Call for change

Contact your elected representatives and ask them to outline what they are doing to help refugees.

Don’t just write to your MP or MSPs, contact your local councillors as well.

Local authorities have a critical decision to make about whether they are involved in resettlement programmes.

The best thing you can do is to contact or meet all your representatives – your Westminster MP, your Holyrood MSPs and your local councillors.

Make sure you get a reply. If you don’t then follow up your contact. As your representatives they work for you and are accountable to you.

If you can why not invite them along to a community event or a meeting so they can meet other members of your group

Write to your Westminster MP on issues relating to Home Office policy and International Development policy:

  • The right to work for asylum seekers and the level of support they receive
  • The quality of accommodation and access to services
  • Policies of dawn raids and detention
  • Destitution
  • Decision-making in asylum cases and legal processes
  • The numbers of refugees resettled directly from conflict zones
  • The administration of family reunification and to offer resettlement in the UK to unaccompanied asylum seeking children
  • Commitment to the 0.7% target for aid spending
  • Ensuring that money is spent well and on humanitarian relief and protection

Write to your Holyrood MSPs about:

  • Promoting support for refugees and asylum seekers in Scotland as it relates to their wellbeing and integration
  • Tackling racial and religious hatred
  • Promoting respect for diversity in the education system and in public life

Write to your local councillors to:

  • Ensure that your local authority is doing everything it can to participate in UK wide programmes to offer a home to asylum seekers and refugees. This might include participating in asylum dispersal, receiving more people under the Syrian VPR scheme or the Gateway programme, and / or offering help to unaccompanied asylum seeking children, transferred from other parts of the UK or resettled from places such as Calais or camps around Syria.
  • Ask that they are committed to making your local area one which is safe for everyone.