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St Mungo’s apologises for sharing information on migrant rough sleepers with Home Office
The chief executive of homelessness charity St Mungo’s has apologised for giving the details of some migrant rough sleepers to the Home Office without their consent and has vowed to overhaul the charity’s processes.
Earlier this year, St Mungo’s was accused of working with immigration officials to find rough sleepers from the European Union deemed to be in the UK illegally in order to arrest and deport them.
While the Home Office policy was intended to allow outreach services to rapidly obtain a person’s immigration status and ensure the correct support options were given, in reality a referral would also lead to a person’s case being expedited “for resolution”, critics said.
St Mungo’s said it had worked alongside the Home Office in an effort to encourage destitute EU citizens who were sleeping rough to take up support options.
This approach did sometimes involve “sharing basic information about individuals with the Home Office without their consent,” St Mungo’s admitted, adding that this was a lawful practice.
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However, St Mungo’s approach changed in May 2016 when the government introduced a new policy which regarded rough sleeping in itself as a breach of EU treaty rights.
This meant that people sleeping rough were liable to more rapid detention and removal with less opportunity to find alternative solutions, the charity said.
At this point St Mungo’s outreach managers agreed that working with the Home Office would be a last resort and information would no longer be shared without consent.
Despite this, one of the charity’s 18 outreach teams continued to share information with the Home Office between July 2016 and February 2017 – in contravention of its own policy at the time.
Formal complaints were submitted to the Charity Commission and the Information Commissioner’s Office last year and although both regulatory bodies found that St Mungo’s was acting lawfully the charity decided to conduct an internal review.
Its policy now states that it will not share any information about its clients with the Home Office without the individual’s “full and informed consent” unless it is legally obliged to do so.
Howard Sinclair, chief executive of St Mungo’s, said: “There are important lessons for us from the review. We could have done more to explain the change in approach to internal teams and should have been quicker to put the change in approach into formal policies and procedures. The executive team takes full responsibility for this and is sorry it happened.”
He said that the charity has introduced new procedures to ensure a consistency of approach going forward.
Mr Sinclair added that currently help for migrant rough sleepers to get off the streets was “far from adequate”.
