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OUR 2023-2030
STRATEGY

For many years, we’ve been fighting for a fair asylum system for people seeking safety. But this is no longer enough. 

The asylum and immigration system in the UK is structurally and systematically racist, upheld by the racialised and dehumanising narratives that are used to justify it.  

To end this, we need systematic change. Not just changes to laws and policies, but to the narratives used by those with power, our culture and values, our whole society. This is what our ambitious 2023-30 strategy sets out to do, starting with ending the hostile environment faced by people seeking safety.  

Read more about our journey to our 2030 strategy, written by our Chief Executive, Tim Naor Hilton, here.

OUR VISION

Every refugee seeking safety in the UK can thrive as part of a welcoming, anti-racist society.

OUR MISSION

To end the hostile environment for refugees by 2030. 

Our vision is that every person seeking safety in our country can thrive here, not just survive. But if we’re going to achieve this, we have to end the hostility we have as a society to refugees, people seeking asylum and migrants. 

This hostile environment of anti-refugee and anti-immigrant sentiments and beliefs has been created by a potent mix of factors, including:  

  • Our current set of policies and laws that embed immigration control into every area of British life, meaning refugees, people seeking asylum and migrants have fewer rights than British citizens, in contravention of human rights law and the Refugee Convention.
  • The hostile policies that shape our wider immigration and asylum system. For example, the current Government’s position that anyone without documentation is ‘illegal’ and therefore they have no rights. 
  • The wider structurally racist attitudes and beliefs that underpin these laws and policies and perpetuate prejudice and oppression in our culture and society, such as discrimination in the rental market, in employment and in our schools.

It is our systems and our society that is responsible for the hostile environment people seeking safety in our country face. To end it, we have to change them.  

And that starts with empowering the people with lived experience of this hostility. That’s why refugees and people seeking asylum have led the development of this strategy. It is their voices, views and experiences that have shaped how we will work together to end the hostile environment over the next decade.  

We’ll know we’ve been successful because of what people seeking safety say it feels like to live in the UK. We will use personal experience to measure our progress, because success in disrupting and dismantling racist systems can only be measured in terms of the human impact it has.  

OUR GOALS FOR 2030

  • Removing barriers to power for refugees so that they are at the heart of the national conversation on refugee rights and protection. 
  • Building a positive movement for change to shift political and societal attitudes towards refugees and people seeking asylum. 
  • Fighting for the rights of people seeking safety so that they can live with dignity, feel recognised for all that they are, and ultimately thrive. 
  • Playing our part in building a resilient, innovative, power-aware sector that collaboratively works to remove barriers to power for refugees, shift political and societal attitudes and fight for the rights of people seeking safety. 
  • Growing our resources so we can reach and empower more refugees.  
  • Modelling a power-aware, anti-racist working culture where we put the well-being of people first and they are empowered to learn, grow and lead. 

OUR OBJECTIVES

We have developed objectives for each of our goals, which we’ll work to achieve over the next two years, guided by our values. From 2023 to 2025, we will: 

  • 1.  Remove barriers to power for refugees through co-producing our strategies, campaigns and services with them, increasing their opportunities for influence and learning, and increasing lived experience employment and support within the organisation, so that their voice defines in every way the change we want to see. 
  • We will: 
  • a. Ensure 50 people with lived experience can use their voice to influence issues that matter to them. 
  • b. Establish an organisational working group to create a co-production plan by 2025. The framework will inform our co-production approach until 2030. 
  • c. Increase the number of staff we have with lived experience of the asylum system at all levels and support staff to develop their skills. 
  • 2. Campaign alongside people with lived experience, grassroots groups and allies to increase public support for refugees and influence decision makers to commit to a workable, fair and anti-racist asylum system. 
  • We will: 
  • a.  Seek out 10 new partnerships within the social justice movement, working closely with environmental, mental health, housing, labour rights and anti-racism organisations to build our base of support.  
  • b.  Host events to engage Labour, Scottish National Party and Liberal Democrat candidates and MPs before and after the General Election to influence the narrative and future policies on asylum and immigration. 
  • c.  Publish co-produced reports on anti-racism and the systemic issues eroding refugee rights to shift the political and national conversation from restrictionist policies to fair, proactive, holistic and workable policies. 
  • 3. Disrupt how the hostile asylum and immigration system strips people seeking safety of their rights so that they can live in dignity and thrive in our country.
  • We will: 
  • a.  Support 3,000 people living within the asylum system to defend their rights and help them thrive.  
  • b.  Support 2,000 resettled refugees to defend their rights and help them thrive. 
  • 4. Work with our partners to build our sector’s expertise and ability to combat the hostile environment through sharing research and learnings, convening and holding space so we can collaboratively tackle our shared challenges and supporting a shared journey towards removing barriers to power for refugees and supporting our sector be anti-racist.
  • We will: 
  • a.  Collaborate with 250 sector and partner organisations to respond collectively to key sector priorities and challenges across 3 thematic areas, such as housing, rights, and lived experience employment and support, taking a data-led approach and seeking out ways to innovate where we can to test and model the future refugee support system we will need. 
  • b.  Conduct regular surveys to understand how refugees, people seeking asylum and migrants are feeling and experiencing so that we can measure our progress towards our goals and any insights or trends can inform our planning.  
  • 5. Invest our resources responsibly to achieve sustainable financial growth so that we can reach and empower even more people seeking safety.
  • We will: 
  • a.  Keep our monthly income and expenditure in line with our budget. 
  • b.  Roll out a new integrated income generation strategy and invest in fundraising so we can achieve financial sustainability by the end of the financial year in 2025.   
  • 6. Develop a work culture which is centred on well-being and encourages data-driven learning, empowering staff to hold boundaries, to practice self-care, and to hold each other and selves to account on upholding our anti-racist values so that we as an organisation can ultimately achieve our mission.

  • We will:     
  • a.  Introduce a well-being support model to help staff cope in the current hostile external context. 
  • b.  Continue our anti-racism learning journey and make sure our learnings are shared and acted on across the organisation. 
  • c.  Review our approach to data as an organisation and take forward the recommendations. 
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