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Asylum Matters is calling on all City of Sanctuary groups to join up with other local groups working to support refugees and people seeking asylum to contact their MPs in the post-election period. 

We’re coordinating joint letters to MPs from all groups working in their constituencies in order to highlight the key issues affecting asylum-seekers locally and start a dialogue about how these concerns can be addressed by Parliamentarians. We think it’s also important to raise some of our concerns around the introduction of a ‘two-tier’ system of refugee protection at the expense of asylum-seekers – something that remains a major policy threat in the coming months.

To that end, we have drafted a template letter highlighting these issues which can be tailored to reflect local circumstances and sent to MPs, ideally on behalf of a number of organisations and groups present in their constituency. The letters are a first step towards engaging with your MP and potentially organizing a meeting to discuss key issues more in depth. Asylum Matters will be producing briefings and offer support for these meetings where useful. Even if you already have a good relationship with your MP, this could be a good opportunity to re-engage with them and certainly, the more MPs we can reach with the same message, the more impact we can have.

If you’re interested and want to know more, including seeing a version of the template letter, get in touch with the Asylum Matters team:

–        West Midlands, Emma Birks, [email protected]

–        North West, Estelle Worthington, [email protected]

–        North East, Katie McSherry, [email protected]

–        Yorkshire and Humberside, Lorna Gledhill[email protected]

–        Other regions/ nations, Andrea Vukovic, [email protected]

We’ll be mapping all contact and responses from MPs across our regions and more widely, which will offer useful insights into what MPs are doing on our issues and where we can find potential allies for future influencing opportunities. We hope you’ll get involved!