while, but it sort of was turbo charged under I believe, Theresa May, that is the kind of visa requirement. So there are a lot of people in this country who are here legitimately. They have every right whether they've arrived as students or on a working visa or family visa, but as a requirement on their visa, they're allowed to do whatever activity they've arrived to do. But they have no recourse to public funds, which means that they are not eligible to claim benefits to get housing support, the most sort of mainstream benefits are included, schooling and stuff like that is not part of it. But that's sort of on their visa. But the problem is that, you know, in certain cases, for example, a woman who has come here and has a British partner, and they have a family, but her visa says no recourse to public funds. And if she ends up in a violent relationship with that person, a victim of domestic violence, it becomes very difficult for her to find a way out of that situation and to get support because she's not eligible for mainstream support. And ultimately, those types of families end up - if they're facing destitut- a choice between you know, staying with a violent partner or destitution, the only choice is to go to the local authority and ask for support - subsistence support the local authorities under the if there's a child involved, there's a Children's Act, and under Section 17 of the Children's Act, they have a duty to provide some level of support in that situation, but it's very, very threadbare and quite punitive. And what has had been happening and probably still does happen in some local authorities is that immigration enforcement officers are brought in when those often women are coming into to ask for support from the local authority. And that acts itself as a deterrent because those people may have for example, fallen into becoming undocumented meanwhile, if they haven't been able to maintain their up to date visa or whatever, so it gets very complicated and one of the first things we lobbied the Haringey Council on was the removal of this immigration enforcement officer sitting in on interviews with destitute women who had no recourse to public funds. And to their credit Haringey council did make a change there.

Jamila  14:45  
And okay, so you started with this Syrian refugee crisis. Now we've had a few other crisis since then. What have you been lobbying over the last eight years?

Lucy  14:58  
Oh, goodness. I mean, there's so much

Jamila  15:02  
Maybe some successes then? Shall we talk about successes?

Lucy  15:06  
Yes, we have had successes. But I mean, as I sort of began to describe the way we see ourselves is as a strategic campaign group. So we're kind of in it for the long run. But that's one example, you know, persuading the council to get rid of this immigration enforcement officer. And we've also done again, a lot of work with Haringey council to encourage them to develop a welcome strategy. And in fact, Haringey Council is the first council nationwide to become a welcome borough. And that, that, you know, we commend them for, but that is sort of work in progress, as they would admit themselves. 

Jamila  15:53  
What does that mean? 

Lucy  15:55  
Well, they have a strategy, a welcome strategy, and a commitment to providing a welcoming space for everyone, every resident of Haringey, whether or not they've just recently arrived, or they've lived here for many decades, or all their life. Also, I think, in a sort of softer way, we've had lots of different campaigns and sort of community engagement type projects, a lot of them using the art. And those many of them have been really successful and fun and great to do. So for example, for a couple of years, we ran a school's poetry competition in primary schools across the borough. So one of our members, Ruth Valentine, who is a poet lead on this particular project, I think there were five or six schools involved. And each year, there were about 100 children who wrote poems on the theme of welcome. So there was a whole kind of structure to this process of going into the classroom and getting them to sort of talk about well, what is a poem and what is welcome and so, and we then produced an anthology and prizes for the winner and runners up and so forth. So we did that a couple of years in a row. And one of our MPs Catherine West, read one of the prize winning poems out in Parliament, which was great. Another of our members headed up was a secret shopper survey of GP surgeries and migrant access to registering at GP services, surgeries. So we did a secret shopper survey, and this is back just before the pandemic broke out. And so the survey was sort of curtailed because we thought it wasn't fair to continue on during the lockdown. But we surveyed about half of the GP surgeries in Haringey as secret shoppers and discovered that indeed, probably about 90% of them, when asked could could this person who doesn't have a passport and doesn't have a fixed address, but needs to see a doctor, if they could register, they were turned away back with that then generated a report, which then generated a lot of discussion with the local NHS and so forth, and engagement of doctors. I think it's Doctors of the World who they have this safe surgeries project. So there was sort of efforts made at the time to improve services. But to be fair, it's an ongoing problem. And last, I think it was last year Healthwatch Haringey did a much more expansive survey which we partnered on, similarly following up but also providing training and information booklets and so forth. And also off the back of the survey that were done, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism did a nationwide survey, and that got quite a lot of publicity. So that's another win for us. Because we've highlighted an issue we might not have completely resolved the problem, but we've definitely brought it to people's attention. It's got a lot more publicity.

Jamila  18:56  
The other thing  I was wondering is what kind of migrant groups do you work with? Like who are? Are there changes as well?

Lucy  19:06  
Oh, gosh, I mean, Haringey is just so diverse. I couldn't give you the statistics. I don't think it would be possible to list the groups because we don't work with specific national or ethnic groups, we work across the board with people in the immigration and asylum system. And that also doesn't just mean refugees or asylum seekers. It means the wider immigration system which you know, in some instances can also include former EU nationals here who are struggling with that system post Brexit and some people are still facing a lot of problems. Because we're a campaign group and we don't provide services. We don't have any staff we don't have a public space where we operate and provide services from so those of us many of us do volunteer in different spaces across the borough and come across people and of course, our core group includes people with experience of migration in one way or another, some of our members are in the asylum system or have experience of it, I would say our core group are mainly more people who are more settled here and have more privilege and capacity to give their time and energy to this work. Because for many people who are dealing with these problems, they're just so stressed and have so many problems to contend with. And firefighting, it's very difficult for them, and also very scary for them to step up and be very visible. But what we do try and do very hard and we have, like you, we also have a podcast. And that's just one example of where we try to provide platform those voices, and provide space to people with that lived experience to talk about their story. A lot of them are very inspiring, actually.

Jamila  20:54  
Yeah, I was gonna mention that, because I think this is really nice about the podcast, I'm gonna link it in the show notes as well, no small victories, because it shows such a breadth of personal history. And I think that's what sometimes gets forgotten in all the discussion. And I know, like, you guys are focused on the strategic look, but to really see what does it mean for the individual to go through this process, because I think a lot of us don't really understand what it means not to be allowed to work not to be allowed to access certain things. That is difficult, you know, kind of, we just hear the other loud stories that are in the media, about boats, etc, and about the hotels. But again, we don't really understand what it actually means, for example, to live in a hotel. What are the limitations for you? What what does it actually feel like? So I think, from that perspective, it's pretty good to hear those voices themselves. So shall we talk a little bit about what's going on right now? 

Lucy  22:00  
Right now, we are facing a homelessness crisis. This is in Haringey, and is also nationwide, a homelessness crisis for refugees who have just very recently received their asylum status. The situation is that there are as you may have heard, many listeners will have heard about the government going on about the clearing the legacy backlog of asylum claims, this is the language they use. And they'd set themselves a target by the end of 2023, to clear the legacy backlog which in fact, they didn't achieve. But anyway, and they used various underhand means as well to process a lot of these people. In fact, a lot of them haven't been processed. So a lot of claims. And we're talking about people who've been stuck in the asylum system. In many cases for several years, many years, there is a large proportion of people who have finally been given/ granted their refugee status. And that should normally be a moment for celebration and joy and relief for that person. And finally, finally, congratulations, you're a refugee, we recognize you as a refugee, that opens the door to that person then being eligible for public funds, being eligible for housing being able to work and just lead a normal life like the rest of us take for granted. However, what the home office decided back in August, was in order to clear the hotels more rapidly, which of course, they've had a lot of bad publicity about, they decided to give people less notice after receiving their refugee status before they were evicted from their asylum accommodation. So that notice had already been too short, it was just 28 days to get yourself together, find a job find somewhere to live claim, Universal Credit, etc. Well, the government reduced that to what ended up being in practice seven days. So you can imagine people who have been living for years in asylum accommodation, not allowed to work. Many of those living in hotels living on eight pounds a week, not able to choose where they were placed in the country, often being shoved around from one place to another place, and being uprooted. So all of a sudden, you're told, okay, you're out on your rear in seven days. And by the way, you've got to claim Universal Credit and find somewhere to live and they've got no money for a deposit no guarantor for a landlord. It's a government made crisis that we're having. I think it's the Refugee Council has predicted that around 50,000 People would be affected under this situation. And we are seeing locally in Haringey increasing numbers of people who are coming out of the asylum system who should be welcomed into society, but instead of which are becoming street homeless, so that's the situation we have it's an impossible situation to deal with there is Yeah, hardship and destitution is happening right now and increasing. 

So Lucy, what are you doing or what's Haringey welcome trying to do.

First thing I really want to highlight and we're really inviting people to engage with this, we have a fundraiser, which we're doing in partnership with the wonderful organization, the Museum of homelessness, and the fundraiser is, so it's, it's called prevent refugee homelessness in Haringey. And what we're attempting to do is to raise funds, which would eventually be money that would go towards helping refugees who've managed to find a tenancy to pay for their first month's deposit and, and rent, bearing in mind that these people have not been allowed to work and have no savings and no guarantor, the council has its own housing team, of course. And that housing team will treat these people just like it does anybody else, they don't get any preferential treatment, some refugees actually get priority need if they are a family, for example, with children, where the council has an obligation to house them in temporary accommodation, or whatever it is. But many refugees, and particularly single men do not get priority need status, and therefore they get much less support. They may once after a housing assessment, they might  become eligible for a small amount of proportion of money, which would help them towards funding their first, their moving on, but it's not enough. So our fundraiser is a community effort to kind of make up the difference to enable those people to move on, I'd really encourage people in our community, we've already raised over 3000 pounds, but that's a drop in the ocean, we're going to need a lot more. So anybody who's able to, has the means to contribute to our fundraiser, we will be eternally grateful. So that's one strand of the effort to deal with this problem. But clearly, there's a housing crisis in the country. And many refugees who are just entering the system are unfamiliar with how to navigate the private rental sector. And because refugees have been evicted at very short notice, and the government has now reversed the very punitive policy of evicting people within seven days, they've only gone back to what it was before, which was not enough time, 28 days, as we know, you know, even just to claim Universal Credit that the money doesn't start coming in for several weeks. So it's very easy for people to fall through the net and become destitute this time. So we're also with other groups, voluntary community sector groups, and in conversation with the council, what we want to do is to coordinate much more support, and that would include people who have a spare room who are happy to host somebody for a period of time temporarily, whilst that person is then allowed time to get themselves up and running to get their benefits sorted out deal with whatever they need to do maybe find work, and then to move on into the private rented sector. So we're really calling out for people who may have a spare room and capacity to support somebody in that situation, which is, you know, it has been done - the many people in across Haringey hosted Ukrainians, for example, and it can be a very rewarding experience, both for host and for tenant, 

Jamila  28:42  
especially if the tenant can cook well.

Lucy  28:44  
(laughs) Yeah, right. Exactly. There is lots of scope there. But we need people who would like to do this to get in touch with and what the situation is at the moment is to get in touch with the council's resettlement team. And so they have an email address resettlementteam@haringey.gov.uk So anybody who's interested in hosting could send them an email to start with, but also we are calling out for anyone who's got a bit of time to volunteer who would like to sort of buddy up with a refugee to help them navigate this housing system. So you know to be realistic, what should the person be looking for? How should they go about it, dealing with landlords and so forth. So anybody who would be up for volunteering could also contact the Council on that resettlement team email address. What we're hoping to do soon is to better coordinate this effort. So we're really in the beginning stages, the council is producing some information booklets for refugees entering this move on period, but we're hoping that there'll be more coordination across the community and the borough.

Jamila  30:01  
Okay, so that's what you're doing at the moment. Is there anything else we should talk about? Or are we going to the third part? Are we going to the happy part?

Lucy  30:13  
There probably are things I haven't thought really. 

Jamila  30:15  
So let's move to some upbeat parts. The happy part. Lucy, what are your top tips? Tottenham or Haringey?

Lucy  30:26  
Okay, my top tips I did think about this one, because I knew you're gonna ask me. So, okay, um, one place I love is Karamel restaurant in Wood Green. It's probably the best vegan restaurant ever. And they do. They have an amazing vegan chef. I'm not a vegan, strictly speaking, but I you know, obviously I can eat vegan food like anybody. But they do it really well. They also have jazz live music several nights a week. And actually Haringey welcome has held several of our annual events there. We have All Welcome events once a year, we try to and as well as the restaurant, they have a black box theatre space and a gallery space. So it's a sort of really useful space for holding events where you want to do lots of different things at the same time. Yeah, it's great place Karamel restaurant, actually opposite Karamel. And I'm actually not too sure if it's, I hope it's still going the goodness brewery? 

Jamila  31:32  
I think so. Yeah. Yeah. 

Lucy  31:34  
So it's because I think it's in one of those meantime spaces. And I know there's a lot of development going on in that area. So I don't know, I hope they managed to hang on in there because they're great. So they have a tap room several days/nights a week, I think sort of Thursday to Sunday or something like that. And they have great beer. So and pizza. That's what they at least last time I was there that's what they were doing. So definitely recommend those. I love living under one sun in Tottenham Hale and Leila who runs it. She was one of our podcast guests. But she does amazing community activities. They're so welcoming, so diverse and just really, really great. And then I guess my go to place when I just need to feel a bit peaceful and tranquil is the grove in Alexandra Palace Park, which I love. It's like my favorite place just to go and (what is it?) reflect the grove is just an area in Alexandra Park. But it's a particularly tranquil, beautiful place. And actually, we did have one of our events there in the summer. Last year. One of our long term members was a very good friend of mine, a man called Sharif Barko, who was originally from Darfur in Sudan. And he lived in Haringey for many years and he was a supporter of Haringey welcome. And very sadly, he was he went back to Darfur a few years ago and was killed. But we have a commemorative bench for Sharif in the grove. And last June, I think, we had partnered up with an organization called waging peace, who work with the Sudanese community in the UK. And we had a commemoration for Sharif but also for everyone in the Sudanese community. And it was an extremely moving and wonderful, beautiful event picnic commemoration with about 100 People from all over the UK, from the Sudanese community different parts of Sudan. And that was held at the grove and it was an absolutely beautiful day. So for me, it's a kind of place to go and contemplate and reflect and feel peaceful, and it's very beautiful.

Jamila  33:53  
Okay, Lucy, thank you very much. Okay, that was quite an abrupt ending. Please be assured that actually I talked with Lucy afterwards, and I stopped recording and then I said bye to her. So we did say goodbye to each other. I will link in the show notes, the fundraise on their Twitter page. I'm going to link in the website and I'm going to link in the podcast as well. Okay, so please get involved. And I hope you learned something. And I'll speak to you in February. Bye bye. I hope you enjoyed today's episode, learned something new. And let that Tottenham love grow. Take care. And until next time, bye

Transcribed by https://otter.ai