Advisers’ Spotlight: Heather Staff
Heather Staff, RAMP Adviser to Neil Coyle MP (previously Kate Green MP)
‘He lost his life for a pair of trainers’
I will never forget hearing those words as I listened to an activist from the ‘Lift the Ban’ campaign tell a heart-breaking story of one young asylum seeker who died in an accident while fleeing enforcement officials. He’d been working illegally in a car wash to enable him to buy his friend a birthday present. That story of desperation, and a waste of a precious life, has stayed with me since joining RAMP at the start of the project in 2018. It serves as a stark reminder that the work we do to raise the quality and quantity of debate on migration is not just a matter of numbers, it’s about real people and real lives.
The past two years have certainly been a rollercoaster as we have transitioned through Brexit, worked during a general election, had two goes at the Immigration and Social Security (EU Withdrawal Bill) and asked what an ethical, just, compassionate and fair immigration policy look like in the midst of, and now hopefully moving out of, a pandemic.
During Covid-19 we have seen some positive shifts around the Immigration health surcharge for some health workers and the suspension of the 28 day move on period for newly recognised refugees. These are changes that have been welcomed and in some cases long-championed by RAMP Principals. We now need to work to ensure that positive changes are cemented and that opportunities to look again at what and who we value as a society are not lost.
These questions were certainly front-of-mind for me and former RAMP Principal Kate Green as I supported her in her role on the Bill Committee for the Immigration Bill in the Commons in June. RAMP briefed Kate and other parliamentarians on a number of issues including children in care and settled status, NRPF, asylum seekers having the right to work, detention without a time limit.
Perhaps one of the most emotional aspects of this work was hearing the stories directly from activists and campaigners with experience of being detained without a time limit in the immigration system – a cross party motion on which we hope to continue to see movement on when the Bill reaches the Lords. COVID-19 has taught us all a lesson on the mental pain that uncertainty and isolation can bring.
It has been a complete privilege to have worked with Kate on this Bill and on all of the other work that she’s done with RAMP. I have admired her ability to debate complex ideas in a calm and forensic fashion, while doing so with a fierce compassion for the people whose lives she seeks to improve. Kate has enormous integrity and her promotion to the Labour front bench is richly deserved. I am also glad that Kate will stay informally involved with RAMP as an Associate member and I look forward to working with Neil Coyle MP as he joins as the RAMP Principal on the Labour side.
Having already met with schools and activists with Neil in his constituency I am personally excited about the work he hopes to do on NRPF, and on helping young people to regularise their immigration status. As ever, these are areas where RAMP can support a drive for pragmatic policy-making that seeks to be value-driven and can deal with the complexity that each individual case brings, including those similar to the one I heard about through the Lift the Ban campaign in 2018.
