Humiliation Is Price Refugees Pay For Vouchers

By Daniel Mcgrory, The Times, Tuesday August 28 2001

Bazhadi Hassan will no longer let her eight-year-old daughter run errands to the corner shop after a teenage gang taunted the girl and threw coins at her as she paid for bread, milk and tinned fruit with government-issue vouchers.

"We may as well have asylum-seeker tattooed on our forehead," Mrs Hassan said. "Carrying these damn vouchers makes us a target for racists and thieves."

Civil servants, still convinced that it is the fairest way to make sure that asylum- seekers get what they need, might spend a morning shopping with this 42-year-old primary school teacher from Iraq as she timidly picks her way along the supermarket aisles. Shopkeepers cheat her, other mothers in the check-out queue insult her, and youths on mountain bikes lie in wait outside to steal the flimsy vouchers, which unscrupulous traders swap for cash with no questions asked.

Her neighbour was robbed earlier this month, but like most of the 2,000 or more asylum-seekers recently housed in Liverpool as part of the Home Office’s attempt to disperse refugee families, she did not report the crime in case it jeopardised her appeal to stay in Britain.

Mrs Hassan, a mother of three, is regularly tempted to part with a £10 voucher for as little as £5 in cash. "You can’t buy children’s shoes with vouchers, or pay for bus fares or phonecards, and the few shops that take vouchers are much more expensive than street markets".

On her shopping expedition in Everton Park Mrs Hassan shows why the Government is being pressed to scrap its voucher system before next month’s Labour Party conference. She tries to keep a running total of what she puts in her basket because the rules say that shops must not give change if she does not spend the full £26 of vouchers.

A Somali woman in front of her suffers the indignity of returning some tins to the shelf as she has gone over her limit by 12p. The surly check-out operator will not let her make up the difference in change.

The woman and her two children are made to join the back of the queue. Some supermarkets insist on asylum-seekers waiting at separate tills. Corner shops often charge commission for vouchers, which is illegal.

The arrival of sizeable numbers of asylum-seekers has created a new currency in places like Liverpool, with vouchers known locally as "blue money" because of the colour of the badge displayed on the windows of shops that will accept them. Rashid Iqbal, the advice manager at the Refugee Action office in Toxteth, said: "Voluntary organisations know how the benefits system works but suddenly this country has introduced a kind of parallel, privatised welfare system. Apart from stigmatising those forced to use them, these vouchers don’t let these families buy what they need".

Families say that vouchers are not a practical way to shop. Suman Mohammad, 44, an Iraqi Kurd who almost lost a hand because of his mistreatment in one of Saddam Hussein’s prisons, said: "You might want just a pint of milk but if all you have left is a £5 voucher you have to buy other things in that shop or lose the money. If we had cash we could buy what we need where we want and find the cheapest prices."

Budgets do not stretch to taxis or bus fares, so most days families walk six miles to and from the city centre to use designated stores. Such journeys are a daily trial for 40-year-old Mohammad, who is confined to a wheelchair. He was shot nine times by colleagues in the Yemeni services for refusing an order to attack pro-democracy demonst rators with his army unit. Thisformer major describes using vouchers as demeaning, and says: "We don’t want to feel like charity cases or that if we have money we will spend it on things other than food and clothing."

At an English class in a law centre in Toxteth, a young mother from Angola sent to Liverpool two months ago hides her face with embarrassment as she admits sometimes using newspaper for nappies because she cannot afford supermarket prices for disposable brands. The one-room refuge in which Isobel Coutano, 37, lives with her husband and two children does not have hot running water, so she cannot wash their clothes or nappies.

That morning in a grocery store that she always uses, staff would not let her use her husband’s vouchers as well as her own. He was outside with the children and endured the humiliation of

being marched inside by a teenage shop assistant to identify his wife, and to separate out the shopping bought with his vouchers.

Desmond Chow, an outreach worker funded by the Glaxo Neurological Centre, tours the Landmark estate most days. More than 500 young single men and four women have been crammed into two grim tower blocks called the Inn on the Park. "There aren’t the support services to help asylum-seekers when the voucher system breaks down. Families are humiliated every day and more and more are beaten up and robbed, as vouchers are as good as money to the gangs now," Mr Chow said.

"These people are scared to complain about the wrongs and abuses of the voucher scheme as they think it will go against them at their hearing for refugee status and there is nobody to tell them otherwise". The health centre on the other side of the precinct at Everton Park keeps emergency food rations because some asylum-seekers go for days without eating. "Their vouchers don’t turn up and they don’t know where to go to correct the problem so they just go hungry," said Simon Abrams, a doctor. The Liverpool experience is replicated everywhere that asylum-seekers have been moved to since April. The voucher system is reviled and it is difficult to find anyone in the local authority, or among shopkeepers, charities and refugee families, who sees any virtue in it.

Copyright 2001, The Times

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