The Guidance Resource

• About the New Plan for Immigration and the consultation process
• Concerns about the consultation process
• How to respond to the consultation
• Understanding the consultation questions and preparing your response
• The consultation questions themselves, with information and resources to help with responses

If you are responding as an Individual

If you are filling it in as an individual, there are two separate questionnaires and the two pdf documents on the following web-page take you through question by question (it is a Quaker document but it can be used by anybody):
How Quakers can respond to the government’s new immigration plan – Quaker Asylum and Refugee Network

Or you can follow the guidance provided by Amnesty International.

You do not have to answer all the questions. In fact, we in CoS UK will not be answering many of the multiple choice questions because they are leading questions and they do not allow participants to provide a meaningful answer.

If you would like to respond to the questions of the consultation without using the online platform, you can use the New Plan for Immigration – Stakeholder Questionnaire PDF of the questions to formulate your response and send it to this email address by the 30th of April: [email protected]

What else can you do about the consultation? 

The consultation is being run by Britain Thinks on behalf of the Government, and people can e-mail them at [email protected] to complain about the process itself. You can also write to your MP. We have the following concerns which we think should be raised:-

• The consultation is only running for 6 weeks (Government guidelines state that consultations should be run over a 12 week period). These six weeks include Easter holidays, a May bank holiday and is been run during a pre-election period (elections for Local Government, Mayoral and devolved nations).  
• The document is only in English and Welsh, many people with lived experience will therefore be unable to respond.
• The questions are leading and do not allow for meaningful answers. The claims made in the  Immigration Plan itself are not based on evidence and the consultation itself has been designed in order to lead people to endorse the plan.
• The consultation is poorly designed and the sign-up process makes it incredible inaccessible.
• The consultation ends on the 6th May, the Government intends to announce the Bill in the Queen’s Speech on the 11th May. It will be impossible for the Government to fully take account of the consultation responses in 4 days. A consultation should be an opportunity to hold the Government to account – it is in fact a sham.

Sign up to sector wide responses

Refugee Action has developed a public statement in response to the New Plan for Immigration Consultation, City of Sanctuary UK wholeheartedly supports this statement and is a signatory. It will be made available to the public shortly and we will update the network with details on how you can sign up.

Over the last few months the Asylum Reform Initiative have been developing the idea of a new, broad-based coalition to campaign for deep change in the UK’s whole approach to asylum-seekers and refugees – for a system that is truly fair, effective and humane. This work will shortly begin to come to fruition. Further information to follow.