Asylum Welfare and Work in the UK, 2015-2017

1. Gathering of a corpus of texts on asylum and the right to work using Nexis; Hansard; the archive of British political speeches; Home Office press releases farmed from the Home Office website; grey literature gathered through NGO and UN networks. The database of texts of includes all of the records of the debates in the Houses of Commons and Lords which covered the issue of asylum seekers and the right to work; records of parliamentary committee meetings and reports where the issue arose (e.g. the Home Affairs Select Committee); newspaper articles from all major UK national newspapers; political speeches made by party leaders and cabinet ministers; think tank reports; European Union (EU) Commission and Parliament reports; third sector reports; and campaigning materials produced in the period. In total, 449 texts covering the period 2002–2015 were gathered and imported into NVivo qualitative data analysis software. The texts were then coded to identify the full range of arguments made—for and against—giving asylum seekers the right to work. When coded, this provided a database through which I was able to identify the range of arguments made, by who, and in what contexts, for the period since what was effectively a work ban came in.
2. Research interviews with politicians (Home Secretaries, Immigration Ministers), policy makers who have worked on asylum in the Home Office since 2002, and NGOs with expertise in this field, in trying to shift policy on welfare and working rights for people who are awaiting a decision on their asylum application. 22 interviews were undertaken and participants were selected using a purposive sampling method informed by the textual analysis earlier in the project.
3. Creation of a database of organisations that support people in the asylum system using the Charity Commission database. Financial information on voluntary organisations is based on their annual accounts submitted to the Charity Commission. The “asylum support” charities is applied to all charities who list their beneficiaries as ‘asylum seekers’ / ‘refugees’ AND whose activities include: ‘make grants to individuals’ / ‘provide other finance’ / ‘provide housing’. Financial data for the entire sample of 199 of these organisations was obtained by entering data from the Charity Commission Register.
Before use, the data is cleaned to remove significant errors, and undergoes a series of checks to ensure validity. These checks include:
• comparison of income, expenditure and workforce data between this year and last year to look for particularly large increases and decreases, and
• construction of various ratios between financial variables (for example between income and expenditure) to look for anomalies.
In-depth analysis is performed on a sample of 20 small / medium / large / major charities that are required to submit detailed annual accounts to the Charity Commission. Financial and operational data for these organisations was obtained by entering data from the charities accounts and annual report. The data is cleared to remove information which would enable the charities to be individually identified in the analysis and reporting.
4. Research interviews with people in the asylum system. This was undertaken by refugee comity researchers who were trained in qualitative interviewing methods. 30 people were interviewed in one dispersal city across three major refugee language groups (Amharic, Farsi, Arabic). A snowball sampling method was used, starting from contact made at an asylum drop in centre. Researchers aimed for at least 3 women in their sample of 10.

The Data Collection is available for download to users registered with the UK Data Service.