Policy paradoxes and the Vulnerable Persons Resettlement Scheme: How welfare policies impact resettlement support

Abstract

The Vulnerable Persons Resettlement Scheme (VPRS) comprised the UK government's primary response to persons forcibly displaced by the Syrian civil war. Recipients were granted immediate recourse to public funds and a locally-based 12-month integration support plan, designed at the discretion of practitioners. Drawing on forty in-depth interviews with refugees and practitioners in two areas with contrasting local approaches, this article explores the tensions that emerged when broader central government policies (distinct from the VPRS), intersected with resettlement support in recipients’ lives. Two current welfare reforms are identified and evaluated as having impacted resettled families’ housing experiences: firstly; the Two-Child Limit and secondly; the Benefit Cap. The article demonstrates how the financial precarity produced by both policies undermined local practitioners’ resettlement support. In doing so, the article challenges dominant policy narratives of exceptionality, locating those resettled within the routinised systems of precarity and conditionality embedded in the welfare system.

A Rule-Based Decision Support Method Combining Variable Precision Rough Set and Stochastic Multi-Objective Acceptability Analysis for Multi-Attribute Decision-Making

“…However, in some real-life applications, the information has obvious ordinal characteristic where better condition attribute values usually bring out better decision attribute values. e dominance-based variable precision rough set (DB-VPRS) approach improves the VPRS approach by replacing the indiscernibility relation with dominance relation, thus taking the preference-orders into consideration [44]. e dominance relation with respect to attribute p is represented as D p , which is also denoted by ≻ p , and x≻ p y means that x dominates (is better than) y in terms of attribute p. For the benefit index, x≻ p y means that the attribute value of x is greater than the attribute value of y with respect to attribute p, i.e.,…”

Governing resettlement: Interrogating tensions and contradictions around age, vulnerability, and integrate-ability in the Irish context

“…This article addresses the government of resettlement, drawing on evidence from Ireland. It adds to work concerned with power relations in resettlement (e.g., Garnier et al, 2018;Schneider, 2021;Welfens and Bonjour, 2021), contributes to an emerging literature at the intersection of social policy and resettlement policy (e.g., Darrow, 2018;Haycox, 2023) and highlights connections between the government of migrant integration and the government of childhood. The analysis draws on findings from a qualitative study -commissioned by the Children's Rights Allianceon the support needs of Syrian children and families resettled under the Irish Refugee Protection Programme (IRPP).…”

“…It is recognised that the relatively more 'deserving' status and greater support offered to those admitted under resettlement (see e.g., Arnold et al, 2021 in the Irish context) does not necessarily insulate against relatively poor outcomes, particularly in respect of economic indicators of integration. Recent critical literature points to the negative effects on resettled persons of policy tensions and contradictions in various host countries (Darrow, 2018;Haycox, 2023). An important theme is the tension between vulnerability as the key criterion for resettlement, and explicit or implicit requirements around what has been referred to as integrate-ability (Laurence, 2001).…”

Racism and Ethnic Inequality in a Time of Crisis

“…Experiences of, and access to, housing provisions are shaped by the power relations within wider society, including racial, gender, class and generational dynamics (Ahmed, 1999;Brun and Fábos, 2015). Despite the persistent ethnic inequalities in experience in Britain (Finney and Harries, 2015;Shankley and Finney, 2020;Haycox, 2022), considerations of relationships between ethnicity and housing are often limited in broader debates (Bloch et al, 2013). Minority groups were evidenced by Finney and Harries (2015) to be at greater risk of overcrowding compared to White British people, with overcrowding defined as a situation where there are too few bedrooms to meet household needs.…”