Kirsty Blackman

As I said, I do not think that anybody should be subject to no recourse, but I looked at children under five as a first step, because those years are key. If it is going to be anybody with dependants of any age, I am equally happy with that. I am speaking in this debate as a Back Bencher about the issues that I have seen, rather than advancing the SNP policy. I should maybe have been clearer about that at the beginning, but this is about what things look like in my constituency and the concerns that have been raised with me. I have heard doctors and health professionals talk about issues with rickets and malnutrition. Those are issues that we have not seen since 50 or 60 years ago, when people did not have access to good quality food. Food banks should not have to fill the gaps when we have a responsibility to all the children, everywhere, on these islands. My other concern is about the dependency on other individuals that no recourse to public funds creates for families. If they cannot get support from the state, they may rely on friends to lend them money, support from religious communities, immoral lenders, or taking part in sex work to get money to provide food for their children. I have seen situations in which people who are being supported by religious communities are in relationships with significant domestic abuse and domestic violence, but cannot separate from their abusive partner, because they know that they will lose the support of the Church, and that is the only thing ensuring that their children are fed. I do not think that is an appropriate situation for the UK Government to force families into. I wrote to the previous UK Government about that issue in relation to an individual constituent who was divorced from her partner. She was not able to have any relationship with her family, who lived in an African country, because they were so angry about her divorce and had threatened significant violence against her. I had written to the Home Office, suggesting that there was a real problem and that the children needed to be fed and supported. The Home Office said to me, “If she has such a problem with the situation, she can go home.” That was the only response it could think of. We have a responsibility to that woman and those children to provide them with a level of protection, because they are living here and it was not safe for the woman to go back to the country that she had been born in. I agree that the length of time it takes for decisions to be made is a real problem. We have just had a visa approved for somebody whose case we have been helping with since July 2024, and that is a short period of time compared with some of them. One chap who has just had his visa approved has three children who have been struggling with no recourse to public funds. Thankfully, the school has stepped in and given them free school meals to ensure they are fed—but again there is no consistency in the decision making on free school meals, partly because we do not know which children it is who have no recourse to public funds, whose parents are not currently able to bring in an income and are not getting state support either. If there was more understanding about which children were in those categories, schools would be better placed to provide support.