On 8 May Corporate Watch held a symposium on green capitalism, bringing together activists, academics and anyone who was interested, to discuss trends within green capitalism, how to oppose them and possible alternative approaches.

The symposium was organised following the publication of our A-Z of green capitalism in which we explored the idea and related themes, including genuinely ecological alternatives.

Green capitalism is often presented as a way of addressing environmental problems without having to change underlying economic systems. However, put simply, it is a contradiction in terms as capitalism is fundamentally reliant on the exploitation of nature and natural resources (as well as people!). But the idea of green capitalism is also used as an effective way of undermining ecological resistance and efforts towards systemic change.

The symposium provided a space to go into more detail on some specific themes within green capitalism, with expert speakers providing introductions to spark discussion among participants. Individual sessions were held on food, co-ops, accountability, technology and design. Below we provide a very short summary of what was discussed and point readers towards some resources for further exploration.

To read more about Green Capitalism, see our A-Z, downloadable from the Corporate Watch website here.

Opposition to corporate control of the food system

Tomaso Ferrado from Warwick Law School started the symposium with a presentation on the corporate control of food systems. He explained how the food market is controlled by a small number of multinationals, and how consumer aspirations in the global north for healthier more environmentally friendly food had been turned into just another profit making opportunity by corporations. Although most of the food around the world is produced by small scale farmers, the increase in demand for healthy, organic and greener food without considering the ecological, economic and social impact create new bottlenecks and unjust distribution of resources. Items for discussion included: agroecology, developments in organic and non-certifification in the UK, and the People’s Food Policy.

Here are some links for further related reading:

• Tomaso’s paper on ‘The Financialization of Land and Agriculture: Mechanisms, Implications and Responses’
• The Cornucopia Institute does research and investigations on agricultural and food issues. They support economic justice for family-scale farming and back ecologically produced local, organic and authentic food.
• La Via Campesina is the international movement which brings together millions of peasants, small and medium-size farmers, landless people, women farmers, indigenous people, migrants and agricultural workers from around the world. It defends small-scale sustainable agriculture as a way to promote social justice and dignity. It strongly opposes corporate driven agriculture and transnational companies that are destroying people and nature.
• The Landworkers Alliance is a member of La Via Campesina. They are a producer-led organisation of small-scale producers and family farmers who work to overcome the obstacles facing that land-based workers face.
• UK Food sovereignty movement
• Also, for an introduction to food related politics, see Corporate Watch’s Food Revolution poster.

Co-ops as alternatives to green capitalism

Sofa Gradin, of Queen Mary’s University, talked about the nature of non-for profit co-ops and how they provide alternatives to capitalist organising forms. The presentation included a simple way of defining non-capitalist co-ops and examples of existing co-ops, how they organised and the challenges they face, such as how to avoid destructive competition and informal power concentration. The discussions were based on how to replace capitalism with co-ops and included contributions on the Lucas Plan,energy co-ops, local currencies and economies, and how instead of expanding and ‘upscaling’ it is often better to ‘outscale’ and create replicable, small scale models.

Some links for further related reading:

• Cafe libertad (supplier of Zapatista Coffee)
• Radical Routes is a network of radical co-ops whose members are committed to working for positive social change. The network is made up mainly of housing co-ops of various sizes, a few workers co-ops and a couple of social centres.
• The are various collectives in the UK that can help co-ops and other groups with training on things such as consensus decision making and internal power dynamics. There is a list of them on the Rhizome website.

The fallacy of corporate accountability

Grietje Baars of City University began with an introduction on how corporations are the cause of most ecological destruction in the world, and that the simple answer to questions such as: should we sue them? Should we prosecute them? Should we demand laws that control them? is, No! Because essentially the legal system is designed to support capitalist agendas, and simply put, law loves capital and isn’t the same as justice. Discussions covered areas such as the form and nature of the corporation, corporate personhood (including the corporate death penalty in California), affordable non-corporate alternatives for consumers and the NGO industrial complex.

• For some further reading in this area see Grietje’s articles here
• Corporate Watch’s publication on corporate law and structures.
• Grietje also recommended checking out the May Project gardens, a non-corporate alternative combining gardening, training, food and music.

Technocracy and green capitalism

Dave King introduced the session by talking about the concept of technocracy, and how our current ecological problems can be traced back to the development of industrial capitalism. He described how technology is shaped by power relations and more so, how technocracy also shapes society, as things inbuilt into technologies direct societal development. He also described some problems with the environmental movement and how it can tend to treat ecological issues as de-politicised, scientific or technical problems. Discussions included how green capitalism (especially the ‘natural capital’ element) is a technocratic approach to conservation of nature, and the importance of identifying both capitalism and technocracy as being the causes of global ecological crises.

Corporate Watch will shortly publish an essay by Dave on Technocracy and green capitalism.

For some further reading, have a look at:

• 40th anniversary of Lucas plan
• Corporate Watch’s technofixes report

Within and beyond green capitalism

Joanna Boehnert of University of Westminster first discussed some competing terms suggested to define new geological epochs: Anthropocence (due to the human effects on geological processes); Capitalocene (where the effects on the global environmental are recognised as being due to capitalism rather than humans as a whole) and Ecocene (which, based on new ecologically informed relationships between humans and nature, is yet to emerge). Joanna described the important role that design plays in creating new, ecologically literate ways of thinking, but also how design is involved in maintaining current power relationships. For example, participatory design has been around for about 15 years, but is now being co-opted by capitalists.

To find out more, have a look at:

• Joanna’s new book, Design, Ecology, Politics. Towards the Ecocene
• Decolonising design
• Ecolabs:a not for profit graphic design research lab and studio engaged in the visual communication of complex problems. Creates resources, projects and programs that nurture ecological literacy, critical whole systems thinking and  agency in response to environmental challenges.

The post Exploring and opposing green capitalism appeared first on Corporate Watch.

The Home Office is trying to deport dozens of refugees to Iraq, with at least 30 people currently held in detention centres awaiting forced removal. But instead of using high-profile charter flights, the Home Office is now turning to a handful of major airlines to take Iraqi deportees as scheduled passengers: Royal Jordanian, Turkish Airlines, and Qatar Airways. Strong resistance by deportees and supporters may yet win out though, and several flights have been cancelled in the last week.

At the start of April, the International Federation of Iraqi Refugees (IFIR) announced that it was in contact with several dozen Kurdish and other Iraqis who had been rounded up and detained in Colnbrook, Campsfield, Morton Hall and other UK detention centres. Many assumed a mass deportation charter flight was in the offing, as this is a common Home Office pattern following a sudden wave of arrests.

The last charter to Iraq had been booked for 21 June 2011. That flight was called off at the last minute as campaigners blockaded the coaches leaving Colnbrook and Harmondsworth and lawyers scrambled behind the scenes to get removal papers quashed. By 2012 Iraqi refugees appeared to be on reprieve, as years of campaigning by IFIR and others had finally pushed the Iraqi national government passing a resolution to refuse deportation flights.

Even with the apparent weakening of the Iraqi government’s resolve, it seems that a charter flight is still too much of a political risk. Politicians in the Iraqi parliament are moving again on this issue: last month over 100 MPs signed a call for a new parliamentary resolution against deportations. Also, here in the UK, a blockade of a charter flight to Nigeria and Ghana at Stansted Airport on 28 March helped raise the profile of these mass expulsion night flights.

But the Home Office can also collaborate with commercial airlines to deport people. The first of the arrested Iraqis, 36 year-old Aras Ismail from Kirkuk, was put on a scheduled Royal Jordanian flight to Baghdad. Four security guards reportedly locked him in the plane’s toilet for the duration of the flight, gagged and handcuffed with his legs tied together. His home of Kirkuk is currently a war zone under partial control of Daesh (ISIS). Just the day before the flight, there were reports that Daesh had executed 12 people in the town.

As reports of Aras Ismail’s ordeal made it into regional press, and campaigning against the deportations grew, the flights seemed to reduce in number. And then a new airline appeared on the scene. Since 2005, Royal Jordanian had been the only commercial airline carrying individual deportations to Iraq. But, whether or not because of the bad publicity and campaign pressure, the next wave of deportations at the start of May instead featured Turkish Airlines’ flights via Istanbul to Bahgdad.

Qaranmin Amin, also from Kirkuk, was deported on a Turkish Airlines flight from Heathrow at 6pm on 4 May. Assan Yaba Assan, from Mosul, was due to fly on 6 May, again with Turkish Airlines, but his flight was cancelled on the day. Following an appeal from IFIR and Assan’s partner, Turkish Airlines received phone calls and emails asking them not to collaborate in the deportation, which may have been a factor in its cancellation.

Another three deportations scheduled with Turkish Airlines for 9 May were also cancelled at the last minute. One of the refugees successfully resisted, and this may have led the airline or the Home Office to call off all three.

Then on 10 May, another airline got involved: Qatar Airways. It was scheduled to take Soran Ahmed on a Heathrow flight via Doha, although this flight was also cancelled.

Corporate Watch has contacted Royal Jordanian Airlines, Turkish Airlines, and Qatar Airway for comment. None of them responded to us.

After his flight was stopped, Assan Yaba Assan was taken back to Colnbrook detention centre, and is still being held there along with many other Iraqi refugees. The Home Office will be hoping that campaign pressure dies down and they can try to deport them again. IFIR and other supporters will do their best to make sure that doesn’t happen. Key will be getting support inside Iraq to reaffirm the deportation ban. But active pressure from the UK and elsewhere can also play an important role, particularly by persuading the airlines not to take more forced passengers.

Dashty Jamal of IFIR told Corporate Watch: “Iraqi people are still paying the price for the imperialist actions of the British and American governments, as war continues to rage in the country. We ask all freedom-loving people to stand against these actions, and we call on the governments to immediately halt these deportations.”

The next deportation flight is scheduled with Turkish Airlines again, with Haram Kalif, who has a three-month pregnant partner living in the UK, due to be sent to Kirkuk on 26 May. IFIR and friends are calling for people to keep communicating with Turkish Airlines, and any other airlines that continue to be involved, demanding they stop these flights.

Turkish Airlines is largely owned by the Turkish government, not known as a great respector of public opinion. However, the company is very careful about its image, boasting that it has been awarded the title of “Europe’s best airline” six years in a row. This might make it more likely to listen to complaints about the “service” it provides for the Home Office’s unwilling passengers.

For more information:

Contact the International Federation of Iraqi Refugees (IFIR) on 07856032991, ifir@hotmail.comand sign their petition here. 

Check IFIR website for more news and updates on Iraqi deportations: http://www.federationifir.com/en

Turkish Airlines

UK main phone number: 020 7471 6666

London office: 149 Hammersmith Road, Lyric House, W14 0QL
infolondon@thy.com twitter:
@TurkishAirlines
@TK_HelpDesk

Press Office: Yahya ÜSTÜN, Senior Vice President of Media Relations

+90 212 463 63 63 / Ext. 11173-11153

Press and Communication line: +90 212 463 64 44

email: yustun@thy.com, press@thy.com

Royal Jordanian

London Office: 1 Beadon Rd, London W6 0EA

LONTSRJ@RJ.COM / LONTMRJ@RJ.COM

twitter: @royaljordanian

Qatar Airways

UK Reservations Number: 0330 024 0125

Central London Office: 10 Conduit St, Mayfair, London W1S 2QR

London Harrods Ticket Desk: Harrods Lower Ground Floor, 87-135 Brompton Road, London SW1X 7XL

Press Office: Qatar Airways Group, Corporate Communications Department
Tel: +974 4022 2200, Fax: +974 4022 5350
E-mail: qrmedia@qatarairways.com.qa

The post Iraqi deportations: the airlines helping the Home Office deport refugees to war zones appeared first on Corporate Watch.

A run-down of the Home Office’s “hostile environment” measures against migrants, from NHS charges to the renting ban.

In 2012 Theresa May, then Home Secretary, announced a new approach to immigration: to make Britain a “hostile environment” for people who have “no right to be here”.The introduction of compulsory ID checks in hospitals, due to start this month, is just one element. The plan is to make it ever tougher for people without the right immigration papers to get a job, rent a flat, use a bank, drive a car, get medical treatment, send kids to school, or otherwise live a normal life.

This report outlines 13 of the main hostile environment policies introduced so far, including:

• NHS England will start compulsory ID checks in hospitals this month. “Overseas visitors” will be made to pay for non-emergency treatment; later in the year, the government wants to extend charging to A&E and GP surgeries too.
• Meanwhile, patient details collected when people register with GPs are systematically passed on to Immigration Enforcement who use them to track down “illegals”. Around 6,000 people were traced this way in 2016.
• Similarly, the Department of Education has agreed to hand over names and addresses of 1500 school pupils and their families each month, collected in the “School Census”.
• At the moment, such information sharing requires specific legal agreements. This will change if the Digital Economy Bill passes unamended this year, allowing government departments and corporate contractors to automatically share people’s confidential data.
• Other measures ban unwanted migrants from renting homes, opening bank accounts or getting driving licenses. Migrants are being criminalised with new offences of “working illegally”, “driving in the UK”, and employing or renting to “illegals”.
• Migrants forced onto the streets are being targeted by immigration raids against rough sleepers, coordinated with local councils and homelessness charities.
• Police and Immigration Enforcement are increasingly integrated, led by Operation Nexus in London which embeds immigration offficers in police stations and standardises ID checks. Met Police are also handing over details of victims and witnesses of crimes.
• Local councils are being encouraged to launch immigration enforcement operations with money from a new “Controlling Migration Fund”.
• The introduction highlights three basic themes across all these measures: mass information sharing, criminalisation of migrants, and widespread citizen collaboration.
• The hostile environment relies on collaboration from bosses and workers in the public sector and in private companies, and also from many more of us as “members of the public”. The conclusion looks in more depth at how the government is trying to foster a culture of collaboration – and at some possibilities for resistance.

Download a PDF version of this report here.

Contents

• Introduction: Information, Criminalisation, Collaboration

• 1. Healthcare (1): NHS charges and ID checks

• 2. Healthcare (2): NHS Digital data sharing

• 3. Education (1): the School Census

• 4. Education (2): Higher Education student monitoring

• 5. Housing: no passport, no home

• 6. Homelessness: the rough sleeper round up

• 7. Work: employer collaboration

• 8. Driving: driving licence data sharing

• 9. Bank Accounts

• 10. Marriages

• 11. Police Liaison: Operation Nexus

• 12. Local Authorities: the Controlling Migration Fund

• 13. The Digital Economy Act: towards the One Big Database

• Conclusion: How collaboration works

• Appendix: How to stop Immigration Enforcement getting addresses from GPs?

Introduction: information, criminalisation, collaboration

The “hostile environment” approach extends immigration control beyond the obvious national borders to a range of areas of everyday life including housing, homelessness, healthcare, school, higher education, driving, bank accounts, work and marriage.

The rationale, more or less, is: if the government can’t actually seal tight the external borders, it can push unwanted “illegals” to leave, or deter others from coming in the first place, by making it near impossible to live a normal life.

None of this is really new, but it is escalating fast. We can identify a gear shift in 2012, when the government set up an Inter-Ministerial Group on Migrants’ Access to Benefits and Public Services, tasked with looking for new ways to make migrants’ lives difficult.ⁱ The upshot was two new Immigration Acts, passed in 2014 and 2016, which have drastically cut migrants’ rights, and introduced a list of new criminal offences.

In October 2013, announcing the parliamentary bill that was to become the 2014 Act, Theresa May declared that its aim was: “to create a really hostile environment for illegal migrants”.ⁱⁱ In the formal language of the act itself, the main aim is to “limit … access to services, facilities and employment by reference to immigration status”.ⁱⁱⁱ The Immigration Act 2016 made these measures harsher still, and added some new ones.

However, in many areas the new policies and interventions do not involve new legislation, but internal changes in policy or approach by the Home Office and other government departments. Some of these are formalised in protocols, guidance documents, and Memoranda of Understanding (MoUs) for cooperation between agencies. Others are informal shifts in practice.

As we look at the details of the different measures, we can also note a few core themes that run through them.

First, information. Many of the new measures involve ramping up data collection and data sharing between the Home Office and its “partners”. This can involve gathering personal data on migrants from other government departments (e.g., Department of Education, NHS England); from NGOs (e.g., the CHAIN London rough sleeper database run by the charity St Mungo’s); or from private for-profit companies (e.g., banks and money lenders, including through the CIFAS databases).

The Home Office’s Immigration Enforcement directorate itself has notably poor databases and intelligence gathering. Its intelligence systems typically rely on low grade “tip-offs” from “members of the public”. Its central information system, the Case Information Database (CID), which stores files on all known immigrants to the UK, is notoriously out-of-date and error prone, and new generation replacements are behind schedule. Access to the personal details collected by banks, schools, doctors, homelessness charities or the DVLA is a big boost to the Home Office’s ability to track and arrest “illegals”. While migrants are currently on the frontline of this growing surveillance state, these tools can also be turned against many more people.

NB: we intend to publish soon a further report on the Home Office’s databases, information sharing, and the new generation of “big data” systems it hopes to bring on line.

Second, criminalisation. Just trying to live without the correct documents is becoming a crime. Working or driving a car, or renting a home to an “illegal”, can now lead to prison sentences of up to five years. A range of other harsh penalties, for example automatic evictions and freezing of bank accounts, can also hit anyone without the right to remain.

In the past, migrant campaigners have sometimes insisted “we are not criminals”. But growing numbers of people without the right papers are becoming just that.

Third, collaboration. Control is “outsourced” from the Home Office to other government agencies (e.g., the NHS, schools) or to private bodies (e.g., charities, banks, bosses, landlords).

The Home Office only has a limited number of Immigration Officers, and the general police force is already overstretched. So the government follows the path taken by police states throughout history: it seeks to make ordinary citizens into an army of informers, spies and collaborators. School teachers, doctors, nurses and hospital receptionists, charity workers, registry office staff, bank clerks, as well as employers, landlords and letting agents, are being turned into Immigration Enforcement agents.

In the conclusion we will look in a bit more depth at how the various hostile environment measures are underpinned by collaboration; at different types of collaboration relationships involving government agencies, NGOs and charities, private companies, and individuals; and at different ways the government “incentivises” collaboration. For example, by threatening penalties and criminal prosecutions, by offering profitable contracts, by trying to normalise hostility to migrants, or seeking to convince people they even have a “duty” to collaborate.

1. Healthcare (1): NHS charges

From this month (April 2017), hospitals in England will be required to ID check all patients and make any of those found not to be legal “residents” pay for their treatment.^iv The new NHS regulations will not initially apply to emergency treatment (A&E) or to GP surgeries (primary care).^v But the government says it wants to extend charging to both in future, with more announcements due later this year.^vi Further down the line, it will even look into charging for hospice care, which is part-funded by the NHS alongside charities.^vii

NHS charges for migrants are not wholly new. They were first introduced in 1982, when the Thatcher government introduced a distinction between people classed as “ordinarily resident” in the UK, entitled to free health care, and “overseas visitors” who could be made to pay. But until now charging has been at the hospital’s discretion, and has not been widely put into practice.

The present government intends to change this. In 2014, alongside the new Immigration Act, the Department of Health set up what it calls an Overseas Visitor and Migrant Cost Recovery Programme to encourage hospitals to charge, with a target of making £500 million per year from NHS charges. Now the new regulations will make charging a “statutory requirement” for the first time.

Also for the first time, payments will be demanded upfront before patients are allowed many hospital treatments. If treatment is urgent, patients may not have to pay in advance, but will be presented with a bill after.

Who has to pay?

The Immigration Act 2014 redefined who counts as “ordinarily resident”. Citizens of the European Economic Area (EEA) – the EU countries plus Iceland, Lichtenstein, Norway and Switzerland – are still included so long as they are “exercising their treaty rights”, i.e., are working, looking for work, studying, or are independently wealthy (for more on EEA rules also Section 6 below on homelessness). Non-EEA nationals must be ‘living lawfully in the United Kingdom voluntarily and for settled purposes”. For example, people who have been granted “indefinite leave to remain” are okay; but people on temporary student or work visas are not “settled”, and people without any valid papers are not “lawful”.

The 2014 Act also introduced a “health surcharge”: non-EEA citizens applying for a UK visa for six months or more (e.g., for work or study) must pay this fee before entry, and are then exempted from charges while the visa lasts. The fee is currently £200 per year or £150 for students. There are a few further exemptions: e.g., refugees with temporary leave to remain, or asylum seekers who have not been refused asylum or who are receiving “Section Four” support, do not have to pay.^viii

What must be paid for?

For the moment, accident and emergency (A&E) care and GP services (primary care) are still free for everyone. So is treatment for many contagious diseases, including sexually transmitted diseases and plague; pregnancy care; and treatment to “victims of violence”, including, e.g., torture survivors – so long as they have not “travelled to the UK for the purpose of seeking that treatment.”

The April 2017 regulations will introduce some new charging areas, including secondary care outside of hospitals. But much bigger changes are due to begin later in 2017, as charging will gradually be extended to GP primary care and A&E. The Department of Health’s thinking here is set out in a document published in February 2017, called “Making a Fair Contribution”, which followed a consultation exercise carried out in 2015-16.^ix In the consultation, the government sounded out health professionals, migrant charities and “members of the public” on its proposals, which included: extending charges to all A&E care, to ambulance and paramedic care, and to primary care except for initial consultations with GPs or nurses (which are believed necessary to stop the spread of contagious diseases.)

According to the government, over 50% of those consulted agreed with all of the proposals except for two: charges for A&E and for ambulances. On these, more than half disagreed or “strongly disagreed”. The document concludes that the government will introduce some changes immediately in April, but the less popular ones will be phased in more slowly. On GP charges, it says (on page 12):

“While we believe that primary care has an important role in establishing chargeable status and charging overseas visitors and migrants we will take a phased approach to implementing this over a longer time scale.”

This will involve working “with stakeholders including the Royal College of GPs, the British Medical Association (BMA)’s General Practitioners’ Committee (GPC) and the General Dental Council to consider how best to extend the charging of overseas visitors and migrants into primary care.” In particular:

“We will work with the BMA GPC to consider how we extend charging to primary medical services so that overseas visitors and migrants not exempt in the Charging Regulations will have to pay for these services, (excluding GP/nurse consultations).”

The negative responses on A&E and ambulance charges mean these proposals will be further delayed. But they are still very much on the table. The report concludes, in a section called “areas for further development”:

“Therefore, in the case of A&E care and ambulance services, we are still considering the points raised by respondents and exploring the feasibility of implementing the proposals. We will therefore respond on those points later in the year.”

How the system will work

Routinely checking documents of every patient will be a massive shift in NHS procedure and culture. Just who will be responsible for performing the checks and demanding the charges? How will staff be made to comply?

Similar measures have already been tested in pilot schemes. The main one has been at Peterborough and Stamford Hospitals NHS Trust, which has trialled document checks on all patients and upfront charges since 2013. ^x In Peterborough, patients must bring two forms of document, including a photo ID, to prove identity and address when registering for non-emergency treatment. Another pilot started in 2016 for maternity services at St George’s hospital in Tooting, South London.^xi

A cadre of designated bureaucrats called Overseas Visitor Managers (OVMs) will play a central role. Currently, in hospitals where some charging already takes place, the basic procedure is often that “frontline” staff, particularly nurses and admin staff, should “flag” potentially chargeable patients to OVMs for assessment. But if checking and charging is to scale up, either trusts will have to employ much bigger OVM teams, or responsibility will have to be devolved much more widely through hospital staff.

The centralised patient databases run by NHS Digital (see the next section) will also play a big role in generalising charging. According to a recent parliamentary Public Accounts Committee (PAC) report: “The Department has been working with NHS Digital to make changes to IT systems, including the summary care record application, to help trusts identify whether a patient is likely to be chargeable or entitled to free NHS care.”^xii

In the modern NHS, hospitals are run by semi-independent structures called NHS Trusts or NHS Foundation Trusts, the latter being the “better performing” ones that are rewarded with more autonomy and funding opportunities. They are subject to continual assessment and financial rewards or penalties. To ensure compliance with the “hostile environment”, it is likely that trusts will also become scored on performing ID checks and collecting charges. Such “incentives” are proposed in the same recent Parliamentary report.^xiii It is notable that Peterborough and Stamford was in the midst of an acute financial crisis, owing to massive PFI debt, and receiving special government bail-outs, when it took on the ID checking pilot in 2013.^xiv

The government is well aware that ID checking and charging patients does not sit easy with many health professionals. It recognises that it needs to create what it calls a “cultural change” where doctors and nurses will become happy immigration enforcers. In the conclusion to this report we will look a bit further at some of its moves to achieve this through propaganda campaigns within hospitals.

See also …

NHS charging has so far caused the most controversy of all hostile environment policies. The campaign group “Docs not Cops” is working to highlight the issue (http://www.docsnotcops.co.uk/).

Doctors of the World, which has long provided free healthcare without ID checks to excluded people in its clinics, has been a loud voice against anti-migrant health policies (https://www.doctorsoftheworld.org.uk/).

2. Healthcare (2): NHS Digital intelligence gathering

Immigration policing in the NHS is a double attack. The more hidden aspect is how patient data is being transferred in massive quantities from the NHS to the Home Office’s Immigration Enforcement directorate. The NHS collects data on millions of individuals who willingly hand over addresses and phone numbers, details of family members, and other personal “demographic” information when they register with a GP, perhaps trusting that it is safeguarded by medical confidentiality. This information is gold dust for Immigration Enforcement, which uses it to locate and arrest “illegals”.

The data is automatically fed by GP surgery computer systems to a national database called the Personal Demographics Service (PDS), run by an “arms length” business unit called NHS Digital (previously the Health and Social Care Information Centre). A recent Freedom of Information disclosure showed that, in the first 11 months of 2016, the Home Office made 8127 information requests from NHS Digital; 5854 of these led to people being traced.^xv

And this collaboration is just getting going. On 1 January 2017 a new “Memorandum of Understanding” (MoU) came into force between the Home Office and NHS Digital. This standardises direct data transfer between the two organisations so that patients’ addresses and other personal information are now handed over without GPs‘ permission.

NHS Digital’s data goldmine

The Personal Demographics Service (PDS) database is one of the most complete collections of personal information on people in England and Wales.^xvi Anyone who has ever used NHS services in England and Wales and been given an NHS number is recorded, and records are updated and “synchronised” every time you access another NHS service.^xvii It is widely accessible by NHS staff across the country.

The “demographics” collected include name, date of birth, gender^xviii, current and previous addresses, place of birth, “ethnicity category”, details of GP practice and preferred pharmacy, and details of relatives and other close contacts, cross-referenced to their own database entries. It also carries alerts about individuals flagged as “violent”. The NHS number is the key element of the system, acting as a unique identifier for individual patients.

The PDS does not contain medical records but is used as the basic identification tool that underpins the NHS Care Records System (CRS). The whole system of identification and care records together is often called the “Spine”.

Sharing of NHS medical records has been controversial, particularly when the recent care.data project was hit by worries about private companies’ use of clinical information.^xix In response to these concerns, patients are given some (rather vague) “opt outs” on sharing of their medical data. This is reflected by a field in the PDS which records if patients have said they “express dissent” to their Care Records being shared. But there is no such opt out from the non-medical PDS.^xx

The Memorandum of Understanding

The January 2017 memorandum of understanding sets out the protocol by which Immigration Enforcement goes to NHS Digital with “tracing requests” on named individuals.

In the current legal framework, data collected by government departments is intended for a particular purpose: e.g., the purpose of NHS data is medical care. It is not lawful to share data for any other purpose, even amongst government departments, unless some special circumstance or overriding concern applies. (NB: see Section 13 on how this may soon change.) So the memorandum sets out a legal basis for data sharing by arguing that the Health and Social Care Act 2012 allows “disclosure of information”, “in connection with the investigation of a criminal offence”, and that sharing this information is in “the public interest”.^xxi Every trace request has to be individually signed by an Immigration Officer affirming that the information requested is lawfully required.

The trace request then contains details on the target taken from the Home Office’s main immigration computer system, the Case Information Database (CID). NHS Digital searches against these on their databases and replies with personal information from their records, including: names, date of birth, gender, last known address, primary care (GP) details and date of NHS registration. The reply should be via “secure email” within 20 days, using a pro forma template set out in the memorandum.^xxii

The NHS Digital unit in charge of sending data to the Home Office is called the PDS National Back Office (NBO), based in Southport.^xxiii The same unit also works with the Home Office on data for the Immigration Health Surcharge.

In the past, NHS Digital strenuously denied passing on individuals’ addresses (as opposed to just GP areas) to the Home Office, unless this was demanded by a court order.^xxiv Doctors of the World and the National Aids Trust, in a briefing on the memorandum, argue:

“The MOU marks a departure from the principle that clinicians and the NHS respect patient confidentiality. Unless required by law the General Medical Council (GMC) only permits clinicians to share patient information when there is a risk of death or serious harm, or a public interest test on the individual circumstances has been carried out. Immigration offences do not present a risk of death or serious harm, and the MOU does not include case-by-case assessment of the public interest.”^xxv

The data shared by NHS Direct does not currently involve information about nationality, ethnicity, or birthplace. Birth place and “ethnic category” data are stored on PDS, but these entries are not demanded under the current memorandum. What Immigration Enforcement are looking for are current location information, i.e., addresses. The people targeted here are those already flagged as “immigration offenders”, for example, because their asylum claim has been rejected or they have overstayed a visa, and where the Home Office doesn’t have their current contact information.

Recently, some GPs and campaigners have pledged that they will not ask questions about people’s nationality or immigration status. This is an important stand, and will be very relevant in future as the government seeks to roll out ID checks and charges to primary care (see Section 1 above). But it will not address the main existing form of NHS Digital collaboration, which is focused on sharing addresses.

NB: We have set out a few more thoughts on this last point in an appendix to this report.

3. Education (1): the schools census

Since December 2015, the Department of Education (DfE) has had a Memorandum of Understanding with the Home Office to pass over an anticipated 1500 pupil records every month for immigration enforcement purposes.^xxvi The memorandum states directly that it aims to: “create a hostile environment for those who seek to benefit from the abuse of immigration control.” (Section 15.1.2).

As with the NHS agreement, first the Home Office sends a list of names they want to trace – in this case, a monthly batch. These may be names of children or of their family members. The DfE searches its National Pupil Database and sends back information including the family’s latest address, within a target of 10 days.

The National Pupil Database (NPD) is a central database of all state school pupils in the UK. School teachers collect personal data from parents and children three times a year, each school term, in the School Census. The personal census data includes items such as: name, date of birth, address, family members, ethnicity, and first language. Schools and other bodies such as social services also feed in further data to pupils’ records, for example test results, and records of absences and exclusions.

It is a statutory obligation for schools to complete the census – but not for parents or children to answer all the questions. The census is collected on one given day each term: e.g., in 2016-17 on the third Thursday in October, January and May.^xxvii The DfE unit responsible for replying to Home Office requests is the National Pupil Database and Transparency Team.

Although the memorandum anticipates about 1500 requests each month, in practice the numbers seem to have been lower. In response to a Freedom of Information request by Jen Persson, the DfE said it had received 599 trace requests from Immigration Enforcement in September through December 2016 – so more like 150 a month. The DfE only found matches in its database for 151 of these.^xxviii

The new questions

In September 2016, additional questions were added to the Schools Census asking for pupils’ nationality and country of birth. Education ministers have denied that data from these questions are shared with the Home Office,^xxix though there is no good reason to take their word on this: before the publication of the Memorandum of Understanding, they denied that any School Census data was shared at all. It may not be happening yet, but in future this information could certainly be useful to the Home Office to flag up potential “immigration offenders” they are not already targeting.

The guidelines on the new questions state that schools should record the answers as given by the pupil or guardian. The guidance explicitly states that schools are not allowed to ask for ID to check the answers.^xxx Leaked cabinet papers published last December show that the Home Office had indeed wanted to introduce ID checking in schools but this was resisted by the Department of Education.^xxxi Despite these instructions, there are numerous reports of schools in fact asking to see ID documents. Pupils or parents may refuse to answer, in which case schools should mark “refused”, and not put their own answers down.^xxxii

There have been calls to boycott these particular questions on the Schools Census. Like with GPs pledging not to ask for ID documents, this is an important stand. But it is worth remembering that it does not address the main use of pupil data by Immigration Enforcement at the moment: to track addresses of people they already know about.

See also …

The new Schools Census questions and the forced release of the memorandum have caused some controversy amongst teachers and parents. The campaign group Schools ABC (https://www.schoolsabc.net/) has been raising awareness of this issue and has called for a boycott of the questions on nationality and place of birth.

4. Education (2): Higher Education visa monitoring

Higher Education was one of the first areas where the Home Office outsourced border control to other agencies, making universities and colleges responsible for vetting non-UK students. Here we briefly recap some main issues in this sector.

Student visas are known as Tier 4 visas, under the wider “Points Based” visa system which was first introduced in 2009.^xxxiii To get a Tier 4 visa, a student must show that they have sufficient funds for their study and living expenses, and must be sponsored by an educational institution which holds a Tier 4 Sponsor Licence.^xxxiv The government’s rhetoric is that education is a route for illicit migration where “bogus students” either enrol at a sham college or drop out of their courses after arriving: their real interest is in entering the country to work … or perhaps to prepare terrorist plots.^xxxv

Foreign students are now central to many universities’ and other institutions’ income so they are anxious not to lose sponsorship status. To keep it, they must commit to collaboration with Immigration Enforcement. This includes agreeing to “support immigration control” and to:

“co-operate with the Home Office by allowing its staff immediate access to any of its sites on request (whether or not visits are prearranged) and complying with requests for information, including in connection with the prevention or detection of crime, the administration of illegal working civil penalties and/or the apprehension or prosecution of immigration offenders.”^xxxvi

It also involvesintensive ongoing monitoring of foreign students. Students details, including addresses and other personal information, are entered on an online system called the Sponsorship Management System (SMS), and must be kept continually updated. The Home Office directorate in charge of this database, and of the Tier 4 visa system in general, is UK Visas & Immigration (UKVI) rather than Immigration Enforcement and in particular, the UKVI Sponsor Management Unit (SMU), based at Vulcan House in Sheffield.

Sponsoring institutions are required to continually monitor and report students’ attendance. In general, they are expected to withdraw sponsorship and report to the Home Office if a student misses “10 consecutive expected contact points”, e.g., lessons, lectures, tutorials, supervisions, exams, or coursework submissions.^xxxvii

The Home Office does not specify just what internal monitoring procedures institutions must put in place. A certain amount of vagueness seems to work well for the Home Office:the burden is on institutions to prove that their systems are satisfactory, and precisely because the requirements are not spelled out colleges are likely to go well beyond the basics. For example, according to a 2012 article by the then NUS international student officer:

“At Coventry University ‘all undergraduate students are required to Check-In on 3 days per week.‘ Checking in is done by ‘present[ing] your Student ID Card to the member of staff at any monitoring station.‘ The University of the Arts London and the University of Glamorgan requires all its international students to ‘check-in‘ once a week. The University of East London has introduced a ‘three-strikes‘ system where if a student misses ‘3 compulsory elements of a module‘ or ‘whose overall attendance falls below 75‘ will be de-registered from the module. Other universities have introduced similar physical checks albeit not of the same quantity. Greenwich and UWE require monthly check-ins.”^xxxviii

In August 2012, the Home Office made a show of suspending London Metropolitan University’s “highly trusted” status. It regained the license in April 2013, but this served to scare institutions into tightening up their surveillance.

In many institutions, the “frontline” role of monitoring attendance is mainly carried out by lecturers and teachers taking class registers. Attendance registers will often be taken for all students, not just foreign students, which helps avoid an appearance of “discrimination”. Teachers may not even be aware that a main reason for taking registers is to comply with Home Office sponsorship requirements: instead, the university may say that the main aim is to help with “pastoral care”.^xxxix Many institutions will have dedicated “international student” teams in charge of assessing this data and liaising with the Home Office.

There are also similar pressures on institutions to monitor international staff. For example, according to a report by the University and Colleges Union (UCU):

“At Bangor University, unauthorised absences of international staff for more than 10 days are reported by Human Resources. East Anglia University reports international staff failing to turn up for their first day of work, along with any reason for their non-attendance.”^xl

See also …

Both the main university teachers’ union (UCU) and students union (NUS) have issued statements against elements of this policy since it began. But there has not been much active campaigning on the issue in the last few years.

5. Housing: no passport no home

People who are not British or European citizens, or who have not been granted “leave to remain”, are now banned from renting a home. Or as the government puts it, they do not have the “right to rent”. The Immigration Act 2014 orders that landlords must check prospective tenants’ ID documents, or call a Home Office hotline to check people without the necessary papers. Renting to someone without the right immigration status can mean a civil penalty of up to £3000 (£1000 on the first occasion) for the landlord. The penalty will not apply, though, if the landlord can show evidence that they made the checks correctly and have kept copies of the documents.^xli

The Immigration Act 2016 made things heavier still. As well as civil penalties, landlords or their agents can now also be charged with a criminal offence punishable by up to five years in prison. In this case, the prosecution will have to prove that they knew or had “reason to believe” that the tenant was illegal. The 2016 Act also allows landlords to evict existing tenants who do not have a “right to rent”, without any court order, and the Home Office can order them to do so.

Landlords can delegate their responsibility to letting agents, and landlords or agents are allowed to charge prospective tenants fees for checking their papers. The law also applies to lodgers in someone’s home, so long as money changes hands (the civil penalties for renting to lodgers are smaller, between £80 to £500). A few types of properties are exempt from the checks, including hostels, refuges, and student halls of residence.

Landlords need to check documents of all prospective tenants, not just those they suspect of being foreign (as that would break discrimination rules). A wide range of documents can be presented and small landlords are unlikely to be familiar with the procedures. A survey by the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants (JCWI) of the Home Office’s initial “right to rent” pilot scheme in the West Midlands found that “42% of landlords are unlikely to rent to those without British passports. Over 25% would be less likely to rent to someone with a foreign name or foreign accent.”^xlii

The new regime is a boon for letting agents, who can profit by offering landlords their experience in document checking. Some local authorities are also looking to cash in by offering “right to rent check” services. The laws also, of course, create a good black market business opportunity for those willing to take on the risk of housing “illegals” in return for inflated rents.

The civil and criminal structures of the “right to rent” closely mirror the Home Office’s procedures for dealing with “illegal working” (see Section 7 below). In that field, it is common practice for Immigration Enforcement to approach bosses and employment agencies for information on “illegals”, offering reduced or waived penalties for collaboration such as setting up “arrests by appointment”. We may soon see similar moves in housing, e.g., involving letting agents in setting up sting operations against prospective tenants on their books.

See also:

The Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants (JCWI) has produced useful briefings on the “Right to Rent” scheme (https://www.jcwi.org.uk/hostile-environment-undocumented-migrants). Also see the “Homes Not Borders” campaign website https://homesnotborders.net/.

6. Homelessness: rounding up foreign rough-sleepers

If the renting ban pushes more undocumented people to sleep on the streets, the Home Office’s Immigration Compliance and Enforcement (ICE) teams will be waiting for them. Rough sleepers are now a target group for ICE patrols, which rely on close collaboration from local councils, police, and charity “outreach” teams.

Here we summarise some key points from the recent Corporate Watch report on this topic, “The Round Up”.^xliii That investigation focused on London, which has by far the highest concentration of street homelessness in the UK. Similar developments have also been reported in Bristol, Brighton, and other cities with large numbers of rough sleepers.

Immigration Enforcement rough sleeping patrols largely target European nationals. In London, almost half (47%) of all rough sleepers are non-British Europeans, compared to 41% British nationals, with smaller numbers from Africa (5.5%) and Asia (4.9%). Particularly large numbers are from Romania (19.5%), Poland (8.7%), and other East and Central European countries which joined the EU in the 2000s.^xliv Elsewhere in England, up to 85% of rough sleepers are British.

European Union and other “European Economic Area” (EEA) citizens normally have a right to remain in the UK for 90 days, and indefinitely after that so long as they “exercise their treaty rights”: i.e., are working, looking for work studying, or are independently wealthy. However, in May 2016, the Home Office published a new policy which defines sleeping rough as an “abuse” of treaty rights, making people liable for detention and deportation the first time they are found sleeping on the street.^xlv This policy was written into new legislation (Home Office rules) in February 2017.^xlvi

Under these Home Office guidelines, ICE officers have the power to immediately issue a “decision to remove” notice to European rough sleepers, and put them into detention. However, they are supposed to assess whether detention is “proportional”. Another option, for example, is that individuals may be supported by homelessness charities to leave “voluntarily”. They may also be issued a “minded to remove” letter ordering them to attend a Home Office interview.

A notable feature of this initiative is the collusion of homelessness NGOs and charities, as well as local authorities including the Mayor of London and Greater London Authority (GLA), and local London boroughs. For local authorities, “reconnection” of European migrants is an easy way to make a quick impact on visible homelessness and help meet policy targets

In central London, local boroughs contract charities to run street outreach services, the first point of contact with rough sleepers. The biggest player is St Mungo’s, which runs outreach teams for Westminster, the borough with by far the highest concentration of rough sleepers, and most other central councils. A charity called “Change, Grow, Live” (CGL) runs outreach in Camden and Lambeth. Another, called Thames Reach, runs a mobile outreach programme for most of outer London, contracted by the GLA. St Mungo’s also has a GLA programme called “Routes Home”, whose role is to “support” migrant rough sleepers identified by the outreach workers to accept “voluntary reconnection”. 10% of its fee for this contract is dependent on the number of rough sleepers removed from the UK.^xlvii

All of these charities routinely work together with Home Office Immigration Enforcement. This collaboration involves three main routes:

• Accompanying ICE officers on joint patrols. Freedom of Information (FOI) responses showed that there were 141 such joint “visits” organised by the GLA and 12 other councils in 2016.^xlviii Other local authorities, including Westminster, did not respond to FOI requests, and so the full figure will be considerably higher.
• Passing location information on foreign rough sleepers through the “CHAIN” database. This is a London-wide database, commissioned by the GLA and run by St Mungo’s, into which outreach teams upload data every night. The GLA then passes CHAIN information onto ICE.^xlix
• Liaising with ICE to target individuals who refuse “voluntary reconnection”. The outreach teams have agreements in place to hand over information on individuals to ICE for “enforcement” if they have refused to leave voluntarily.

In contrast with some other “hostile environment” policies, the Home Office’s “partners” in this sector have themselves been strong advocates of the tougher regime. Westminster Council has said that it “intensely lobbied” for the move to immediate deportation of EU rough sleepers, pushing the policy through a two month pilot with St Mungo’s called Operation Adoze, which involved 127 deportations.^l Much of the new “partnership” approach was developed by a GLA-led body called the Mayor’s Rough Sleepers Group (MRSG), in which managers from borough councils, St Mungo’s and Thames Reach were active members.^li

See also …

This section summarises our full report on this issue (https://corporatewatch.org/news/2017/mar/05/rough-sleeper-immigration-raids-charity-collaboration-st-mungos-thames-reach). There is a new campaign to support targeted rough sleepers coordinated by North East London Migrant Action (NELMA) and supported by Housing Action Southwark and Lambeth (HASL), Haringey Housing Action Group (HHAG) and others.

7. Work: employer collaboration

“Illegal working” has been targeted by the Home Office since long before the current “hostile environment” approach, and is still a main focus of Immigration Enforcement raids. The Corporate Watch report “Snitches, Stings and Leaks” examines workplace raids in detail.^lii Here we summarise some key pointsfrom that report.

Immigration Compliance and Enforcement (ICE) teams carry out around 6,000 workplace raids a year. Raids are supposed to be “intelligence led”, i.e., based on specific information about the presence of “immigration offenders”. In reality, they are largely based on around 50,000 low grade tip-offs from “members of the public”, or are “fishing expeditions”. The most common targets are South Asian restaurants and takeaways, which are easy pickings for the squads.

While none of this is new, the recent Immigration Acts have escalated workplace enforcement. The 2006 Immigration Act made it a criminal offence to knowingly employ an “illegal worker”. And whether or not the employer could be proved to have knowledge, they could be charged “civil penalties” without any trial. The civil penalty system was souped up in the 2014 Act, and again in the 2016 Act, which also escalated the criminal sanctions.^liii

For the first time, someone can now be imprisoned just for “illegal working”. The maximum penalty is six months, plus an unlimited fine. And any earnings from “illegal work” can be seized. Employers now face up to five years prison for “employing an illegal worker”, if the prosecution can show that they either knew or just had “reasonable grounds to believe” that the employee did not have a “right to work”.

This increased penalty system goes along with an increasing emphasis on employer collaboration by ICE teams. Penalties can be reduced or even waived on a first occasion, if employers agree to cooperate with investigations and hand over workers’ details when they are first approached.

In 2014, the Home Office ran a London pilot scheme called “Operation Skybreaker”, which has since been rolled out nationwide. This new approach involves routinely conducting “educational visits” to employers ahead of raids “to encourage them to comply with employment requirements.”

During these visits, ICE officers may use the threat of penalties to try to persuade bosses to inform on and set up their workers. For example, they may be asked to hand over workers’ home addresses, or even to set up “arrests by appointment” in the workplace, as in the notorious sting operation that took place at Byron Burgers in 2016.^liv Also, larger or more public-facing companies may be approached to inform on their less visible contractors, such as cleaning agencies, who are more likely to use cut-rate “illegal” labour.

Another trend is the increasing role of multi-agency operations, where ICE teams work alongside other government agencies including Local Authority departments (e.g., alcohol or taxi licensing, environmental health, planning for building sites, street market regulation, neighbourhood “wardens”), HMRC, the Security Industry Authority (SIA) that registers security guards, transport police, etc. These liaisons can involve both intelligence sharing and full-on joint raids.

See also:

The Anti Raids Network (https://network23.org/antiraids/) spreads alerts and information about immigration raids in workplaces and elsewhere.

8. Driving Licences

Many of the “hostile environment” measures involve the Home Office accessing other organisations’ data, particularly to track down current addresses of migrants they are targeting. Another invaluable information partner for Immigration Enforcement is the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Authority (DVLA), which collects detailed personal and location data on drivers and vehicle owners.

This is another long-standing collaboration: according to a report by the Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration (ICIBI), the Home Office has had an officer “embedded at DVLA” since 2005.^lv And it is another one that is ramping up under the “hostile environment”.

The 2014 Immigration Act gave the DVLA the power to refuse new driving licence applications to people who are not “normally and lawfully resident” in the UK. This wrote into law what had already been practice since at least 2010, and involves wording similar to the NHS charging rules discussed above. It also introduced a new power to revoke existing licences of people who are not “lawful residents”. The 2016 Act added another new criminal offence: “driving unlawfully in the UK”, even with a licence, is now punishable by up to five years in prison. This act also gave ICE new powers to search people and buildings for driving licences they are not entitled to.

Again, data sharing is at the heart of the Home Office/DVLA collaboration, formulated through a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU). The arrangement goes two ways. The DVLA asks officers to check the Home Office CID database for the immigration status of licence applicants. And Immigration Enforcement officers are given “read only” access to the DVLA’s main database, called the Driver Validation Service (DVS).

Again, there is a double “hostile environment” aim. On the one hand, unwanted migrants are cut off from another right – the right to drive – but also from the use of a driving licence as an ID document that can help access other services. Secondly, the arrangement may help ICE identify and target “illegals” who make the mistake of applying for a licence. This is highlighted by the ICIBI report:

“In some instances, driving licence applications had revealed illegal migrants not previously known to the Home Office, or had provided an up to date address for an individual with whom the Home Office had lost contact. In some cases, the applicant had submitted a valid travel document with their application and this had been retained by ISD as the absence of a valid travel document is a barrier to removal. Some of these migrants received visits from local ICE teams, and some had since either been subject to an enforced removal or had made a voluntary return.”^lvi

9. Bank Accounts

Before 2014, banks and building societies were legally obliged to verify customers’ identities and check for “money laundering or terrorist financing”, but not required to look at immigration status. This changed with the 2014 Immigration Act. Since then, banks are required to check people applying for a current account against a Home Office list of “disqualified persons”, who are known immigration offenders (e.g., illegal entrants, visa overstayers, European citizens with deportation orders, etc.). The 2016 Act adds that existing accounts of “disqualified” people can be seized or closed.

The “disqualified persons” list is maintained by a private organisation called CIFAS.^lvii This is a membership organisation^lviii mainly comprised of banks and corporates which runs the UK financial industry’s main National Fraud Database. Banks and other creditors (e.g., car dealers, phone companies) already check CIFAS databases for fraud alerts when opening customer accounts. Now they can check customers’ immigration status at the same time.

Banks must refuse accounts if there is a three point or “best practice match” of name, address, and date of birth against the database; if there is only a “Same Individual At Address” (SIAA) match they have discretion. They can check using the standalone “CIFAS Immigration Portal” (CIP), or access the database via commercial credit check services run by Callcredit, Equifax, Experian, and Synectics Solutions.^lix

According to the Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration (ICIBI):

“The Home Office shares data with Cifas on a weekly basis in the form of updates (additions and deletions) to the list of ‘disqualified persons’ , and the list is updated by Cifas on the same day. At the time of the inspection, the list contained the details of around 200,000 individuals, including permutations of names, dates of birth and addresses, and the weekly updates affected around 2,000 individuals.”^lx

The weekly updates are “extracted automatically” from the main Home Office Case Information Database (CID). CIFAS on its website states that anyone on the list “has exhausted their legal right to appeal in the UK and is either an illegal overstayer or an absconder … they are criminals with no right to remain in the UK.” ^lxi But according to ICIBI the categories are:

“individuals refused leave to remain; absconders; immigration offenders – e.g. illegal entrants, illegal workers, overstayers – who have been encountered and served with notice of liability for removal; and individuals for whom a deportation order is being pursued. The dataset includes any known aliases used and previous addresses.”^lxii

So the list will also include, for example, refugees who have been denied asylum. Also, according to the ICIBI inspection report, 10% of the sample they checked should not have been on the list. 5% still had outstanding appeals or applications; and 5% actually had leave to remain.^lxiii

As with other hostile environment agreements, as well as depriving migrants of a right or service, this system could help ICE track down targets’ locations. Every month, CIFAS sends the Home Office a list of all matches, giving details of people on the disqualified list who have tried to open an account, including the addresses and other information they have submitted to banks. However, in its current form this information is less useful for ICE’s tracking purposes than other sources – because any matches are against the same address the Home Office already has.

10. Marriages

Another staple of Immigration Enforcement for years has been targeting alleged “sham” marriages. In the past, the ICE approach involved handcuff-wielding thugs crashing weddings followed by UK Border Force TV cameras. In the “hostile environment” era, the Home Office has a less spectacular but more systematic approach.

The 2014 Immigration Act extended the official notice period couples have to give for a marriage to 28 days, from 15 previously. Registry offices are required to inform the Home Office of all planned marriages involving people of “non-exempt” immigration status that might be suspected “sham marriages”. The Home Office then decides whether to investigate further.

If Immigration Enforcement decides to investigate, it can extend the notice period to 70 days. So long as a couple complies with the investigation, by submitting documents and attending interviews, they can marry after the 70 days. If the investigators then decide a marriage is “sham”, the wedding may still go ahead, and in fact couples may not even be informed that the marriage is viewed as a fake. But any later immigration application based on it will be refused.

According to the Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration (ICIBI):

“The inspection found that the different approach had not been fully understood by all registrars, and the fact that ICE teams no longer routinely attended register offices had created an impression with some registrars that the Home Office was less active in relation to sham marriage.”^lxiv

The Home Office unit set up a specialist team called the “Marriage Referral Assessment Unit” (MRAU), based in Liverpool, to evaluate sham marriages. However, according to the ICIBI report, there have been issues with the unit’s performance and the job of judging couples’ sincerity may return to local ICE teams.

11. Police liaison: Operation Nexus

The hostile environment approach is all about reducing ICE’s workload and extending its reach through “partnership working”. Another key partner is the police.

Historically, police and Immigration Enforcement, despite often working together on joint operations, have not always had good relationships: in the eyes of real cops, ICE teams are basically jumped-up amateurs. This lack of cooperation may be reflected in information sharing arrangements. In January 2016, the Home Office asked the Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration (ICIBI) to review “the extent to which the police are identifying and flagging foreign nationals arrested to the Home Office and checking status”.^lxv Police said they arrested over 185,000 foreign nationals between April 2015 and March 2016; but only around half were checked for immigration status.

The Home Office review of this area may suggest a coming push to better integrate police and ICE checks. Anecdotally, there does seem to be a shift taking place towards much more systematic collaboration. This includes recent stories of the Metropolitan Police handing over victims and witnesses of crime to Immigration Enforcement.^lxvi

Coordination is particularly advancing in London, under a scheme started in October 2012 called Operation Nexus. In this scheme, Metropolitan Police are required to pass details of all “foreign nationals or suspected foreign nationals” they “encounter or arrest” to a central Home Office unit called the Command and Control Unit (CCU).^lxvii Staff in this central unit then check their details against the Home Office’s databases, primarily the main Case Information Database (CID). If there is a “match” with a known “immigration offender”, the case is then referred to several ICE Immigration Officers (IOs) who are embedded as “police liaison officers” in a number of area “hub” police stations for this purpose.^lxviii A group of other IOs and police work together in a dedicated Joint Operations Centre (JOC).

Outside London, the review found that referrals to the CCU for immigration checks were as low as 15% in West Yorkshire, although more cases were referred straight to embedded IOs. One other issue the Inspector found was that many cops outside London hadn’t been taught that they should also check European citizens. The report mentions several times a Home Office priority to also target EEA nationals who are “not exercising their treaty rights”.

In general, police and IOs currently do not have full access to each others’ databases. As of October 2016, only the police working in the Joint Operations Centre could access the Home Office CID database themselves. Home Office fingerprint databases were not available at all police stations. Police could access the Passport Authority’s DVA database; IOs couldn’t access it directly, but have to get the CCU to do so for them, and each check has to be requested individually. IOs could access the main cop database, the Police National Computer (PNC).^lxix

Police also routinely make “ACRO” criminal records checks on all arrestees. Where arrestees are foreign nationals, this can involve sending off criminal record requests to their countries of origin, and the responses may still take days or even weeks to come back. IOs can also make ACRO requests – but legally police and ICE are not allowed to share the results with each other (whether they do in practice may be another question). ACRO results can only be entered on the Police National Computer in the case of serious, usually violent, offences.^lxx

We could expect all of this to change in months or years to come, as we approach the Home Office dream of one big government database uniting police and immigration files, and much more besides. (NB: we will look more at this issue in a separate report.)

12. Local Authorities: Controlling Migration Fund

Local councils are another group of important partners. These authorities often conduct joint operations with ICE teams and police, e.g., involving departments that manage alcohol or taxi licensing, environmental health, planning for building sites, street market regulation, neighbourhood “wardens”, and more. They are also key in the targeting of rough sleepers, as they commission and manage many homelessness services including street outreach teams.

The Home Office is keen to foster these relationships. In November 2016, it announced a fund called the “Controlling Migration Fund” which local authorities in England can bid to for help with projects aimed at “mitigating the impacts of migration on local communities”.^lxxi It’s clear that the beneficiaries of the fund are meant to be “locals” as opposed to “migrants”. The amount is in fact small change, £140 million over three years. But £40 million of that is specifically earmarked for “enforcement” projects to develop collaborations between councils and ICE teams.

The fund’s prospectus highlights two particular enforcement targets: foreign national rough sleepers, and “rogue landlords” who are breaking the new “right to rent” legislation. But it also invites councils to come up with new ideas in “an entirely different area”.

It is still early days, and there is no available information overall on what bids have been submitted so far. There is no particular deadline, but many councils report that they have been contacted by the Home Office and encouraged to submit immediate bids.

In responses to Freedom of Information requests sent in January, out of all London boroughs only Haringey Council stated openly that it was “considering a bid” to the fund for targeting rough sleepers. But others are also likely to be working on such schemes.^lxxii For example, a February 2017 document from the Borough of Redbridge in East London says that it is investigating a range of options for enforcement targets, including rough sleepers, “rogue landlords”, and also sex workers.^lxxiii Outside London, Nottingham City Council is making a bid that includes ESOL classes and support for voluntary organisations, but also “a variety of engagement, cohesion & enforcement activities in communities”.^lxxiv

13. The Digital Economy Bill: towards the One Big Database

The last measure we will look at in this report is not in fact a Home Office “hostile environment” policy, but goes much wider than this.

Many of the hostile environment measures we have looked at are about the Home Office accessing data from other government departments, or from charities or private companies. At the moment, there are a few obstacles in the way of data flowing freely between these “partners”. For example, even units in the same department may use quite incompatible software systems. But also, there are still relatively tight legal restrictions on how data can be shared.

As we write, the House of Lords is having one of the final parliamentary debates on a new law that sets out to change all that, the Digital Economy Bill. Most publicity on the Digital Economy Bill has focused on its inept attempts to control pornography^lxxv; but its potential to free up government data gathering is much more significant.

In the current legal framework, data collected by government departments is intended for a particular purpose. E.g., School Census data is meant to help planning in the education system. It is not lawful to share it for any other purpose, unless some special circumstance or “public interest” need applies. In bureaucrat language, an information-sharing memorandum establishes an “information sharing gateway” between two departments. It must be for a specific reason, and there must be a legal argument for why that reason is important enough to override confidentiality.

Part 5 of the Bill is on “digital government”. Its first clause, Clause 38, creates a general purpose “single gateway to enable public authorities, specified by regulation, to share personal information” from their databases.^lxxvi To be precise, Clause 38(1) provides that “a specified person may disclose information held by the person in connection with any of the person’s functions to another specified person for the purposes of a […] specified objective”.^lxxvii

But who are the “specified persons”, and what are the “specified objectives”? This is the thing: they are not actually specified in the new law. Instead, they are left open to be decided later by secondary legislation. I.e., the government (or devolved regional authorities) can just add to a list of “specified persons” as it wishes later on, without this having to be approved by parliament.

What the Bill does say is that “specified persons” can be any “person who exercises functions of a public nature”, including a person “providing services to a public authority” (under clause 38(4)(b)). I.e.: they can also include private sector contractors.

Currently, it might just be possible to make a legal challenge to a data sharing memorandum such as the NHS or Schools Census agreement, e.g., arguing that it is not in the “public interest”. If the Digital Economy Bill passes without amendment, all the government needs to do is write a rule saying that the Home Office and the Department of Health – or Atos, Capita, G4S, Google, or another private contractor – are “specified persons” entitled to share their databases.

The Bill passed the House of Commons without amendment on this clause in November 2016.^lxxviii In January 2017, a House of Lords committee called for substantial amendments, particularly to remove the inclusion of private contractors.^lxxix The Lords is now debating the bill’s “third reading”, after which it will go back to the Commons for final debates on amendments.

See also:

There is a lot more to say about the Home Office’s plans to dramatically escalate data sharing in the future. We plan to discuss this further in another report.

Conclusion: how collaboration works

This report aims to make a small step towards understanding how the hostile environment works, and so stimulate thinking about how to fight it effectively. People on the frontline will know a lot more about how things work in their own fields; but it may help to have an overview and see how many of the same patterns repeat.

Why do people collaborate with a police state … and why do some people resist? We can think about some of the different roles that people are asked to play in the hostile environment; the different incentives that encourage them to conform; and so where the hold of collaboration may be broken.

Besides recapping from the sections above, we will look at one interesting document. This is a report commissioned by the Department of Health from a private consultancy, Ipsos MORI Social Research Institute, on its project to get hospitals to ID check and charge “overseas visitors”.^lxxx If you can wallow through the post-Blairite newspeak, this report is a fascinating study into how the government goes about destroying a culture of care, to create instead a culture of collaboration. In its own words:

“As well as aiming to increase awareness regarding the rules and processes for charging overseas patients, the Cost Recovery Programme also set out to support a culture in which all NHS staff are aware of their responsibilities to identify and recover costs from overseas visitors and migrants. It aims for an attitudinal shift to a point where all NHS staff feel a responsibility for recovering money from chargeable visitors and migrants and, where medically possible, do not treat patients until the eligibility for free NHS care has been established.” (page 40).

Collaborating roles

The hostile environment means depriving people of basic rights and services, blocking people’s possibilities of life. One part of this is what we can call enforcement action. In the most obvious sense, “immigration enforcement” means ICE teams (or others such as police, security guards, or fascist vigilantes) using or threatening force: arresting, detaining and deporting people. But hospitals refusing to give someone medical treatment, or landlords refusing to rent someone a home, are also direct forms of immigration control, which may have similarly damaging consequences.

Denying people homes or healthcare causes immediate suffering. But it also helps create an environment of hostility which impedes every aspect of people’s lives, and goes way beyond particular acts of force. The main impact of a workplace raid is not just a few arrests or a broken door, but spreading fear amongst many more workers who know they may be next. The impact of hospital ID checks is that many more migrants may never seek treatment in the first place.

By “collaboration” we mean people who are not professional Home Office immigration enforcers acting in ways that support the hostile environment. In the measures surveyed in this report, we see two main kinds of collaborative actions:

(i) Controlling.I.e., directly blocking migrants’ possibilities of life. E.g., refusing someone medical care, refusing to employ someone or rent to them, refusing someone a driving licence or bank account.

(ii) Informing. I.e., passing on information which can help ICE or others who actually carry out enforcement. E.g., collecting the Schools Census, registering patients’ details, collecting details for bank account or driving licence applications, taking a student register, recording locations of foreign national rough sleepers. In these cases, the information is fed into databases that may later be accessed by Immigration Enforcement. But there are also cases of more direct informing, e.g., bosses, landlords, bank staff, registrars reporting a suspected “illegal” to the Home Office. Or just “members of the public” grassing up their colleagues or neighbours in one of the 50,000 tip offs submitted every year.

In the second case, actual enforcement or control is carried out by other people – but it coudn’t happen without the information supplied. There may be various links in the data chain: e.g., a teacher fills out a School Census form; which is passed on to school admin staff; who pass it on to the DfE’s central data unit (the “National Pupil Database and Transparency Team”); who pass it to the Home Office. Those at the start of the chain may have no idea where the information they pass on will end up.

Collaboration of both kinds involves workers in various roles and sectors. We can identify:

Frontline roles. People who deal directly with migrants, provide or block services, and/or gather their information. Including those in care roles such as teachers and classroom assistants, nurses, doctors, paramedics, homelessness outreach workers. Also receptionists in hospitals or GP surgeries, or registrars, or bank clerks. Also employers, landlords, or their agents.

Admin roles. People who collect information from frontline workers, organise and circulate it. Data workers in schools, universities, hospitals, the DVLA, credit check agencies, NHS Digital, etc.

Managerial roles. People who make strategies, targets and directives, arrange collaboration agreements and sign memoranda, who give the orders. From senior bureaucrats in government departments down to headteachers, charity bosses, local council executives, university assistant vice-chancellors and foreign student managers, local health commissioners, hospital trust boards, hospital accountants, hospital “Overseas Visitor Managers” (OVMs), etc.

Technical roles. Programmers who build the databases, IT geeks who maintain them. Management consultants who advise on how to achieve “attitudinal shift”. And others who lend their expertise to making control and information systems function.

All these roles can be found in public sector institutions, e.g., NHS hospitals or state schools; or in NGOs and “third sector” organisations, e.g., homelessness charities or universities; or in profit-making companies, e.g., banks and letting agents. In the modern market state, where NHS clinics are contracted to Virgin Care and schools become “academies”, these divisions are often fluid or intersecting.

Finally, we can also consider the roles we all play as “members of the public”.

Firstly, any citizen, or indeed other migrants, can also collaborate by passing on information on migrants. We know that one of the main sources of Immigration Enforcement intelligence remains tip-offs from “members of the public”, i.e., people informing on their colleagues and neighbours. This too can happen unknowingly or with good intentions. E.g., citizens may inform a charity about people sleeping rough, believing this will help them, and never imagining that this information is passed to Immigration Enforcement.

Secondly, there is a broad sense in which we can collaborate by giving information just about ourselves. The Schools Census or NHS registration data require widespread participation by citizens in this data gathering. If many people stopped answering Schools Census questions, or giving their addresses to GPs, these systems could not be used to track down “illegals”.

Incentives to collaborate

People act from many different motives. Often a whole mix of different motives will lead us to act in a certain way, and often our motives clash and pull us in different directions at once.

One motive leading people to collaborate with the hostile environment may be downright malice, hatred and fear of migrants. Racist xenophobia is a constant and virulent presence in our lives, bombarding us in every politician’s speech and TV news broadcast, from newspapers, billboards, social media, talk in the street or the playground. The norms of stranger-hating shape our environment, and make it much easier to ignore the consequences of our actions and inaction. But, for most people, hatred or fear of foreigners is not strong enough, on its own, to guarantee collaboration and override our empathy for others.

To make the hostile environment happen, government tries to set up a range of incentives which foster collaboration and deter resistance. We can group these into a few broad categories:

Punishments: criminal sanctions.The 2014 and 2016 Immigration Acts escalate the criminalisation of migrants with new offences including “illegal working”. They also criminalise landlords and employers who don’t collaborate in refusing homes or jobs to migrants.

Punishments: financial penalties. Alongside the new criminal sanctions, civil penalties are still the mainstay of enforced immigration collaboration. In workplace enforcement, the civil penalties system is used to encourage bosses and employment agencies to inform on or set up workers, e.g., handing over their home addresses or arranging “arrests by appointment” as in the Byron Burgers case, in order to win reduced penalties. This approach now serves as a model being rolled out to the “right to rent” and possibly more areas in future. In other sectors, the Home Office doesn’t directly fine non-collaborators, but, e.g., removing a licence to teach foreign students can have an even greater financial impact. And for many contractors or workers, refusing to collaborate could mean losing crucial income, promotion prospects, or your job.

Rewards: money, contracts, andother opportunities. Conversely, being prepared to collaborate can open up lucrative opportunities for individuals or organisations. Canny bureaucrats in government departments will be quick to latch on the new big thing. Management consultants, letting agents or councils offering right to rent checks, and many others stand to gain from the hostile environment. For some, like the software engineers working on the new generation of Home Office databases, it can even offer opportunities for creative excitement as they get to play with innovative new “big data” systems.

Inertia. For many other workers, it will be more a matter of keeping heads down and “just doing my job”. The habit of obedience, and the fear of asking questions or standing out, are some of the most powerful motivations of all.

Doing good.There are also those who genuinely believe, or at least tell themselves insistently, they are doing the right thing. Perhaps they are patriots who believe they are working for the nation. Or maybe they believe they are doing the best thing for migrants too: see the justifications given by charity bosses at St Mungo’s and Thames Reach who claim that “reconnecting” non-British rough sleepers with the streets of home is in their own best interest.^lxxxi

Towards a culture of collaboration in the NHS

The Ipsos MORI study on hospital charging shows a government department mobilising a full range of motivations in its quest to create an anti-migrant “cultural change within the NHS”. First of all, financial incentives are the base level. In the “Non-EEA incentive scheme”, hospitals are allowed to bill non-Europeans 150% of the normal “national tariff” set for NHS charges. When a charge is collected, half goes to the local commissioning body which allocates NHS funds, but the other half – so 75% of the actual tariff – is now kept directly by the hospital trust.

And along with the carrot comes a stick. The commissioners “do not have to pay for services provided to chargeable patients if the Trust has failed to take reasonable steps to identify and recover charges from that patient”. And, in future, penalties for any hospital bosses who hold out will become more severe: both because the systems for identifying chargeable patients will become increasingly efficient, and because from this month charging will be a legal duty.

These rewards and penalties impact on hospitals as a whole, and will be felt most directly by senior managers. Their career prospects are directly linked to the hospital’s financial success and to the approval of their NHS higher-ups. The more incentives bite them, the more they will be encouraged to pass them on to the frontline staff who will have to actually ID check patients. To help them, a whole new middle-management profession of “Overseas Visitor Managers” (OVMs) has been created to oversee charging, and to “educate” hospital staff on its necessity.

So far, hospitals have been allowed to operate very different charging systems. Often OVMs do most of the work: “frontline clinical and administrative staff are only engaged to the point of flagging cases to the OVM that need investigation whilst OVMs themselves have retained responsibility for interpreting complex rules, and making decisions on how to proceed.” (Page 44). But if ID checks and charging are to become routine, this will require much greater participation from frontline staff. This needs resources: staff will have to come off other duties to “investigate” and make charging decisions themselves, and will need more training to do so.

Furthermore, according to the Ipsos MORI report, financial incentives are not enough to get staff on board with ID checking: they also need to believe that it is right. In the report’s wording, the programme’s success is linked to “driving cultural change across staff groups” so that staff come to believe they have a ‘duty to charge’, and “understand and support the principles of fairness and entitlement underpinning the Cost Recovery Programme”, seeing it as “legitimate and worthwhile at all levels” (Page 35).

The report claims that most hospital staff surveyed do already support the “broad/overarching principles of the Cost Recovery Programme”.

“In particular, there was a very strong level of agreement, across all staff groups, that charging overseas visitors and migrants for NHS services is fair. At least two thirds in each group agree, and indeed, almost nine in ten Trust chairs and board members (88%) and OVMs (86%) agree, as do 84% of administrative staff. In addition, at least half, and often much more, of each staff group disagreed that overseas visitors and migrants should have the same access to free healthcare as UK residents.” (Page 35).

But broad support in a survey is different from active participation. And the report is concerned that a “significant minority” disagreed. 28% of hospital doctors and 26% of hospital nurses thought that “overseas visitors and migrants should have the same access to free healthcare as UK residents.”

Some complained about migrants’ “human rights”. Some even “refused to be involved in identifying and flagging potentially chargeable patients because they saw their role as being only to treat the patients”, not to follow the “‘funding- led’ attitude driving cost recovery”. The report mentions one OVM complaining about senior managers taking down their educational posters. Few staff actively opposed the policy, but more were half-hearted: “this tended to take the form of ambivalence or a ‘reluctance to get involved’”. Even those who did participate were unlikely to see ID checking patients as a priority in their already very busy schedules.

Even more worrying for the programme, the report found that rather than getting stronger, “buy in” for the “duty to charge” actually seemed to be dropping over its two years.

“In particular, the proportion of hospital doctors who agree that charging overseas visitors and migrants for NHS services is fair has fallen from 85% in the baseline survey to 68% at the follow-up survey, while a similar picture is also evident amongst primary care clinicians, CCG Leads and Boards, and Trust Chairs and Boards. […] The overall decline in support for the principles underpinning the Cost Recovery Programme among some groups raises the possibility that some Trusts will face ongoing difficulty in making the changes required to improve the recovery of costs.” (Pages 36-7).

To counter this, the report suggests that “buy in” of frontline staff was best when OVM had made the most efforts “to engage with them and explain the reasons behind cost recovery and the benefits it could bring to their Trust. ” Across all staff groups:

“there was a perception that increased communication around the impact of cost recovery would help to encourage staff buy-in at all levels. This particularly related to sharing information on the amount of money recovered and what this might equate to in terms of benefits to the Trust (e.g. being able to purchase a new piece of equipment or employ more nurses).”

So the strategy is to counter values based around care with a corporate ethos based around money-saving. But then money-saving must stop being seen as some abstract concern of accountants, and instead appear as a real and concrete imperative, a vital mission for the hospital “team”, which all staff need to feel part of.

Sealed compartments

On the whole, it is easier to carry out hostile environment measures the more you are insulated from the consequences of your hostile actions on other people. Frontline clinical staff are one of the hardest cases for collaboration: they actually have to see, even touch, the human beings who are targets, directly encounter their pain.

It is heartening that “buy-in” amongst both frontline staff and managers actually seemed to be dropping over the life of the pilot programme. Why would that be? The report doesn’t have a clear answer, but makes this suggestion:

“One point to consider in understanding this decrease, supported by anecdotal evidence from the case study visits and interviews with OVMs, is that over time staff have become increasingly aware of the challenges of cost recovery and the difficulties faced by some patients who are not eligible for free NHS care. In particular, OVMs and senior staff stressed the vulnerability of some patients and the sense of empathy they felt for them; although this did not fundamentally change their views on charging, it did cause them to hold somewhat conflicted feelings and provided a possible explanation for a lack of support among some frontline staff.”(Pages 35-5).

Empathy. It is one thing to read a poster about cost savings, another to look into a sick and distressed person’s eyes. Many doctors and nurses may agree with the “fairness” of charges in the abstract, but this belief is challenged as they see what it actually means in practice.

Hostility flows more easily when flows of information and action are dislocated into compartments, chains of multiple distinct links. This is the case for many admin workers who process the key data: that address could mean a death or a broken family, but you see only words and numbers. The GPs who hand over patient data to NHS Digital are also frontline doctors – but, crucially, they don’t know what use this information is put to. Similarly, the teachers filling out Schools Census forms, or outreach workers inputing rough sleeper locations into the CHAIN database.

In the purest form of insulation, these unknowing collaborators may not even realise that Immigration Enforcement can access this data. In other cases, you may know that some of the data you enter is passed to the Home Office, but you won’t ever know which files, or what then becomes of them. It’s easy enough, then, to put it out of mind. And of course many of these databases have other benign purposes: having that address or next of kin on file could be vital in a medical emergency.

Empathy may be broken by distance. But there is also something else that a hostile environment has to fight against. Ethos. While on the one hand doctors and nurses have to learn a certain clinical detachment, they are also taught a certain ethos of care, a certain ideal of dignity and compassion. This also comes through in some comments in the Ipsos MORI report: clinicians are not bureaucrats, docs are not cops, they have their own role, to “treat patients”.

If the hostile environment is to be successful, it will have to fight both empathy and ethos. It will have to create systems that keep us in compartments, links in machine-link chains, where we are not able to see the other’s eyes or feel their pain. And it will have to shatter our surviving values and cultures of care and commitment.

Resistance strategies

The Hostile Environment needs the collaboration of millions of people.

• So it breaks when people start to refuse, and that refusal spreads. Refusal often just means small everyday things, like refusing to sign a form, hand over an address, or look away when a raid happens. Resistance can identify effective acts of refusal, and help them spread.

Government encourages collaboration through a range of means including: spreading hatred and fear; putting in place legal, financial, and other rewards and penalties; trying to get us to “buy in” to values of cost-saving, informing, or unquestioning compliance with authority.

• Resistance may promote different values, cultures of care and dignity, or mistrust and refusal of authority. Resistance can support those facing legal or other penalties. Resistance can target those profiting from hostility. Resistance can mock the corporate bullshit of things like hospital money-saving schemes pushed by highly paid management consultants.

The Hostile Environment works by insulating us into many separate compartments, where we are “just doing our job”, or “getting on with our lives”. We are isolated from the consequences of our actions, and isolated from each other.

• Resistance can make connections: show people that their actions have consequences; show people that they are not alone in refusing, and link them up.

Many hostile environment measures involve chains of data sharing and enforcement action involving multiple government departments and units, contractors, NGOs, etc.

• Resistance can identify and target weak links in these chains.

The hostile environment succeeds to the extent it becomes “the new normal”. When it is engrained in our habits, everyday ways of living and working, so we don’t even see or question it any more. This is already the case in some aspects: e.g., it is now presumed normal to pass on our personal information to the state without question, or to show ID almost everywhere we go. New hostile environment measures build on this previous normalisation of surveillance, data sharing, and conformity over recent decades, and ramp it up further.

• But in other areas, hostility still has a long way to go. The Ipsos MORI report on the hostile environment programme in hospitals is encouraging. The large majority of hospital staff are still not involved themselves in ID checking; a “significant minority” is actively opposed; many more just don’t see it as part of their job or as a priority; this leaves a small number of middle managers (OVMs) to implement the system with inadequate resources. The government will struggle to shift the “culture and practices” of NHS hospitals and get widespread “buy in” to the hostile environment there. It will need to invest more resources and more time to do this.

The more these measures become normalised, the harder they will be to counter. This means the time to act is now.

Appendix: How to stop Immigration Enforcement getting addresses from GPs?

Some GP surgeries have pledged that they will not ask patients for ID documents or ask them about their nationality. This is an important stand. But it will not stop the main existing use of GP patient information by Immigration Enforcement, which is to get up-to-date addresses of people they are already targeting as “illegals”. How could that be stopped? The data flows in a chain: from patients to GP surgeries; from GP surgeries to NHS Digital; and from NHS Digital to Immigration Enforcement. If any of these links break, the chain breaks.

1) If patients don’t give addresses to GPs

GP surgeries routinely asks patients for their address when registering, usually by asking new patients to fill out the standard “GMS1” form.^lxxxii But do you actually have to give an address? In fact, although it is common practice, there is no actual requirement for patients to give an address.^lxxxiii And the official registration guidance for GPs from NHS England states:^lxxxiv

“Where necessary, (e.g. homeless patients), the practice may use the practice address to register them if they wish. If possible, practices should try to ensure they have a way of contacting the patient if they need to (for example with test results).”

GPs can refuse patients who do not live within their “practice area” – although they also have discretion to take patients who do not.^lxxxv They can ask for you to show ID documents to prove your identity and address. But they are not meant to refuse registration if you do not. This is also clearly stated in the NHS England guidance:

“If a patient cannot produce any supportive documentation but states that they reside within the practice boundary then practices should accept the registration.”

“When applying to become a patient there is no regulatory requirement to prove identity, address, immigration status or the provision of an NHS number in order to register.”

“Inability by a patient to provide identification or proof of address would not be considered reasonable grounds to refuse to register a patient.”

We can expect the government to try to change this. As it seeks to roll out “overseas visitor” charging into GP surgeries, an obvious next step is to make it compulsory for GPs to demand ID documents on registration – and it would make a lot of sense if proof of address is demanded at the same time. But it hasn’t happened yet.

2) If GPs don’t give addresses to NHS Digital

When GP receptionists register a new patient, they enter information into their own local computer system. However, GP computer systems are integrated with the national PDS database as standard, so that all data automatically updates the national system run by NHS Digital.

GP surgeries are contractually obliged to share patient data, including care records as well as registration records, under the standard NHS England contract. And they are also obliged, under the same contract, to use computer systems from an approved list, all of which are designed to facilitate data sharing.^lxxxvi

However, as far as we are aware, there is no specific contractual obligation on GPs to collect address data or input this into a particular system – just as there is no obligation for patients to give this information (the same goes for information on “place of birth”, “ethnic category”, etc.).

For example, it could be possible for GPs to store contact addresses of patients on a separate local system, without updating this into the main computer system linked to PDS (the address field in PDS can have a zero entry; or perhaps all patients’ addresses could be given as the practice address). Would this be against GPs’ contracts? We are not aware of this issue ever having been raised or challenged.

3) If NHS Digital doesn’t give addresses to the Home Office

In the past, NHS Digital claimed that it did not give addresses to the Home Office. It said that it only passed on a patient’s “primary care area”. Immigration Enforcement would then have to directly contact GPs in that area to ask for addresses, and it was up to GP surgeries whether they complied.

This changed with the January 2017 memorandum, in which NHS Digital agreed to routinely hand over addresses to the Home Office. The memorandum was signed by the chief executive of NHS Digital, Andy Williams. For the moment, then, there are clear orders from the top that NHS Digital will collaborate.

Strong legal challenges or campaign pressure would be needed to reverse this decision.

End notes

The post The Hostile Environment: turning the UK into a nation of border cops appeared first on Corporate Watch.

UK fracking company and target of environmental protest, Cuadrilla, is using new legislation designed to increase corporate transparency to hide the identity of the people who control it.

According to documents filed at Companies House, the four individuals that ultimately control Cuadrilla Resources Holdings Ltd, the UK-registered parent company of the Cuadrilla group, are using an exemption in the government’s ‘Persons of Significant Control’ legislation, introduced last year to protect their identities.

Previous disclosures have shown Cuadrilla is majority owned by the investment funds Riverstone Holdings and AJ Lucas. But the attempt to withhold information suggests others may be involved, with a Chinese state-owned oil firm previously rumoured to be a possible investor.

The government introduced Persons of Significant Control (PSC) legislation in June 2016. Its aim, in the words of then Business minister Baroness Neville Rolfe, is to:

“help tackle abuse of corporate entities. This is part of our commitment to creating an environment of trust and accountability for business.”

Under the new legislation, details of the human individuals (rather than other companies) who own or control companies should be entered into a publicly-accessible register.

However there are certain exemptions that people can use to protect their identities. One, section 790ZG in the Small Business, Enterprise and Employment Act that brought in the requirements, allows details to be withheld if the individuals can prove they are at risk of violence, intimidation or “targeting by activists”.

Government guidelines describe the exemptions as particularly suitable for people running companies involved in defence or animal testing, or if your company “has been targeted by activists”.

When asked for this article about their use of the exemption Cuadrilla said it was granted after they provided evidence of “threats” that left their controllers at “serious risk of intimidation”:

“We can confirm that in the Autumn of 2016 Cuadrilla made an application to Companies House to protect the names and addresses of Persons of Significant Control (PSC) with regard to Cuadrilla on the basis that having this information in the public domain would present a serious risk of intimidation to them. We followed the procedure set out by Companies House by submitting a statement and supporting evidence to demonstrate there had been historical threats and a strong likelihood of ongoing threats to those individuals. This was then independently assessed by the registrar and permission was granted to protect the relevant directors’ details. The information supplied remains confidential and not on the public record.”

Cuadrilla is one of a very small number of companies whose controllers have been granted protection in this way. Freedom of Information requests have shown that Companies House had only accepted five of 33 applications made for non-disclosure under exemption 790ZG in the 11 months between the start of the PSC regime in April last year to this February.

This is not the first time a fracking company has benefited from state protection. The anti-fracking movement has been specifically targeted by the government in order to protect the industry, including through the use of the counter-terrorism strategy, Prevent. This has involved police advice to schools linking anti-fracking campaigners to domestic extremism and identifying environmentalists as being at risk of being drawn into terrorism.

The UK state has a long history of protecting companies from protesters and public scrutiny. In the late 1990s, for example, the new labour government introduced a raft of legal measures intended to protect companies from protesters, particularly if the companies’ activities were deemed significant to the national economy. The arms and pharmaceuticals industry in particular started to use a range of legal processes to discourage protest and criticism. Measures previously used to protect companies from protest include the application of anti-social behaviour orders (ASBOs), the use of bail conditions by the police as a form of extra-judicial punishment, use of blackmail and harassment law and extensive use of terrorist legislation (including as an intelligence gathering tool against activists entering or leaving the country), with protesters being identified as ‘domestic extremists’.

Who does control Cuadrilla?

Existing Companies House records show Cuadrilla is owned by Australian mining services company AJ Lucas and US investment firm Riverstone.

Riverstone is run by its two founders: the ex-Goldman Sachs financiers David Leuschen and Pierre Lapeyre Jr. Research by Greenpeace has previously identified Kerogen Holdings as the majority shareholder of AJ Lucas. Kerogen is co-owned and run by Ivor Orchard, who is also a Cuadrilla director.

All of them could be PSCs, as could Cuadrilla CEO Francis Egan. But these individuals are already publicly-known to be involved with Cuadrilla. If they had wanted to protect their home address, they could have applied for another exemption, section 790ZF, that is more readily granted and allows for just that.

This raises the possibility that there are individuals behind Cuadrilla who have not yet been identified.

Companies House records show another two of AJ Lucas’ UK companies – Lucas Holdings (Bowland) Ltd and Lucas Holdings (Bolney) Ltd – have also applied for the exemption, which suggests it is people connected with AJ Lucas rather than Riverstone that want to stay hidden

There have previously been rumours that the Chinese state-owned oil firm China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC) is involved with Cuadrilla through its major investment in Kerogen Capital. Being under the control of a representative of the Chinese state is exactly the sort of thing it would make sense for Cuadrilla and its backers to keep quiet.

Something to protect

Given their company’s track record, it is perhaps not surprising the people behind Cuadrilla would rather stay in the shadows.

Cuadrilla was the first company to carry out high volume hydraulic fracturing (fracking) in the UK, in Weeton, Lancashire in March 2011. That resulted in a small earthquake and a moratorium on fracking operations, which has since been lifted. The company was also rebuked by the then energy minister, Charles Hendry, for not reporting the incident, saying that the “failure” had exposed “weaknesses in Cuadrilla’s performance as a licensee”. Cuadrilla has the largest fracking licensing block in the country, but is still a relatively small exploration company, hoping to cash-in by going to equity markets or debt markets if they are successful in getting significant extraction operations off the ground. It also tested for shale oil in Balcombe, the site of major protests against the industry in 2013. Cuadrilla has been rebuked for a host of planning breaches and technical failures and have previously come under pressure for ‘bullying’ activists. After successfully applying for an injunction to remove a protest camp, the company then pursued one of the protesters, Tina Louise Rothery, for £55,000 legal costs. Despite being threatened with jail time, she refused to pay and was later told by a judge that the order to pay had been discharged.

Despite Cuadrilla’s aggressive approach, the fracking industry has so far failed to establish itself in the UK, having been hampered by widespread protest, legal opposition, low oil prices and the now lifted moratorium. However, 2017 looks to be a key year in the battle over fracking, with Cuadrilla being given the go ahead to continue operations at it’s Preston New Road site in Flyde, Lancashire and a host of other locations around the country coming under threat, including active sites at Surrey and Yorkshire. Opponents to fracking are also stepping up their efforts, with a rolling blockade at the Preston New Road site and a series of actions targeting companies supplying the fracking industry.

Hydraulic fracturing, known as ‘fracking’, involves injecting a mixture of high-pressure water and chemicals into a borehole, fracturing the rock and releasing gas. It has been shown to poison water supplies and cause seismic activity, radioactive contamination and increased greenhouse gas emissions. To find out more about fracking and shale gas, see our report and factsheets.

For information on the law and policing around fracking see Netpol’s guide.

For all the latest on fracking in the UK, including events, protests, active sites and background information see the mighty Frack Off.

The post People behind Cuadrilla win state approval to keep identities secret appeared first on Corporate Watch.

Ahead of Drax’s AGM, Biofuel Watch, give us the low down

On 13 April, Drax Plc, operator of Drax Power Station, will be holding its AGM in York, sparking protests both locally and in London where its major investors have their offices. Campaigners will be highlighting Drax’s involvement in dirty energy, its links with climate change and deforestation, and its continued reliance on government subsidies – which could instead be going to support genuinely renewable energy – to keep afloat.

While Drax describes itself as ‘Europe’s largest decarbonisation project’, its portfolio now covers three forms of dirty energy: coal, biomass, and, since 2016, gas¹. Drax opened in 1974 as a coal-fired power station, and in 2012 it began the process of converting 3 of its 6 generators to run on biomass in the form of imported wood pellets. This conversion is now complete, with 65% of the energy Drax generated in 2016 coming from biomass².

Despite its claims to be ‘preparing for a post coal future’, Drax remains one of the UK’s largest burners of coal, importing it from places such as Colombia, where the coal industry is responsible for air and water pollution and landgrabs resulting in the dispossession of Indigenous People’s communities from their land, and the impoverishment, ill health and growing malnutrition among those not evicted outright³. Drax remains the UK’s single largest emitter of CO2, and is now also the world’s largest biomass power station, burning the equivalent of more than the UK’s total annual wood production each year⁴.

Biomass is considered by industry and government calculations to be lower carbon than coal because it is assumed that the carbon emitted will be reabsorbed by new trees planted to replace those that were burnt. However, burning trees today releases carbon into the atmosphere today, and any new trees planted won’t reach maturity and absorb the same amount of carbon for decades. At a time when we need to be rapidly reducing our carbon emissions, it makes no sense to create such a ‘carbon debt’. The atmosphere doesn’t care whether CO2 in it comes from burning biomass or coal. If trees are left standing, they will continue to absorb carbon, contribute to ecosystems and provide habitat and food for other species. If they are cut down, this is lost and can’t be replaced quickly, if ever. A forest ecosystem takes decades to mature, and to reduce the trees’ importance to their carbon sequestration capacity is a massive oversight and an incomplete way of looking at a forest.

Just over half of the wood burnt at Drax comes from the United States, and most of this is supplied by the pellet company Enviva. Enviva sources wood from clearcut wetland forests, important ecosystems which are home to a wide variety of animal and plant species and have been classified as global biodiversity hotspots by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, and ‘some of the most biologically important habitats in North America’⁵. Many of the species who live in these forests are now threatened by habitat fragmentation from logging and land conversion. According to the Natural Resources Defense Council, it is difficult to restore these forests after logging because they take a long time to mature and being logged once can alter flooding patterns, reducing the diversity of plant and tree species when the forest does eventually regenerate.⁶ Supplying biomass to UK and European power stations is a major driver of forest destruction. A local resident says:

“When I see wood pellet ships leave our port, I don’t see the vessel. I see the miles of clearcuts I know happened. It’s a feeling of loss.”⁷

Drax also sources some of its pellets from plantations, which have taken the place of forests in some areas of the southern United States. The biomass industry points to these plantations as evidence that its activities are not reducing forest cover, but a monoculture plantation does not support as many other species as a forest does, is more likely to deplete the soil and water and may rely on spraying with agrochemicals.

As the only currently operating coal-fired power station in the UK to have converted to biomass, Drax is playing an important role in pushing bioenergy as a replacement for coal and making it appear to be a ‘sustainable’ option. Two other biomass power stations currently being built, Lynemouth (another converted coal power station) and MGT Tees (a purpose-built biomass power station), plan to source their pellets from Enviva. Drax’s research and development of necessary infrastructure, including specially adapted railway carriages and storage domes for biomass pellets, will be important if large scale import-reliant biomass is expanded further in the UK. Drax also owns a pellet retail business and is in the process of expanding its pellet mills in the US.

Through engagement with the community using the local media⁸ and ‘corporate social responsibility’ activities⁹, Drax is making further attempts at equating biomass with sustainability in people’s minds. For exampel, to help with lobbying the government and EU, Drax has hired the PR company Edelman, whose other clients have included E.On, Shell, Walmart and Burger King (see Corporate Watch profile of Edelman here).

Drax’s CEO, Dorothy Thompson, chairs the Sustainable Biomass Partnership (SBP), a biomass certification scheme set up and administered entirely by energy companies. Unsurprisingly, the SBP has concluded that Drax’s biomass is sustainable – based largely on reports written by Drax itself. Environmental NGOs have described this certification scheme as ‘little more than industry greenwash’.¹⁰ The recent appointment of a senior Drax official – Dr Rebecca Heaton – to the UK’s Committee on Climate Change, a body set up to advise the UK government on reducing its carbon emissions, provides Drax with another opportunity to influence government and popular opinion about the feasibility and sustainability of biomass¹¹.

Drax has been a recipient of renewable energy subsidies since it started converting to run on biomass. In December 2016, Drax started receiving another more lucrative subsidy, called a Contract for Difference (CfD), bringing Drax’s total subsidies for the year up to £541 million, or nearly £1.5 million a day, a figure which will go up further in 2017 thanks to the CfD. These subsidies are paid out of a surcharge on your electricity bill. At a time when 6.59 million households in the UK are considered to be ‘fuel poor’ (having to spend more than 10% of household income on heating)¹², these subsidies are very badly misplaced. Imagine what we could achieve if rather than subsidising forest destruction, we invested this amount of money into energy saving, retrofitting buildings to make them more energy efficient, or generating genuinely renewable energy.

Reliance on dirty energy is not acceptable, whichever way you spin it. Biomass is a dangerous false solution to climate change and subsidising it is a waste of bill payers’ money. We will be visiting Drax and its investors on the day of its AGM to say that instead of paying for forest destruction and increased carbon emissions with our electricity bills, we want to reduce our energy demand, protect forests and build more democratic energy systems. Communities around the world are trying to address the consequences of climate change, and companies like Drax are getting in the way.

Links

http://www.biofuelwatch.org.uk/2017/axedrax-agm-2017/

Facebook event for the London demo https://www.facebook.com/events/669034126633772/  and for the York demo https://www.facebook.com/events/965306123569428/

References

1 https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/dec/06/drax-coal-opus-energy-gas-plants Drax has acquired four yet-to-be-built gas fired power stations, and Opus Energy.

2 https://drax.cdnist.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Drax-Group-plc-annual-report-and-accounts-2016-Smart-Energy-Solutions.pdf

3http://coalaction.org.uk/ditchcoal/

4In 2016 Drax burnt pellets made from approximately 13 million tonnes of wood https://drax.cdnist.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Drax-Group-plc-annual-report-and-accounts-2016-Smart-Energy-Solutions.pdf, and the UK’s annual production is around 11 million tonnes.

5https://www.nrdc.org/sites/default/files/enviva-wood-pellets-FS.pdf

6https://www.nrdc.org/sites/default/files/enviva-wood-pellets-FS.pdf

7 https://www.dogwoodalliance.org/2017/02/stop-exporting-southern-forests/

8E.g. http://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/news/why-is-government-stalling-on-green-revolution-at-drax-1-8437492, or http://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/news/opinion/yp-letters-drax-boss-biomass-is-a-cleaner-form-of-technology-1-8463468

9E.g. http://www.bastropenterprise.com/news/20170317/drax-biomass-joins-with-keep-morehouse-beautiful-to-host-spring-clean-up-event

10http://www.biofuelwatch.org.uk/2016/drax-sbp-pr/

11https://www.theccc.org.uk/2017/03/27/dr-rebecca-heaton-to-join-committee-on-climate-change/

12http://www.energybillrevolution.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/ACE-and-EBR-fact-file-2014-01-Fuel-Poverty-update-2014.pdf

The post Drax’s dirty energy appeared first on Corporate Watch.

As part of our Green Capitalism project, one contributor, Benjamin, gives their take on the idea of ‘steady state economics’ – an ecological approach to economics where economies remain at a stable size instead of growing over time, and resource consumption is kept within ecological limits. Please note the views are the authors and do not represent Corporate Watch’s position.

In the foreword to a new report by the prominent economist Jeffrey Sachs, senator Bernie Sanders writes: ‘What I heard and what I continue to hear is that Americans have had enough of establishment politicians and establishment economists who have claimed for far too long that we must choose between economic growth, economic fairness, and environmental sustainability. They have sold us a bill of goods that says we can’t have all three. Well, they are wrong.’ [1] Whilst Sanders’ rhetoric is appealing, should we demand all three? Do we need to revisit the presumption that economic growth is always necessary and desirable?

“The increase of wealth is not boundless, at the end of what they term the progressive state lies the stationary state.” – J. S. Mill [2]

The idea of steady-state or zero-growth economics is far from new. Nineteenth century economists such as John Stuart Mill and Adam Smith, embraced the concept of growing towards a desirable end, then maintaining that end with no need to grow further. During the twentieth century this focus was lost with conventional economists arguing for infinite growth, whilst rarely addressing the question of how this could be achieved with finite natural resources. In 1990 a group of economists sought to highlight this contradiction when they established the International Society of Ecological Economics.

Economies are measured by adding up all of the transactions which take place, usually over the course of a year. In the case of a country this figure is called GDP or Gross Domestic Product. The total value of transactions can go up from one year to the next, either because there are more people or because each average person has bought more this year than last. We call that rise economic growth. Any change due to fluctuating population can mask per capita (per person) changes. If we want to consider human welfare, per capita figures can be more useful.

Let us remember that there is nothing natural or inevitable about economic growth. Growth is a modern obsession, which did not pertain in the classical world. Civilisations rose and fell without ever experiencing per capita rises in income or consumption. In Europe, all this changed two hundred years ago with the industrial revolution. New sources of energy allowed growth beyond the ecological limits imposed on previous societies, borrowing from the past in the use of fossil fuels and from the future in the use and abuse of ecosystem services. As such, growth only began when civilisation stepped outside the sustainability inherent in living within ecological limits.

In 1990 when the first Ecological Economists advocated a new respect for these ecological limits, their ideas were well outside the mainstream. However, in the intervening two and half decades, many ecological themes have moved from speculative theorising to current affairs. The thaw of Siberian permafrost. Melting of alpine glaciers. Armed conflict over water resources. The idea of an economy in which growth is neither necessary nor desirable also has more currency than it did.

According to the Centre for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy, a system without growth ‘aims for stable population and stable consumption of energy and materials at sustainable levels.’ [3] Let us consider each of these points individually:

Zero growth in itself is not a panacea. The steady-state we are aiming for must be within ecological limits (sustainable levels), for example the atmosphere’s ability to cycle carbon dioxide.

Stable consumption means that we can all expect to live comfortably, but that consumption patterns must not balloon over time.

Stable population means that population cannot continue to grow. If it does, each individual must consume less year on year for consumption as a whole to remain steady. Reproductive rights are one of the most fundamental expressions of personal liberty, so how we stabilise population without recourse to authoritarianism or unjust market mechanisms remains a huge challenge. Addressing inequality in relation to both gender and income distribution remains key.

Achieving a society which respected all three points would have huge advantages for ordinary citizens. In a steady-state economy it would be more realistic to achieve stability, which could provide a comfortable life for all whilst eliminating boom/bust cycles. Since continuous growth and sustainable scale are mutually exclusive, any steady-state economy must abandon the flawed expectation that growth will be the engine to alleviate poverty. Some mechanisms of redistribution would equally help achieve true sustainability, because poor people who have trouble meeting basic needs tend not to consider their ecological impact, and the super rich tend to consume unsustainably.

In a mutation of language which has largely passed unremarked, our society’s obsession with growth has led the word to be used interchangeably with prosperity. President Trump has promised to bring growth back to the American rust-belt and George Osborne’s “Northern powerhouse” purported to bring growth to Britain’s northern cities. In Cornwall, the Cornish word “sowena” (prosperity) is used as a toast, it wishes drinking companions good fortune in the same way that the French “santé” wishes them health. I have yet to find a language which wishes growth upon anyone other than small children.

To make the transition to a steady-state economy, we must reform the language we use to talk about consumption, wealth and work. There is a degree of truth in the Orwellian notion that vocabulary shapes our thinking. Our terminology must focus on ends not means: welfare, not growth or money. Once we recognise ends, we will be freer to search for means which are both more effective, as well as more sustainable than our current model. Consumption must not be used as an analogue for contentment. We must begin to consider livelihoods instead of merely jobs.

Political ecologists tend to consider the size of an economy as approximately proportional to the load that it exerts upon ecosystems. Exceptionally few sectors of any economy have yet been able to break this link. With this as our starting point, it is logical that many radical environmental campaigns seek to disrupt through-puts of natural resources, thereby impacting on the overall size of the economy.

In a subtle contrast, proponents of steady-state economics argue that escaping from the presumption of economic growth is more urgent than constraining the economy within ecological limits. As Herman Daly put it in his ground-breaking book Steady-state Economics, ‘We cannot go into reverse without first coming to a stop.’ [4] Since those words were published, the term Degrowth has entered the lexicon to describe an economic reverse gear, but Daly’s simple assertion remains true. Once society has built effective measures to constrain and manage the size of the economy, only then can we hold a meaningful debate about what size the economy should be constrained to. Daly’s writings are not Utopian, rather he proposes a transition from our current, unsustainable rates of consumption and resource depletion: ‘Pragmatically, quotas would probably at first be set near existing extraction rates. The first task would be to stabilise to get off the growth path. ‘Though governments must retain ‘the ability to tighten constraints gradually.’ His is a radical but not a revolutionary discourse.

In his essay ‘Institutions for a Steady State Economy’, Daly draws a distinction between two questions: ‘Could a steady-state economy function if people accepted it?’ and ‘How likely are people to accept it?’. [5] Political history is littered with failed schemes which met only one of these criteria, so it is important that we have confidence in steady-state economics on both counts.

Let us first consider how a steady-state economy might work and the mechanisms necessary to maintain it. We must begin by adopting new measures of success. Many choose annual salary as a measure of individual success. Similarly, GDP is regularly quoted as a measure of national well-being. GDP is flawed not least because it entrenches a disturbing form of double counting. Production which drives pollution is nonetheless positive – from the perspective of GDP. When further money changes hands in any clean-up this again boosts GDP. Such an approach provides little incentive to avoid pollution in the first place. Any transaction where money changes hands adds to the figure, regardless of the social or ecological good of that transaction. Any work which is done without money changing hands, such as childcare and other work within the home, is excluded. In setting out a unique model for his country’s development the king of Bhutan argued that Gross National Happiness (GNH) is more important than Gross National Product.[6] Quite how GNH should be measured remains a question.

There are quantitative approaches which seek to supplant GDP as a go-to measure of national economic well-being. The most developed is the Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare (ISEW). Under this measure, economic transactions are balanced against such factors as income distribution and costs associated with pollution. The calculation endeavours to reflect the environmental sustainability and social acceptability of transactions. ISEW has its critics, particularly those who seek a move away from placing a price on nature. Empirically, whatever the price, someone will be prepared to pay to pollute or deplete. With these criticisms acknowledged it is nevertheless believable that we might devise a measure of success better suited to a steady-state economy than current formulations.

In a world where one of governments’ main objectives is to maintain a growing economy, there is a clear incentive for government – through licensing and tax incentives – to keep down the prices of the raw materials which form inputs to industrial processes. Most notably, this applies to fossil fuels, since this primary energy ultimately powers almost all economic activity.

A form of rationing based upon quotas has been proposed as the key mechanism for slowing and arresting economic growth. Governments would auction quotas for production of raw materials and the revenue generated could replace many forms of taxation. Current approaches, such as mechanisms within the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), are excessively complicated because they seek to regulate emissions. If we accept that any hydrocarbons mined from the ground will ultimately add to carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, it would be administratively easier to apply quotas at the coal-face or the well-head since there are many fewer sites of extraction than there are sites of combustion and emission.

In ecological economics, quotas are seen as more effective than taxes since their effect is direct. Taxation invites industries to pay to pollute; whereas a quota forces a constraint on pollution, through constraining inputs. Importantly, it is quantity which determines ecological impact, not price. As such, it makes sense for government to decide upon a quantity (through a quota) and subsequently allow the market to set a price, rather than set a price – through taxes, and hope that the market will respond by choosing a sustainable quantity.

Bearing in mind the constraints imposed by quotas, there will necessarily be a role for regulation in ensuring a just transition to this newly constrained world. This has been as discussed by the North Sea oil-workers union OILC. Workers in energy production and intensive industries will inevitably be impacted by the imposition of quotas and must be adequately compensated.

Having briefly explored the mechanisms necessary to make it work, let us reflect upon whether such mechanisms could ever gain public acceptance. For those who are fearful of a planned economy as an assault on individual liberty, Daly suggests that ‘The micro [the behaviour of the individual] is the domain of indeterminacy, novelty and freedom. The Macro, or aggregate, is the domain of determinacy, predictability and control. We should strive for macro control and avoid micro meddling.'[7] Ecological economics also argues that – following an initial transition – the sustainable level of any steady-state economy must sit well inside ecological limits, to allow for some variability and avoid the need for market interference.

Current economic norms have lead to huge inequality. Our existing approach is failing vast numbers of citizens. In this fact there is an opportunity, since a new model which seeks to limit inequality is likely to benefit the vast majority and negatively impact only a tiny plutocracy, the one percent highlighted by the Occupy movement. Daly’s argument for limiting inequality is pragmatic, because ‘Exchange between the powerful and the powerless is often only nominally voluntary and can easily be a mask for exploitation.'[9] By his own admission, the market based mechanisms he advocates – to use Daly’s term ‘price-system parameters'[10] – can only be just if inequalities of wealth and power can be moderated. Overall levels of quotas must also take into account future generations, who will lose the ability to benefit from those resources, but who cannot bid in any auction.

Twenty-first century communication can allow ordinary citizens to participate both in a new kind of democratic politics (the Arab spring) and a new sphere of economic activity (peer to peer transactions). Despite this potential, the early ideals of many internet pioneers have been progressively lost. Under present day ‘algorithmic capitalism’ [8] multinational middle-men such as Uber and Airbnb have huge power over both consumers and producers. In defiance of a present dominated by monopolistic corporations, the same technologies – which disrupt industries – could be harnessed to disrupt the operating system of our economy.

“Future progress simply must be made in terms of things that really count rather than the things that are merely countable” HermanDaly.[11]

Politicians and global corporations are often accused of short-termism, yet both government and business are planning and instituting projects which will take years to build and which will operate for decades to come. What kind of economy are they planning for us? If we are to live within ecological limits, a zero-growth economy is ultimately inevitable, so let us begin building a new economic model now, rather than waiting for radical changes to be imposed upon us.

Until those of us engaged in the politics of social change begin to build steady-state and degrowth arguments into existing campaigns for justice and sustainability, we are in danger of arguing for a future which would be impossible, even were it to gain public acceptance. This is a trap, which many who have joined calls for Green Growth are in danger of falling in to. Today, there are so many acute confrontations, we can lose sight of the chronic problems caused by our economic system. The anti roads movement lost battles at Twyford and Newbury but won a broader victory when dozens of road schemes where shelved. We may lose some of our current fights, yet if we do so intelligently we will remodel economics as well as politics.

Steady-state economics offers a model for a future within ecological limits and crucially, proposes mechanisms to reach that destination. Questions remain around how market mechanisms could ever be implemented justly – given existing inequalities. Alternatively, what non-market systems might be devised to limit (non-renewable) resource through-puts? We must remain vigilant: elites often capture moments of disruption and direct them to entrench existing power. Finally, we need to address the question of population, whilst avoiding blame and xenophobia. The economic and ecological challenges of the present and of the future are questions for humanity as a whole. Building walls will not help to solve them.

References:

[1] Sanders, B. (2017) Foreword. In: Sachs, J. Building the New American Economy. Columbia University Press, px http://www.cupblog.org/?p=20674 (21/02/2017)

[2] Mill, J. S. (1848). Principles of Political Economy. Appleton, p514

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/30107/30107-h/30107-h.html (21/02/2017)

[3] O’Niel D. et al. (2010) What Is a Steady State Economy? Centre for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy, p1

http://steadystate.org/wp-content/uploads/CASSE_Brief_SSE.pdf

[4] Daly, H. E. (1992) Steady-state economics (Second edition). Earthscan, p52

[5] Daly, H. E. (1992) Steady-state economics (Second edition). Earthscan, p50

[6] HM Wangchuck, J. S. (1972) Speech. Thimphu.

http://www.gnhcentrebhutan.org/what-is-gnh/the-story-of-gnh/ (21/02/2017)

[7] Daly, H. E. (1992) Steady-state economics (Second edition). Earthscan, p51

[8] Spehr, C. (2016) Spongebob, why don’t you work harder. In: Scholz, T. and Schneider, N. Ours to hack and to own. OR Books, p54

[9] Daly, H. E. (1992) Steady-state economics (Second edition). Earthscan, p54

[10] Daly, H. E. (1992) Steady-state economics (Second edition). Earthscan, p74

[11] Daly, H. E. (1992) Steady-state economics (Second edition). Earthscan, p75

The post Economics for a finite planet appeared first on Corporate Watch.

Summary

Several nights a week, immigration patrols are out targeting rough sleepers in London, now a prime focus for raids under Theresa May’s “hostile environment” policy.

The arrests are carried out by Home Office “Immigration Compliance and Enforcement” (ICE) teams. But they rely on the active collaboration of the Mayor, local councils, and homelessness charities. Charity outreach workers set out to help homeless people. But through a creeping process of changes they are being turned into informers, while some of the city’s most vulnerable people are disappeared into the nightmare of indefinite detention and deportation.

This investigation shows how:

• Outreach teams from charities St Mungo’s, Thames Reach, and Change, Grow, Live (CGL) conduct regular joint “visits” with Immigration Enforcement officers, as often as fortnightly in central boroughs. Freedom of Information (FOI) responses show 141 such patrols organised by the GLA and 12 London boroughs last year. This figure does not include Westminster, the biggest concentration of London homelessness, where patrols are likely to be even more frequent.

• Joint visits in just eight of these areas led to 133 rough sleepers being detained, while 127 people were deported in under a year in Westminster alone.

• Charity bosses say their role is to persuade non-UK rough sleepers to leave “voluntarily”. But the FOI figures show that detention and enforced deportation is more common; in any case, so-called “voluntary” departures are carried out under the threat of force.

• Outreach teams also routinely pass on locations of non-UK rough sleepers to ICE, including through the London-wide CHAIN database, and through local co-operation agreements.

• The GLA has contracted St Mungo’s and Thames Reach under “payment by numbers” schemes where fees depend on the number of rough sleepers they get out of the country.

• EU and other European Economic Area (EEA) nationals are the main targets, as they make up nearly half of London rough sleepers. Migrants from Romania, Poland, and other East European countries are particularly affected.

• In May 2016, the Home Office toughened the rules so that European rough sleepers can be arrested for deportation if found sleeping rough on just one night.

• Tough policy on migrant rough sleepers was “intensely lobbied” for by Westminster Council, and encouraged by the “Mayor’s Rough Sleeping Group”, which included senior charity managers from St Mungo’s, Thames Reach, Homeless Link, and also Crisis.1

• Rough sleeper deportations are at the cutting edge of Theresa May’s “hostile environment” approach where immigration controls are spreading across schools, hospitals, and housing.

The “hostile environment” is based on collaboration. But it can be broken by solidarity and resistance. We are already seeing examples of refusal by some homelessness workers and campaigners; the conclusion gives some ideas for how it could spread.

Click here for a PDF version of the report.

Can you help?

We are continuing to collect information and evidence about rough sleeper patrols.

If you are a homelessness worker, rough sleeper, or have any information that you’d like to share with Corporate Watch, email us at contact[at]corporatewatch.org or call 020 7426 0005. We will respect your confidentiality.

If you have any immediate information about ICE raids, we suggest you contact Anti Raids Network: email: antiraids@riseup.net twitter: @antiraids

About this report

This investigation has used three main kinds of sources:

• Freedom of Information (FOI) responses, which for the first time give some figures on rough sleeper immigration patrols. Requests were refused by the Home Office, but answered by the majority of London borough councils.2

• Official policy statements and documents, which were accessed through FOI requests or were already in the public domain.

• Personal interviews with homelessness workers, (former) rough sleepers, and other eyewitnesses.

We have included excerpts from some of these interviews between the sections of the report. Some are in the form of direct quotations, and some as excerpts from interview notes. All have been anonymised to maintain interviewees’ confidentiality.

A few words

In official documents, the Home Office uses the term “deportation” only for the minority of cases where people have been convicted of criminal offences. It officially describes all other deportations as “removals”. In the homelessness sector, an even nicer sounding word, “reconnection”, is common. But in this investigation we use the common word “deportation” to refer to all cases where people are taken out of the country by government agencies and their contractors.

Contents

1. Rough sleeping in London

2. Joint visits: outreach workers and ICE patrolling together

3. Data sharing: the CHAIN database and local co-operation agreements

4. Just what is “reconnection”?

5. Homelessness as abuse: the May 2016 policy

6. “Intense lobbying”: Operation Adoze and the Mayor’s Rough Sleeping Group

7. Paid by numbers: the rough sleeper deportation Social Impact Bond

8. Conclusion: how does collaboration happen?

Appendix: a response from Thames Reach

Eyewitness account: a passer-by, December 2016

“I was walking to Charing Cross Station to catch the last train home, it must have been a bit after 11PM. There are always a lot of homeless people sleeping round there at night, on Adelaide Street, near the shelter at St Martin’s church. Then I saw there were three vans parked up there, Immigration Enforcement. I went back up onto Chandos Place, I think, and that’s where I saw a whole load of them, there must have been fifteen or twenty, Immigration Officers and Police together. They were just in a mob surrounding a couple of homeless people. One guy was shouting that it wasn’t right. I started challenging them, but they seemed to have finished whatever they were doing, they started walking back to their vans. There were two other guys with them, dressed in normal clothes, they didn’t look like police, more casual. When I tried to talk to them and ask what they were doing they wouldn’t meet my eye. They looked away, almost like they were ashamed.”

1. Rough sleeping in London

First, a snapshot of London street homelessness. 8,096 people were recorded sleeping rough in London in the year up to April 2016. This figure comes from the “CHAIN” rough sleeper database, a system updated and used by homelessness workers across London, funded by the GLA and managed by St Mungo’s.  As any Londoner with their eyes open knows, rough-sleeping is on the increase, and the CHAIN figures show a 7% rise on the year before. By far the biggest number is in Westminster, where 2,657 people were seen sleeping out in 2015-16. Street homelessness is clustered around the central boroughs, with Camden (641), Lambeth (445) and the City of London (440) next on the list.

Outside London, rough sleepers are predominantly British nationals. In London, less than half are British (41.2% , from the same CHAIN figures). Almost half (47.3%) come from other European countries, and in particular from central and eastern Europe, above all Romania (19.5%) and Poland (8.7%). Overwhelmingly (46.2% of the total count), the European rough sleepers are from countries in the “European Economic Area” (EEA), which includes all EU countries plus Iceland, Lichtenstein, Norway and Switzerland. In normal circumstances, these Europeans have a right to live and work in the UK. There are also smaller numbers of African (5.5%), Asian (4.9%), and American (1.2%) people sleeping rough in London.

Across London, councils commission specialist homelessness charities to run their rough sleeper outreach teams. The central London boroughs with major street homelessness generally contract outreach providers directly. The biggest player by far is St Mungo’s, which runs outreach services for Westminster and other central boroughs. St Mungo’s also runs a number of other key services contracted by the GLA, such as the central “No Second Night Out” (NSN0) hubs where first-time rough-sleepers may be brought, and the “Routes Home” project, which aims to “reconnect” foreign national rough sleepers with their countries of origin (discussed more below).

Outside the centre of London, many councils with lower numbers of rough sleepers sign up for a pan-London outreach service commissioned by the GLA. This is called “London Street Rescue”, and is contracted to another charity called Thames Reach. Basically it involves three teams in vans responding to reports of rough sleepers all around the city’s periphery.

Another charity called “Change, Grow, Live” (CGL), runs street outreach services across the UK and in two central London boroughs, Camden and Lambeth.These are run under the label “Safer Streets”. There are also a number of other charities involved in more specialist outreach services across London.

Eyewitness account: arrested near Charing Cross

“I had been sleeping near Charing Cross on my own for about a month. I was never contacted by any outreach workers before the Immigration Officers came, they arrested me on the spot and took me to detention. I told them I was working for 18 months before, but it didn’t matter. Now I am in detention, they say they are going to deport me back to [an Eastern European country]. I have nowhere to live there.”

2. Joint visits: outreach workers and ICE patrolling together

The Freedom of Information requests asked the GLA and borough councils how many times in the last year their outreach teams had conducted joint visits to rough sleepers together with Immigration Enforcement. They also asked how many people had returned “voluntarily” to other countries as a result of these visits, and how many people had been detained.

Many councils did not answer, claiming that they don’t hold this information. Westminster, the council with by far the most rough sleepers and organised rough sleeper services, was amongst these. As we will see below, Westminster has actively lobbied for a toughened “enforcement approach” to European rough sleepers, and in November and December 2015 it ran a key pilot project with the Home Office called Operation Adoze. We know from a Home Office response to a question in parliament that exactly 127 EEA nationals encountered in Westminster during this operation were deported through Operation Adoze, either in those two months or by September 2016. So there is certainly active Immigration Enforcement in Westminster, and active data gathering too.

Twelve other London councils did reply saying that they had carried out joint visits with ICE the year before. They included all the other inner London boroughs with 160 or more rough sleepers. Between them, they counted 133 such visits, so about 11 each, just under one a month, in each borough.

Based on their replies, there seems to be a rough correlation between the number of rough sleepers in a borough and the number of Immigration Enforcement operations. Camden, number two for rough sleepers after Westminster, said that its outreach teams made 24 joint visits with Immigration Enforcement in the previous year, i.e., one a fortnight. Lambeth, with 445 rough sleepers, had 17 joint visits. (These are two areas operated by CGL “Safer Streets” teams.) Tower Hamlets, with 377 rough sleepers, had 16 joint visits. Lewisham (199 rough sleepers) had 15 joint visits, while Kensington & Chelsea (225) and Hammersmith & Fulham (161) each had 14. The outliers were Southwark and Ealing, which had 373 and 219 rough sleepers, but only five and two joint visits respectively.

What about the other boroughs? Many replied that they had not been involved in any joint visits. However, these were mainly outer London boroughs where outreach is run by the GLA through London Street Rescue (Thames Reach). A number of these councils said that they did not hold the data, and several recommended contacting the GLA instead.

A similar FOI request was also made to the GLA. It replied that London Street Rescue (LSR) had made 923 outreach “shifts” altogether during the “2016/17 financial year” in its areas, and Immigration Enforcement had been present on eight shifts.

This number seems very low compared to other areas. However, it is the case that the LSR outreach service is small compared to inner London equivalents. Also, raids in outer London are often focused on bigger “camps” where ten or twenty people may be sleeping together. It could be that outreach teams often don’t visit these camps themselves, but just report their location to ICE and police who then move straight to a larger operation.

Altogether, the FOI responses identify at least 141 occasions where ICE officers went on patrol together with outreach workers. And this number doesn’t include Westminster or the City of London, which are maybe the most heavily patrolled areas of all.

What happens on these “joint visits”? Of the 12 councils that gave numbers, only seven also answered the further questions about “voluntary returns” and detentions: the other five said they “do not hold” this information.3 The GLA also answered these questions, so we have eight respondents altogether, who between them said they had conducted 83 joint visits. We are told that these 83 patrols resulted in 55 people agreeing to “voluntary return”, and 133 people being detained.

The nationalities involved mirror the general demographics of London rough sleeping. For example, the GLA said that it its eight patrols with ICE, London Street Rescue helped nine people sign up for “voluntary return”. They were from Hungary, India, Poland and Romania. And they helped ICE detain 28 people. They were from Romania, Lithuania, Poland, Latvia, Nigeria, Bulgaria, and Slovakia.4

It is worth noting here one point about the FOI data. As we will see, in their official statements Thames Reach, St Mungo’s and other “partners” are keen to emphasise that their work with Immigration Enforcement is directed at what they call “voluntary reconnection”. Detention and enforced deportation is presented as an exceptional last resort. This is not what the figures show. On the contrary, when charity workers and Immigration Enforcement go out together, detention is a standard result.

However, it could be that most arrests take place not on the initial patrol but at a later date. The role of the joint patrols for ICE is then largely one of “intelligence gathering”. One charity worker explained that, in their experience, “joint shifts” generally consisted of two outreach workers accompanied by one ICE officer. The ICE officer would mainly note locations of foreign rough sleepers and issue paperwork such as a “minded to remove” notice which commands people to report for an assessment interview.

Certainly, a lone ICE officer will not make arrests, but will typically come back later with an arrest team. In raids on rough sleepers, as opposed to raids on other groups, ICE will also commonly request police back-up. Actual arrests may take place with or without any outreach workers present. We have heard of cases of both, as some of the eye witness accounts excerpted in this report testify.

Interview summary: a raid in Haringey

20 people, mostly from Poland, were sleeping rough together near Seven Sisters. A large immigration raid took place with ICE and Police late in the evening. Police and Thames Reach had come to the site prior to this, along with a crew from the BBC. 11 people were detained. Only one was released, all others were removed from the UK. Individuals who were not detained immediately were given 30-day notices of removal and required to report to Home Office during that period. ID documents were confiscated.

3. Data sharing: the CHAIN database and local co-operation agreements

Joint patrols are just one part of the picture. Another form of collaboration is less direct and more routine: every night outreach workers gather information on non-UK rough sleepers, and their managers then pass on this information to become Immigration Enforcement “intelligence”.

As the Home Office has so far declined to answer Freedom of Information requests, we don’t know just how much use ICE makes of information collected by local authorities and homelessness charities. We do know that these organisations routinely meet and share information. In particular, every month the GLA passes information from the CHAIN roughsleeper database to Immigration Enforcement.

The agreement to share this data was made between the GLA and the Home Office in May 2015. According to minutes from that month’s meeting of the “Mayor’s Rough Sleeping Group”, where the agreement was discussed, the data is said to be “aggregate and anonymous”, but enough to identify “locations of non-UK rough sleepers”.

And CHAIN is not the only data sharing route: outreach teams routinely hand on “intelligence” at the local level, too. The FOI requests also asked councils about their overall policies on collaboration with the Home Office. A number of replies shed light on this.

Hammersmith and Fulham council disclosed a “local protocol” produced by St Mungo’s for its outreach teams. According to this document, which appears to be from 2015, St Mungo’s outreach workers should assess the nationality of all rough sleepers they encounter and, if they are European citizens, also assess whether they are “exercising their treaty rights”: for example, seeking employment or education. The St Mungo’s document states in bold type the procedure to be followed if a rough sleeper is judged to “not exercise their treaty rights” over a period of time:

“These individuals’ details will be passed on to the ICE by the outreach team. Following this a joint shift will be agreed with outreach, ICE, Parks Police to target/tackle these individuals.”

As we will see below in Section 5, the approach is likely to have got tougher since this document was produced, and European rough sleepers can now be marked for detention immediately.5

The GLA disclosed a guidance document from Thames Reach, issued to its London Street Rescue teams. According to this guidance, outreach teams should assess all rough sleepers, whatever their nationality, and decide on a “Single Service Offer” (SSO), or way of proceeding with that individual, which is recorded on CHAIN.

For a UK national, for example, this could mean “support to access benefits or work and accommodation.” But in 2014 the Government restricted EEA nationals’ access to Job Seeker’s Allowance and then Housing Benefit, meaning that this traditional route off the streets – a hostel place, and benefits to support them into work and stable housing – is no longer open to most European rough sleepers. Instead, as the Thames Reach document shows, the standard offer for non-UK nationals is now “supported reconnection” to “their country of origin”. (See Section 4 below).

If people refuse offers of “supported reconnection”, they will instead be “brought to the attention of HOICE” (Home Office Immigration Compliance and Enforcement). “These clients will be the subject of [a] local authority task and targeting meeting or will be encountered by HOICE staff during joint outreach shifts.”

The Thames Reach guidance is at pains to state that such “enforcement” is a last resort, and ICE will only be involved after people have consistently refused “offers of support”. We also get a similar message from St Mungo’s, via a FOI reply from Islington Council. According to Islington’s reply:

“St Mungo’s would assess any rough sleeper met in the borough. If there was a query over their immigration status they would refer to our in-house legal team for advice. If that offer was not taken up and they did not engage with our service St Mungo’s would then refer to ICE/Home Office. Any EEA national not exercising their treaty rights would be offered a supported reconnection and referred to Specialist team in-house. If the reconnection was refused and there was no engagement with the St Mungo’s service they would be referred to ICE/Home Office.”

As we will see below, since May 2016 Home Office policy is that any EEA national found sleeping rough is “abusing their treaty rights”. The standard “offer” then made to European rough sleepers, particularly since benefits options were removed in 2014, is: leave the country. Thames Reach and St Mungo’s say they aim to persuade people to take up this offer “voluntarily”. If rough sleepers don’t comply, the charities then pass on their details for “enforcement”: i.e., detention and deportation. In either case, the basic outcome is the same, they are out of the UK.

One final point: whatever the charities intend, ICE are not bound to wait until people have refused “voluntary reconnection”. The information they get from joint visits and CHAIN may help them find non-UK rough sleepers even before they are classed as non-complying. Former rough sleepers we interviewed told us they were detained before any “reconnection” process began.

Eyewitness Account: detained in Central London

“I had somewhere to stay, but I had an argument with my partner and that’s why I was sleeping rough in [Central London]. They arrested me and put me here. I have agreed to voluntary return to [Eastern Europe] because I want to get out of detention, if you don’t agree you can stay here for months.”

4. Just what is “reconnection”?

Reading through the councils’ and charities’ official documents, you certainly won’t find any mention of “deportation”, and most likely not “detention” either. The word “removal”, when it is used, generally comes prefixed by “voluntary”. But preferred over all of these is a glorious euphemism: “reconnection”.

We have already seen from the FOI figures that forced detention is actually a much more common outcome of “joint visits” than “voluntary removal”. But we should also mention another two questions. Just how “voluntary” are voluntary reconnections/removals? And just what happens to people who have been “reconnected”?

“Voluntary return” is a Home Office term, meaning that people leave the country unrestrained, without a security escort. Voluntary returns are much preferred by the Home Office for cost reasons. Enforced removals typically involve three security escorts, provided by the contractor Tascor, who must each be paid for their shifts and their plane tickets.

Although actual physical force is not used, “voluntary returns” are also generally coercive: i.e., they are carried out under the threat of violence. “Returnees” are told that they will be removed forcibly if they do not agree to the procedure. Lotte Lewis Smith, in a recently published investigation on “voluntary return” of asylum seekers, documents a typical case:

“‘Hannah’ said the Home Office tried to coerce her and her young child into accepting voluntary return to East Africa by threatening to cut her asylum support when her initial asylum application was refused. Whilst at her local Home Office reporting centre, Hannah said she was approached by an employee who asked if she would consider returning home ‘voluntarily’ and even offered to help pack her bags and order her a taxi to the airport. According to Hannah, she proceeded to threaten her and her son with deportation if she didn’t accept this ‘help’.”

The same approach is used with rough sleepers, encouraged from the top. An internal report of the Mayor’s Rough Sleeping Group, made up of GLA and council officials alongside senior managers from St Mungo’s and Thames Reach (discussed further in Section 6 below), recommends:

“when support is offered, it can be helpful to make clear that, if it is refused, enforcement will be used – for example, when offering reconnection to EU nationals not exercising treaty rights.”

Another point is that detention and “voluntary reconnection” often go together. Many people sign up for “voluntary reconnection” whilst already locked up. The eyewitness account quoted above shows the clear incentive to do this: people may be held indefinitely in the misery of detention centres before escorted removal, and can get out much earlier by agreeing to leave “voluntarily”. Again, Lewis Smith gives an example:

“The UK is the only EU country with no time limit on immigration detention. Since being refused asylum, 19-year-old ‘Aamir’ from Afghanistan has been held at Harmondsworth Immigration Removal Centre, near Heathrow Airport, for eight months. He has no idea when he’ll be released or deported. Without adequate access to legal or psychological support in detention, and no release date, Aamir is considering ‘voluntarily’ returning to Afghanistan […] ‘I can’t sleep or eat. There is no one to talk to. I feel like I’m going crazy,’ he told IRIN. ‘I don’t want to go back to Afghanistan – my whole family is dead there – but I am scared I’ll kill myself if I don’t leave this place soon.’”

The EEA nationals being “reconnected” may not, typically, face such a hostile fate as an Afghan deportee. But what does await them?

In 2009, Thames Reach was awarded the GLA’s contract for running the “London Reconnection Team” (LRT), which arranged “voluntary reconnections” for rough sleepers in London referred by outreach teams or other services. For example, the LRT would generally pay their travel expenses. By February 2016, Thames Reach boasted that it had achieved “over 3,000 reconnections”. However, neither Thames Reach nor the GLA have made any evaluation of what happened to the people “reconnected”.

In April 2016, St Mungo’s took over the London Reconnections Team contract, now renamed “Routes Home”. The terms of this contract make clear that St Mungos must “work in close partnership with the Home Office and the Police”. “Details of all reconnections are expected to be shared with the Home Office”, and St Mungo’s must “ensure that details of clients refusing reconnection are recorded and passed to relevant referral agencies and the Home Office.”

Under the previous contract, Thames Reach had a relationship with a Polish charity called Barka which provided accommodation for Polish returnees. Insiders say this service had some issues, as Barka was a strongly Christian organisation that insisted on teetotalism in its hostels. In any event, this arrangement was ended with the handover to St Mungo’s in 2016.

The contract does demand that St Mungo’s monitors what happens to people after reconnection in one respect: it has a target for numbers of people not returning “to a rough sleeping lifestyle in London” within six months of removal. But there is no need to track what happens to “reconnected individuals” who stay away. There is no record of how many end up back on the streets in Bucharest (Romania) or Warsaw (Poland), where conditions are extremely tough. What matters, it seems, is just that they are not on the streets of London.

One Romanian NGO study, dating from 2009, put the total number of rough sleeper deaths on the streets of Bucharest at around 300 a year. In January and February 2012, during a six week deep-freeze, Eastern Europe saw staggering numbers of deaths of homeless people: more than 200 in Russia, 74 in Romania, 135 in the Ukraine and 82 in Poland. This last winter, between 1st November 2016 and 7th January 2017, 53 people died of hypothermia in Poland.

5. Sleeping rough is abuse: the May 2016 policy

In May 2016, coincidentally or otherwise a month before the Brexit vote, the Home Office made life even tougher for European rough sleepers.

For the moment, people from “European Economic Area” (EEA) countries, still normally have the right to live in the UK. But there are certain limitations on this right. The general rule is that an EEA national can stay for three months without condition, and after that if they are “exercising Treaty rights”. This means: being employed or self-employed, seeking work, studying, or being “self-sufficient”.

However, in May 2016, the Home Office issued new guidance which created an exception for rough sleepers. Sleeping rough, even just for one night, was now defined as an “abuse of Treaty rights”. This means that rough sleepers can be arrested and deported (or, to use the official jargon, “administratively removed”) immediately, even if they are otherwise “exercising Treaty rights” (e.g., working), or have been in the country less than three months. Although ICE officers are supposed to consider someone’s personal circumstances and whether deportation is “proportionate”.

The guidance was slightly amended on 1 February 2017. The issue is reworded as a “misuse of the right to reside”.6 More importantly, the Home Office has back-pedalled a touch on its hardline approach, as the new guidance further expands on the idea of “proportionality”. For example, ICE officers are meant to consider whether someone is “persistently sleeping rough” or, on the other hand, may be “taking steps to find accommodation and exercise Treaty rights”. It would not be proportionate to remove someone if “while there has been a misuse of rights, it appears unlikely it will continue.”

If an Immigration Officer considers that removing a rough sleeper is “proportional”, they can immediately issue removal papers. These consist of a “liability to removal” notice; and, usually simultaneously, a “decision to remove” letter. “Removal directions”, which may contain flight information, are usually served later in detention, with 72 hours notice. For EEA nationals, the “decision to remove” letter should give 30 days notice before deportation, and within that time they have 14 days to appeal. Someone can be arrested and detained as soon as the “decision to remove” notice is served; but if an appeal is lodged, a deportation should be put on hold while it is heard.

In practice, as two of the eyewitness accounts in this report mention, appeal rights are often disregarded or abused by ICE.

Alternatively, if an Immigration Officer wishes to investigate further, they can issue a letter notifying someone that they must come to a “minded to remove” interview.

Just how do ICE officers assess whether removing a rough sleeper is “proportional”? ICE teams are unlikely to have the skills or resources to assess homelessness issues and whether individuals are “taking steps to find accommodation and exercise Treaty rights”. In our view, if any proportionality assessment is made at all, it is likely to be led by the outreach and “reconnections” workers they are liaising with.

But, if so, the new February guidance means that St Mungo’s, Thames Reach and other charity workers will start to play an even more central role in immigration enforcement. It will no longer be a question of just providing intelligence. Decisions about whether or not an individual is detained or deported will increasingly rest in the charities’ hands.

Interview summary: another raid in Haringey

The interviewee was woken up at 12am at his sleeping site in Haringey along with 7 other people. The raid consisted of 12 people including ICE, Police and Thames Reach outreach workers. The interviewee reported that ICE initially came for someone else but came back to serve a 30-day notice of removal and confiscated people’s ID documents. He asked for the papers to make an appeal, which was refused by the Immigration Officers. The interviewee says he doesn’t understand why Thames Reach cooperates with enforcement agencies. The interviewee had been in the UK for 11 years, working intermittently, and has no criminal convictions.

6. “Intense lobbying”: Operation Adoze and the Mayor’s Rough Sleeping Group

The “abuse” policy fits in the context of a range of new tough measures – Theresa May’s “hostile environment” approach – which extend immigration control to new areas of everyday life and seek to turn thousands of workers in housing, schools or hospitals into ICE informants and collaborators.

In October 2013, then Home Secretary Theresa May announced the parliamentary bill that became the Immigration Act 2014. In her own words, the aim of the act was: “to create a really hostile environment for illegal migrants”. In the more formal language of the act itself, the main aim is to “limit … access to services, facilities and employment by reference to immigration status”. The Immigration Act 2016 made these measures harsher still, and added some new ones.

They include introducing questions on nationality and immigration status into the “schools census”, in which teachers are meant to collect immigration data from children as young as five. In healthcare, new hospital charges plus massive information sharing through the “NHS Digital” patient database. And the “right to rent” rules, where landlords and agents are required to check tenants’ passports and refuse housing to “illegal” migrants.

In all these areas, the push is clearly coming from the Home Office. Hospital or school managers may not be putting up much resistance so far, but they don’t seem to be actively calling for these measures. The same can’t be said for the homelessness sector. In London, the GLA and Westminster Council have been particularly willing and active protagonists. And they have been backed by their charity partners such as St Mungo’s and Thames Reach.

In London, escalating collaboration with ICE was encouraged and developed throughout 2015 by a GLA body called the “Mayor’s Rough Sleeping Group” (MRSG). This was chaired in the Boris Johnson era by deputy mayor for housing Richard Blakeway – who now works for housing developer Wilmott Dixon. This group brought together senior officials from the GLA and central London boroughs, the Metropolitan Police and Home Office, plus top managers from St Mungo’s and Thames Reach, as well as other charities including Homeless Link and (on occasion) Crisis.

Minutes show that collaboration around “non-UK rough sleepers” was discussed regularly through 2015 and 2016. For example, the May 2015 meeting discussed the agreement to pass on CHAIN data (see Section 3 above), and established a working group on how to improve joint operations.

This working group drew up a policy paper which made various conclusions, all in favour of greater cooperation with ICE as part of “the use of enforcement in tackling rough sleeping”. To quote a couple of representative passages, it advised that:

“The Police and ICE are not the only agents of enforcement and it is important that different agencies support enforcement work along a spectrum of activity. Outreach workers, as well as Safer Neighbourhood Teams and Community Safety Officers, have an important part to play.”

“There was consensus among participants that partnership working, above and beyond the commitment of resources, is essential to effective use of enforcement. Information-sharing was identified as being of particular importance.”

The paper was presented to the next MRSG meeting in August 2015. It was immediately followed on the agenda by an item headed “joint working between rough sleeping services and ICE”. This discussion was led by Petra Salva, whose title according to her twitter account is Director of “Rough Sleeper, Migrant & Criminal Justice services” at St Mungo’s. Salva discussed a further “guidance” document that St Mungo’s was drawing up on the topic together with another charity, Providence Row.

But the guidance document was not ready by the next meeting, held in December 2015. The group wanted to wait for the outcome of a pilot scheme called Operation Adoze.

Operation Adoze was in fact the trial of what would become the new “abuse of treaty rights” policy. It was carried out initially just in Westminster, in November and December 2015, involving Home Office Immigration Enforcement, Westminster Council, and St Mungo’s Westminster outreach teams. For the first time, the outreach teams and ICE could immediately target someone sleeping rough for deportation, rather than having to assess whether they were “not exercising their treaty rights” over a sustained period. As mentioned above, 127 people were deported in this operation.

In January 2016, the pilot was extended to a handful of other central boroughs. Then, in March 2016, the government declared it a success, announcing it as national policy in the Budget speech. This announcement was warmly welcomed in a press release from St Mungo’s which celebrated “the success of the Operation Adoze pilot”, applauding the “new approach in which immigration officials work with Local Authorities and outreach workers to connect rough sleepers to services that can return them home”.

After the policy was formally implemented in May 2016, Westminster council also crowed about it, and indeed claimed responsibility, in its audit committee report from 30 June 2016. This states: “after intense lobbying, Operation Adoze (Home Office policy change that was piloted in Westminster) has been announced as a national policy approach.”

Interview summary: sleeping in a car

A man from [a Western European country] had been sleeping in his car on a residential street in South London. It seems residents made a complaint to the council, who then arranged for an ICE visit within two weeks. The man was given a “notice of removal” and told to report to Lunar House, Croydon. He made an appeal, which should have meant that the removal was put on hold. However,when he reported to Lunar House he was arrested and spent nearly 2 months in detention before being removed. His appeal was never heard.

7. Paid by numbers: the rough sleeper deportation Social Impact Bond

Operation Adoze was not the first pilot scheme for rough sleeper deportations. Central boroughs have been carrying out joint patrols with ICE, in one form or another, for several years. The first pilot scheme we are aware of was Operation Ark, in 2010-11. This also took place in Westminster, and also involved St Mungo’s and Thames Reach.

We will just give one further example here, which again involves these two charities. In 2012, St Mungo’s and Thames Reach were commissioned by the GLA to implement an “innovative” pilot project addressed at “entrenched rough sleeping”. The key feature of this project was that it was funded through a new form of private finance initiative called a “Social Impact Bond” (SIB). This is a financial technique largely pioneered in the US by investment bank Goldman Sachs, and promoted in the UK by a consultancy called “Social Finance Ltd” which is sponsored by hedge fund boss and Conservative party donor Andrew Law (see here).

The basic idea is that the scheme is at least partly funded by private investors, and carried out by private contractors; and both get “paid by results” depending on how well specific “social impact” targets are met. In the Rough Sleeper SIB, there were five targets, including the obvious ones of reducing numbers of people still sleeping rough and getting them into secure accommodation. But the second highest paid target, up to 25% of payment, was the number of “reconnections abroad”. In short: St Mungo’s and Thames Reach were paid by the number of people they got out of the country.

It turns out that they didn’t do so well. Their target after two years was a total of 142 “reconnections”: 57 for St Mungo’s, and 85 for Thames Reach. Yet by that point they had only managed to remove 77 people (34 and 43 respectively). Possibly outreach workers working on the project were not as keen to chase deportation targets as their managers.

The majority of these removals appeared to involve the charities persuading people into “voluntary reconnection”. However, a 2015 GLA document on the scheme suggests that the success rate was due to improve in year three thanks to an increasing use of force: “with ten SIB clients having recently been referred to the Home Office for administrative removal, the number of reconnections in this year may well exceed the providers’ in-year target.”

On another hopeful note, in the Government’s evaluation report, both St Mungo’s and Thames Reach said they expected “performance against this outcome to improve due to recent changes in the benefits regime.” The restrictions of Jobseeker’s Allowance and Housing Benefit entitlements for EEA individuals then coming int force should “provide a compelling reason for non-UK nationals who cannot claim asylum to return to their home country.”

The same report, though, noted some challenges faced by outreach workers trying to persuade their clients to “go home”. It noted that “having staff who can speak home languages was identified as an element to building relationships”. But even then there was “some mistrust and anxiety reported amongst non-UK members of the cohort who hope to find work rather than return to their home country.” One St Mungo’s “Navigator” was quoted saying:

“Now I’ve got a lot of reconnections and our clients gossip. They ask me ‘but you are going to get paid for that, you want me to go back, if you get rid of me you are going to get a payment’…. To me that feels like a problem… It’s putting the relationship on edge. They trust me and I don’t want to lose that.”

The private finance aspect of the deportation SIB was developed by the “ethical bank” Triodos Bank. According to their website: “As lead advisers on the deal, Triodos Corporate Finance successfully secured £650,000 of working capital funding from a small group of socially driven institutional and private investors.”

While the Social Impact Bond itself has now ended, elements of its approach have been “mainstreamed” into other rough sleeper services. For example, the GLA London Reconnections Team / Routes Home contract won by St Mungo’s in April 2016 (see Section 4 above) again involves “payment by results”. 10% of the contract fee is awarded if St Mungo’s get 95% of a target number of people out of the country, and if they don’t come back within 6 months.

8. Conclusion: how does collaboration happen?

Targeting and deporting foreign rough sleepers is systematic and routine. It involves the collaboration of many different organisations, and many different individuals.

At the top, the orders come from the Home Office – but also from local authorities. In particular, we have seen how the Mayor and GLA have been instrumental in coordinating “enforcement”, and how Westminster Council “lobbied intensely” for tough new rules. Other councils, too, have enacted and promoted the same policies.

Then there are the charity managers. Bosses at St Mungo’s, Thames Reach, CGL, Homeless Link, and others, are dependent on government, GLA and council funding for their salaries and promotions. But they are not just reluctant parts of this system. Senior managers of all the charities just named were members of forums such as the “Mayor’s Rough Sleeper Group” that helped coordinate it. Some have enthusiastically supported collaboration with ICE. Others, such as Crisis, may not be such active participants: but they have not publicly opposed this collaboration.

Managers set the policies but, of course, they only work if outreach workers actually follow them on the street.

Street outreach workers, we believe, are generally people with empathy and compassion. They didn’t go into their jobs to be cops or border guards, but to support people in need. So how does it happen that they end up as part of a system targeting the most vulnerable for indefinite detention and deportation?

In many authoritarian systems, change is introduced incrementally, through a slow or “creeping” process, so that those involved may not notice how it happens. This is how some homelessness workers describe the shift in the sector since 2010, as new targets and ways of working with Immigration Enforcement have been introduced one by one.

In many systems based on collaboration, it is crucial that people are insulated from the consequences of their actions. They do not see what happens next. In the rough sleeper deportation system, this is true in a number of ways. For example:

• Outreach workers input rough sleeper locations into the CHAIN database: but they may not realise that this information is passed on to ICE arrest teams.

• Outreach workers accompany ICE on joint visits: but they may usually just see ICE officers handing out notices, while actual arrests may be carried out later, out of their sight.

• Outreach workers help arrange “reconnections”: but they may not know what actually happens to people after they’ve left.

• Outreach workers refer rough sleepers who do not accept “voluntary reconnections” onto ICE: but may not know what happens next, e.g., whether individuals are detained. Nor may they have any conception of what the nightmare of indefinite detention and deportation really means.

In all these ways, and more, workers are insulated from the consequences of their collaboration. In addition, they may be led to genuinely believe that their actions are the best ones possible.

For example, one homelessness worker told us how teams began to accept the new focus on “reconnection” outside the UK because it came just as other options were disappearing. The new rules on benefits introduced in 2014 meant that many European citizens lost access to Jobseeker’s Allowance and Housing Benefit, so could no longer use this help to get “back on their feet” in the UK. At the same time, cuts to emergency accommodation were making it harder to find shelter places.

In that situation, it is understandable that outreach workers may think that they are doing the best they can for someone by pushing them to accept “voluntary reconnection”. And if the person doesn’t accept the “offer”? Yes, outreach workers pass on the information that will lead ICE arrest teams to foreign rough sleepers. But what happens with that information, they may feel, is not their responsibility. They can tell themselves that they are just cogs in a bigger system, just “doing my job”.

Finally, it is not only outreach workers who play essential roles in this system. In a sense, we are all implicated. St Mungo’s and other charities need funding from the GLA, but they also need our donations. And when ICE teams round up rough-sleepers right in the centre of London, they can only operate because thousands of citizens around them stand silent or walk on by.

How can we fight it?

Where a system is based on collaboration, it can be broken by resistance and solidarity. Resistance means refusal: refusing to work with ICE or hand over information, refusing to turn a blind eye. Solidarity is crucial because individuals who stand alone in refusing may often be picked off one by one. So let’s talk to colleagues in our workplaces, or friends and neighbours, and find ways to support each other in refusing.

There are already some small signs of resistance to rough sleeper deportations. We have heard of some homeless support agencies and projects that have stopped referring people to outreach teams that collaborate with ICE. We have also heard of some local outreach teams that have resisted collaboration, if only by “going slow” on passing over information.

We can’t put names to these examples. So far, such resistance by homelessness workers takes place “off the radar”. It could be a big step forward if projects start to openly distance themselves from the round-up policy.

Here are just a few thoughts on how resistance could grow. Homelessness workers and organisations could:

• Refuse – or just “forget” – to hand over information to the Home Office on non-UK rough sleepers, including through the CHAIN database.

• Stop cooperating with St Mungo’s, Thames Reach and other collaborating charities until these stop working with the Home Office.

• Make public statements condemning the targeting of foreign rough sleepers and refusing to collaborate.

• Pass on information about raids to the antiraids network. (Email: antiraids@riseup.net twitter: @antiraids).

Individuals could:

• Stop donating or volunteering with organisations that collaborate.

• Communicate with your local council about their role in collaboration.

• Join the new campaign to support targeted rough sleepers coordinated by North East London Migrant Action (NELMA) , and supported by Housing Action Southwark and Lambeth (HASL), Haringey Housing Action Group (HHAG) and others. So far this has included producing legal rights “bust cards” for homeless people in Romanian, Polish, and more languages. Or start something similar in another area.

• Pass on information about raids to the antiraids network. And don’t just stand by if you see a raid in progress! Here are a few ideas of things you can do.
  

 Appendix: response from Thames Reach

We contacted St Mungo’s and Thames Reach for comment before publishing this report. We set out the main factual points and also asked the following questions:

• What steps, if any, do you take to keep in touch with and provide support for people who have been “reconnected” out of the country?
• Do you have any general statements to make about why you cooperate with ICE in these ways. Do you do this for financial reasons? Do you do so reluctantly, under pressure from commissioners, or do you believe that it is the right thing to do?
• How would you answer those who say that providing information which helps ICE arrest, detain and deport non-UK rough sleepers is incompatible with your mission of supporting vulnerable people?
• What would you say to former “clients” who have experienced the misery of the indefinite detention system and forced removal as a result of your cooperation with the Home Office, and cannot understand why outreach workers are involved in this?

St Mungo’s did not answer, but Thames Reach sent us the following reply:

“Thames Reach has worked with vulnerable rough sleepers for over 30 years and our staff witness on a daily basis the dangers of sleeping rough, the detrimental effect it has on people’s health and the potential for destitute people to die on the streets.

In order to work effectively we have developed a wide range of partnerships that enable us to help rough sleepers move away from the streets including partnerships with accommodation providers, migrant charities and the Home Office.

Thames Reach can provide support to help non-UK nationals find legal work so they can successfully make a new life in this country. We also help people access legal support in situations where people have complex immigration issues to resolve.
However, Thames Reach also knows from years of experience that for most destitute non-UK rough sleepers, their best option is to come off the streets and be helped to return home voluntarily.

The cost of their travel is covered, and they are put back in touch with family and friends and connected with accommodation providers and support agencies, including drug and alcohol treatment services and mental health specialists. We stay in touch with individuals to ensure that they are successfully getting their lives back on track.

Rough sleepers from the EEA who are in breach of government residency guidelines because they have not found employment face administrative removal by the Home Office.

If people do not take up a voluntary reconnection and are subject to administrative removal, we will work alongside the Home Office to help put support mechanisms in place for them to ensure that their return home is undertaken safely and with dignity.”

End Notes

The post The Round-Up: rough sleeper immigration raids and charity collaboration appeared first on Corporate Watch.

The government announced yesterday that it will not support Underground Coal Gasification (UCG), effectively stopping the technology being adopted in the UK. The end of UCG in the UK will be celebrated by environmentalists who have been campaigning against the technology for a number of years.

UCG is a way of producing fuel from underground layers of coal by igniting them, controlling the flow of air to the fire, and extracting the resulting gas to use as a fuel. UCG, an ‘unconventional fossil fuel’, represents a new way of extracting energy from fossil fuels. As with other unconventional fossil fuels, such as tar sands and fracking for shale gas, UCG consumes large volumes of water and produces large volumes of contaminated water. Other problems include the risk of explosions and accidents, subsidence, increased air pollution at UCG sites, uncontrolled coal seam fires and industrialisation of the countryside.

The various UCG projects that have been carried out around the world have been plagued with accidents, including examples of catastrophic groundwater contamination. In the 1970s a project at Hoe Creek, Wyoming, in the US resulted in massive groundwater contamination. Potable groundwater was polluted with benzene, requiring an expensive long-term clean up operation. In 2011, Brisbane based company Cougar Energy was ordered to shut down its trial UCG project at Kingaroy due to environmental concerns over benzene contamination. Cases of contamination shouldn’t come as a surprise given that UCG creates a number of toxic contaminants, including carcinogens like benzene and toluene. Altogether, 135 compounds that might pollute the local groundwater sources near UCG sites have been identified.

Then there is the effect on the climate. While the energy produced from UCG would be particularly carbon intensive the perhaps more significant concern is that it would open access to vast coal resources which are not economically viable using conventional mining. Conservative estimates suggest an extra 600 billion tonnes of coal could be accessed.

The announcement follows a government-commissioned report by consultants Atkins. They concluded that if power stations used gas from UCG, it would be 40-100% dirtier in terms of CO₂ emissions than burning gas from the North Sea or imports. As a result the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy said the government was “minded to not support” the technique.

Proponents of UCG previously responded to concerns over greenhouse gas emissions by saying that it would be combined with Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) technologies. However it’s questionable whether UCG sites could possibly be suitable for CCS, and with test projects and funding around the world collapsing, it looks as if CCS itself may never be a viable technology.

While the announcement is fantastic news (unless you are Algy Cluff!), the threat from UCG in other countries remains significant. Recent pilot projects have been carried out in Australia, China, New Zealand, South Africa, New Zealand, Canada and the US and a host of other countries, including Hungary, Pakistan, Poland, Bulgaria, Chile, China, Indonesia, India, and Botswana are developing projects.

China and India seem to be the most likely countries to develop the technology. China has conducted 17 UCG trials since 1991 and in 2011 a $1.5 billion joint venture between UK based Seamwell International Ltd and the state-owned China Energy Conservation and Environmental Protection Group (good name!) was agreed for commercial development of UCG in the interior of Mongolia. India also has vast coal resources, but much of its untapped 88.6 billion tonnes is found at a depth of 300 to 1200 metres and is economically unviable with conventional techniques, making UCG particularly attractive. The company Coal India Limited is trying to push UCG technology to harness coal in Kaitha (Jharkhand) and Thesgora (Madhya Pradesh).

Overwhelming scientific evidence indicates that in order to prevent the most serious effects of climate change we must move away from all forms of fossil fuel as rapidly as possible. Technologies such as UCG and CCS represent attempts to continue with business as usual, keeping fossil fuels alive and preventing the radical changes to our societies that are needed if we are to address the global ecological crises we are facing. It may seem like a small victory, but seen as part of a bigger picture, stopping UCG in the UK can be a step towards ending capitalist energy systems, that prioritise profit and unlimited consumption, and creating a world where people live in harmony with the natural world.

For more information on UCG, CCS and unconventional fossil fuels, see the articles, factsheets and reports produced by Corporate Watch:

–Previous, more detailed article on UCG

–UCG factsheet

–CCS factsheet

–Report on unconventional fossil fuels

The post Underground Coal Gasification scrapped in the UK appeared first on Corporate Watch.

Almuth Ernsting from Biofuelwatch explores why sci-fi climate change solutions are dangerous even though they will never be realised and why it’s important that they are specifically challenged.

I wrote this article en route to a public meeting about a very peculiar planning proposal for Milford Haven, Pembrokeshire, the UK’s largest energy port. I have been involved in many campaigns against biomass or biofuel projects falsely presented as ‘climate change’ solutions, but which would in fact cause significant harm to forests and other ecosystems and to communities, whilst often causing as many if not more CO₂ emissions than the fossil fuels they are said to replace. The planning proposal in Milford Haven, however, is different because there seems to be virtually no prospect of it being technically feasible. Failed attempts to operate a technology that doesn’t work can still cause significant local air pollution and noise, but such a scheme is fundamentally different from a conventional biofuel refinery or biomass power station.

At the public meeting, a Welsh-Cypriot company, Egnedol, tried to convince people that they can successfully operate a whole set of ‘low-carbon technologies’, which nobody has ever made to work in the UK, or even worldwide. The technologies include: a state-of-the-art gasification plant which turns waste and biomass into a gas that burns as cleanly as natural gas and that generates both electricity and heat; an indoor micro-algae farm which will produce not just food for an adjacent fish and prawn farm but also biofuels; and a biofuel refinery which will turn some of the purified gas from waste and wood burning into drop-in transport fuels (biofuels with identical properties to conventional diesel or petrol). In addition, they promise that their power plant will provide enough spare heat for a host of food production enterprises, including a perfectly closed-loop fish and prawn farm that will generate no effluent whatsoever.

In a previous article, I illustrated how the UK’s ‘pro-development’ planning and permitting systems discourages any scrutiny of improbable technology claims made by companies such as Egnedol. Laissez-faire developer-friendly policies are supposed to encourage cutting-edge innovation but all too often end up facilitating doomed start-up ventures which can waste millions of pounds worth of investors’ money. Any fraud is unlikely to be uncovered. The Serious Fraud Office’s budget has been so severely cut that, during 2014/15, only sixteen out of 2,832 reports of suspected fraud or corruption resulted in investigations.

Egnedol’s improbable plans bring together three separate technologies which are being widely promoted as climate change solutions. Between them, these technologies – biomass/waste[1] gasification, algal biofuels, and drop-in biofuels from wood or waste – have attracted billions of dollars in subsidies worldwide. Two of them – algal biofuels and ‘cellulosic’ biofuels made from wood, agricultural residues, whole crops, or biomass contained in waste – have been stuck in the Research and Development stages for many decades, with no breakthrough in sight. A small number of waste and biomass gasification plants have been operated successfully in other countries, but they have been expensive to build and operate, and have generally required at last a year of modifications and repairs. Even then, they provide at best minor efficiency and air emissions advantages when compared to standard combustion plants and waste incinerators. In the UK, all attempts to build and run such gasifiers have ended in failure.

Each of the three technologies represents false solutions to climate change for the same simple reason: climate science shows that greenhouse emissions must be cut as quickly and as steeply as possible if we want to have any hope of avoiding the worst impacts of climate change. Technologies which are nowhere near commercial deployment, or which are far too expensive and difficult to implement at scale, even with public subsidies, cannot contribute to this aim.

I call these non-existent ‘climate change solutions’ sci-fi solutions. Sci-fi solutions are very different from existing technologies which have been widely criticised as ‘false solutions’, such as biofuels made from sugar, cereals or plant oils, nuclear power, or fracking (which even the International Panel on Climate Change classes as low-carbon). Biofuels, together with biomass electricity, have by far the highest land footprint of all energy sources.[2] The International Energy Agency reported in 2011 that 30 million hectares of land worldwide were used to grow biofuel feedstock, but that those supplied only around 2% of the world’s transport fuels. This land-hunger has turned biofuels into a major driver of deforestation, biodiversity loss and land-grabbing, as well as food price volatility and loss of food sovereignty in many parts of the world. It also makes them responsible for greenhouse gas emissions which are commonly higher than those from the petrol or diesel they replace. But despite their disastrous social, environmental and climate impacts, first-generation biofuels are the product of perfectly viable and commercially attractive technologies. Cutting down rainforests for palm oil for biofuels might be madness, but cars can drive just fine with palm oil biodiesel blends.

Generating electricity from nuclear fission is an equally proven technology, albeit a highly expensive and dangerous one, with no proven safe methods for storing nuclear waste, and one dependent on toxic mining of uranium. Fracking in the US has been so successful that it has significantly reduced energy costs and the US government expects the country to become a net exporter of gas in 2017, for the first time in sixty years. It also spews so much methane into the atmosphere that some scientists estimate that the increase in US methane emissions from gas drilling since 2002 is responsible for up to 60% of the widely reported rise in methane levels in the global atmosphere, making a unit of energy derived from fracking even worse for the climate than one derived from coal.[3]

Why do governments and corporations support sci-fi technologies?

It is easy to see why corporations love these profitable false climate change solutions – even if (as in the case of nuclear power) they are only profitable with very substantial public subsidies. It is also easy to see why governments like such technologies which allow them to reduce carbon emissions on paper, and which boost energy production without requiring any change in the prevailing economic and social model, nor much change in infrastructure.

Support for sci-fi technologies, especially amongst governments, appears more baffling at first sight. Why would anyone choose to sink millions or even billions into energy technologies which are unlikely to ever generate much, if any, energy? And why should this worry us, given that fossil fuels are being subsidised to the tune of $2 trillion a year worldwide?

To understand both the reasons why sci-fi solutions are being funded and the dangers they can pose, we need to first look in more detail at some of the technologies and players involved. The three examples I have chosen are coal power stations with carbon capture and storage (CCS), Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS), and cellulosic biofuels.

Coal power stations with CCS[4]:

The promise of ‘clean coal’ – i.e. coal burning without carbon and toxic air emissions – offers a lifeline to the coal industry. Coal power stations have been approved as ‘CCS ready’,[5] even if the prospects of their carbon emissions ever being captured are approximately zero. The US government has made $6 billion available to the development of CCS. The concept of low-carbon fossil fuels with CCS has been endorsed by the IPCC, the International Energy Agency and by governments.[6] Time and time again, CCS is held up as the reason why the world doesn’t need to turn away from fossil fuels.[7] Hype about CCS thus plays an important role in legitimising ongoing coal burning. Yet energy corporations and governments have been quietly abandoning coal with CCS as a viable prospect worthy of funding.

To date, only a single such project has been implemented at commercial scale: in 2014, the Canadian company SaskPower inaugurated a carbon capture facility for one unit of their Boundary Dam power station in Saskatchewan, which had originally been built in 1969. Industry media hailed the announcement as a breakthrough for CCS worldwide. One year later, the opposition New Democratic Party obtained a Freedom of Information request which revealed a very different picture: far from capturing 90% of the unit’s CO₂ emissions as promised, SaskPower struggled to capture 55% throughout the year, and the carbon capture unit had been shut down for weeks at a time. A report commissioned by Community Wind Saskatchewan had already shown that the project would not have broken even during its lifetime if it had worked as intended. This analysis took account of the fact that SaskPower are selling the captured CO₂ to an oil company, Cenovus, which uses it to pump additional oil which could not otherwise be recovered. Failure to capture as much CO₂ as anticipated has turned the project into a serious liability for SaskPower: not only have they earned less money from CO₂ sales but they have ended up paying millions of dollars in fines to Cenovus.

Perhaps most damaging to any future CCS ambitions have been the revelations about the energy costs of carbon capture. SaskPower has had to admit using 30-31% of the plant’s energy just to capture and compress CO₂. This means that the equivalent of one new coal power station would be needed to power carbon capture units for two others. It is just as well that the Boundary Dam power station has been such a failure: the carbon footprint emitted during ‘Enhanced Oil Recovery’ (i.e. getting more oil out of the ground), plus the CO₂ that cannot be captured, plus the CO₂ from burning the additional recovered oil add up to significantly greater carbon emissions than those from an unabated coal power station unit.

Other coal CCS projects have been abandoned before they ever got commissioned: in the US, FutureGen was to have been the Bush Administration’s flagship CCS project, involving a highly complex Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle (IGCC) coal power station with carbon capture. It was scrapped after major cost overruns, at a $175.5 million loss to US taxpayers. President Obama revived the scheme as FutureGen 2.0, with a supposedly simpler technology: oxyfuel combustion with carbon capture. This time, the federal government spent $202.5 million before plans were abandoned after not a single private sector investor had come forward. Vattenfall and RWE, who previously invested in CCS Research and Development, have pulled the plug on CCS projects, citing prohibitive costs. The Norwegian government has given up on its flagship commercial CCS project in Mongstad, the EU is yet to co-fund a single CCS scheme (or rather, to find a single such project which they could possibly co-fund), and even the government of Alberta, hitherto one of the greatest enthusiasts for the technology, has announced that they would fund no more CCS because of the exorbitant costs involved. The UK government joined the global trend last year when they withdrew a $1 billion fund for CCS, though not before spending $44 million on feasibility studies for two now abandoned fossil fuel CCS plants.

Clearly, the main danger from CCS lies in the pernicious impact which the hype about it has on climate politics. And billions are being wasted on a hopeless technology which ought to be spent on proven ways to reduce carbon emissions, such as community wind and solar projects or home insulation.

Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS):

Compared to coal CCS, BECCS is an even more fanciful idea. It would involve capturing CO₂ from biofuel refineries and biomass-burning power plants and sequestering it long-term. It is being promoted as a ‘carbon negative technology’ i.e. as a means of sucking previously emitted CO₂ from the atmosphere. The idea is this: bioenergy is classed as inherently carbon neutral by governments and energy companies, based on the assumption that new plant growth will reabsorb the carbon emitted from burning existing trees or other plants. It is scientific nonsense: bioenergy releases carbon which has been stored in vegetation and which would otherwise continue to be sequestered by soils and ecosystems. Burning this carbon transfers it to the atmosphere. Furthermore burning biomass for heat or electricity results in greater upfront carbon emissions than burning fossil fuels (per unit of energy). But based on the idea that bioenergy is carbon neutral, BECCS proponents claim that capturing and storing some of the CO₂ emissions from bioenergy will make it carbon negative. The 2014 IPCC report endorsed this bizarre idea, stating that the great majority of models showed that keeping global warming to within 2^oC requires large-scale ‘negative emissions’ through BECCS.[8] The modellers had not actually studied the feasibility of BECCS, nor the climate impacts of procuring vast amounts of additional biomass – they had simply entered ‘carbon negative’ BECCS figures into their models. Unlike coal CCS, BECCS has never even been tested at a small scale, with one exception: there are a small number of ethanol refineries which capture CO₂ from fermentation. This is relatively cheap and simple, but the amount of CO₂ captured is less than the CO₂ emitted from fossil fuel burning to power the refinery. Such a project thus cannot be considered carbon negative, not even if all the greenhouse gas emissions associated with converting land to ethanol production, with fertiliser use and with burning the ethanol are ignored.

Capturing CO₂ from biomass-burning plants would be even more challenging, expensive and energy intensive than capturing it from coal: biomass feedstocks are chemically much less homogenous, which makes carbon capture more challenging. Even more seriously, generating energy from biomass results in greater CO₂ than generating it from coal. This means that even more energy would be needed to capture that extra CO₂, making the whole concept even less economically viable.

As with coal CCS, the real danger of BECCS stems from the hype around it. IPCC models are being used to falsely reassure policy makers that it is possible to ‘overshoot’ carbon targets, i.e. to burn enough fossil fuels to heat the temperature by far more than 2^oC, yet to still reach the 2^oC goal by scrubbing some of the carbon from the atmosphere later on. And given the growing hype and number of academic studies about BECCS, there is a distinct possibility that significant amounts of public funds could be squandered on non-viable BECCS projects.

Cellulosic biofuels:

Virtually all biofuels today are produced either from plant oils (or, in some cases, animal fats) and from starch in sugar crops or cereals, which is broken down into glucose and fermented to ethanol.

In 1910, Standard Alcohol Company started fermenting sawmill residues to ethanol in the world’s first ever cellulosic biofuel refinery in the US. Their plant, located in South Carolina, had a 5,000 gallon a day capacity. It was followed by a second refinery of the same type and size in Louisiana. Both refineries operated for a few years before they were closed down because they were unprofitable. The amount of ethanol produced would not have justified the energy inputs and costs. They had to steep the processed wood in dilute sulphuric acid at high temperatures to break down complex plant cell molecules into fermentable sugars.[9] They would have had to deal with equipment being corroded by the acid, with relatively low yields of fermentable sugars, and with chemicals forming during the process which inhibited ethanol fermentation. A significant proportion of the sugars would have been the wrong type of sugars for fermentation and significant energy would have been required to boil off the water in order to obtain pure ethanol.[10] Around twenty such plants were built worldwide during World War Two. All but a few in the Soviet Union were closed after the war and all would have faced the same limitations.

In recent decades, billions of dollars in public funds have been spent worldwide on trying to develop efficient cellulosic biofuel production, i.e. biofuels made from wood, grasses, or crop residues. But there is no evidence at all that the inherent problems faced by Standard Alcohol Company more than a century ago are being overcome.

Some of the methods being researched involve ‘thermo-chemical conversion’. This generally means exposing biomass to high temperatures either with controlled oxygen or none, cleaning the gas which results from this process and then converting it to chemicals which resemble conventional diesel, petrol or kerosene by using chemical catalysts. Others involve ‘biochemical conversion’. In most cases, this involves using enzymes secreted by microorganisms to break up plant cells into fermentable sugars, and then fermenting the different types of sugars to ethanol and/or butanol. Much of the research into biochemical conversion pathways focusses on genetically engineering micro-organisms some of which can secrete the right types and combinations of enzymes and others which can ferment all of the different types of sugars contained in plant cells simultaneously.

There is no evidence of any commercial breakthrough. There are currently three commercial-scale cellulosic ethanol refineries in the US, after another one was closed down last November having produced no ethanol.[11] Two of those ethanol plants are not producing any ethanol either. Operators of the third plant, which had been officially opened in September 2014, announced this May that they were finally ‘ramping up production’. Whether they will actually succeed remains to be seen. Three other cellulosic ethanol plants have opened, one in Italy and two in Brazil but there is no publicly available information to judge how – if at all – they are operating. Thermo-chemical conversion, in the meantime, has been all but abandoned by companies after a series of high-profile failures and bankruptcies. The challenges posed by biochemical conversion technologies remain formidable.[12]

The ‘promise’ of supposedly more ‘sustainable’ cellulosic biofuels has, time and time again, been used to legitimise biofuel subsidies and mandates which are responsible for the massive expansion in conventional biofuels in recent years, with all the disastrous impacts on biodiversity and forests, land rights, food and water sovereignty and on the climate which those entail. But, unlike most unsuccessful technologies, cellulosic biofuel research and deployment attempts entail high immediate risks. The great majority of projects use genetically engineered micro-organisms, which rely on synthetic biology.

Synthetic biology is extreme genetic engineering which involves more fundamental and aggressive changes to an organisms’ genome than traditional genetic engineering, and potentially even the synthesis of new organisms from artificially constructed DNA. Secure containment of GE micro-organisms inside industrial plants is an illusion. Industry magazine Biofuels Digest cited an anonymous ‘friend’ of theirs, speaking about biofuel company Amyris, who use GE refineries: “Having worked in nice university labs and clean room pharmaceuticals they did not know what was awaiting them in the down market dirty world of biofuel. You can’t make biofuels with anything you got to keep that clean.” There has been virtually no research into the potential environmental and public health impacts of accidentally released GE micro-organisms. But there are good reasons to worry: micro-organisms play a fundamental role in regulating the world’s carbon and nutrient cycles and in maintaining the earth’s support systems. They evolve more rapidly than higher life forms, which means that synthetic or trans-genes can mutate more rapidly than they would in plants or animals. There is no way of tracing escaped GE microbes. Finally, while GM crops can only breed with non-GM crops of the same species, many microorganisms routinely exchange genes with completely different species. There is even evidence of microbial genetic material having been passed to animals and plants.[13]

Why have sci-fi technologies come to dominate the debate about climate change solutions?

The discussion of coal CCS, BECCS and cellulosic biofuels above illustrates some of the interests that companies have in fuelling the hype around such sci-fi ‘solutions’: fossil fuel companies benefit from creating the illusion that clean coal is on the horizon and that carbon emitted today can be scrubbed from the atmosphere tomorrow. Biofuel companies can hide the very real destruction caused by their biofuels behind promises of future ‘sustainable’ cellulosic – and equally unlikely algal – biofuels.

Similarly, such false promises help governments with an interest in perpetuating the growth-based fossil fuel economy to appease public concern about climate change.

And when governments offer large grants to companies that promise to build, for example, the first ever commercially cellulosic ethanol plant, it is hardly surprising that start-up companies in particular will promise the impossible to get hold of that money. Hype around cellulosic and algal biofuels has helped synthetic biologists and start-up companies invested in extreme genetic engineering to attract large amounts of public funding and investment. Algal oil companies, such as Amyris and Solazyme (now calling itself TerraVia), procured much of their funding through claims about developing algal biofuels, before officially abandoning biofuels altogether and focussing on higher value niche food supplement and cosmetics products instead.

The IPCC’s endorsement of a whole range of sci-fi solutions such as BECCS can be understood as a result of demands put on them by policymakers: they are facing the conundrum that they must put forward scenarios which show how global warming can be limited to 2^oC without admitting that this will be impossible without radical social and economic changes and an end to economic growth. As climate scientist Kevin Anderson has pointed out, their 2014 2^oC scenarios rely not just on large-scale BECCS but also on a time-machine: they require greenhouse gas emissions to have peaked in 2010.

Companies and policymakers exploit techno-optimism (see Corporate Watch’s A-Z of Green Capitalism which explains techno-optimism and related concepts) in order to avoid meaningful action on climate change, to perpetuate harmful investments, and, in the case of some companies, to cash in on public subsidies. But the techno-optimism which is being exploited has much deeper roots. There is no doubt that many of those who work on sci-fi climate change solutions, whether for companies or academia, genuinely believe that they are helping to bring about transformative technological changes which will contribute to solving climate change and other crises.

Faith in ‘Technology Learning Curves’

The origins of techno-optimism can be traced back to the Enlightenment and the early Industrial Revolution. However, the most common justification for continuing to invest in technologies, which have not been successfully deployed despite decades of Research and Development, is the idea of the ‘technology learning curve’. This idea can be traced back to 1936 when Theodore Paul Wright, an aeronautical engineer in the US, observed how the cost of manufacturing aeroplanes was coming down as greater experience led to greater efficiency. He found that every time total production doubled, the requirement for and thus the cost of labour dropped by 10-15%. This learning curve – dubbed Wright’s Law – was to make first aerial warfare and later passenger aviation affordable.

Today, the learning curve idea is most commonly associated not with Wright but with Moore. George Moore was an electronic engineer who, in 1965, published an article called “Cramming more components onto integrated circuits“.[14] Moore’s article correctly foresaw that integrated circuits would “lead to such wonders as home computers”. It specifically predicted that by 1970, 65,000 units would be fitted on one chip, bringing the cost of each component down to one-tenth of what it was in 1965. He further predicted that the number of components on a chip (i.e. the power of computers) would at least double year on year for a minimum of ten years and very possibly beyond, bringing costs down at the same time. By 1975, Moore’s predictions had turned out to have been somewhat over optimistic, but the electronics industry was well on its way towards developing home computers. That year, Moore predicted that computing power would in the future double every two years rather than annually. Progress has since slowed down and Moore himself acknowledged in 2005 that it could not continue forever.

Gordon Moore of course was writing about one particular technology. Nonetheless, his optimistic forecast, which was followed by decades of real exponential progress in electronics, bolstered techno-optimism in general. The observation of learning curves in a small number of technology sectors morphed into faith in a Technology Learning Curve as a universal law – or at least as a law which applied to all but the most outlandish sci-fi ideas. In the energy sector, belief in a universal Learning Curve law was bolstered by the experience with solar PV: for several decades now, the unit cost of solar PV has been falling and efficiency has been rising. The idea that the success of solar PV is solely due to a Learning Curve is disputed: steep falls in raw materials, i.e. silicon prices, for example, have also helped to reduce costs.[15] Nonetheless, global investment in solar PV, once a very expensive and inefficient technology, has more than paid off.

Yet while some technologies have greatly advanced with investment and experience, there is no scientific basis for claims about a universal Technology Learning Curve. Moore’s predictions of future home computers were proven true in principle, but many past predictions about other technologies were not. Not only has nuclear energy not become “too cheap to meter”, as the Chair of the Atomic Energy Authority is said to have claimed in the 1950s,but the global experience of building hundreds of nuclear power stations has failed to bring down nuclear energy costs.[16] Costs have actually increased in several regions and a nuclear power plant without public subsidies remains as distant a prospect as ever.[17]

In 1984, a whole New York exhibition, called “Yesterday’s Tomorrow” entertained visitors with entire halls full of old futuristic predictions which seem bizarre today. 1950s and 60s fantasies about floating cities tended by robots and humans, or family cars doubling as private planes may seem like harmless science fiction today. But time for the urgent action needed to have any hope of avoiding the most catastrophic impacts of climate change is fast running out. In this context, fantasies about unproven technologies which will replace or clean up fossil fuels or scrub vast amounts of carbon from the air have become deadly distractions from the radical economic and social change that is required.

References

[1] Throughout this article, unless otherwise stated, the term ‘waste’ refers to Municipal Solid Waste.

[2] Energy Sprawl or Energy Efficiency: Climate Policy Impacts on Natural Habitat for the United States of America, Robert I McDonald et.al., PLoS One, 4(8), August 2009

[3] Methane emissions and climatic warming risk from hydraulic fracturing and shale gas development: implications for policy, Robert W Howarth, Energy and Emission Control Technologies, 2015:3

[4] Note that throughout this section, CCS is only discussed in the context of power stations, specifically coal power stations. There are certain industrial processes, including gas refining, from which CO₂ can be captured far more cheaply and easily than from power stations, and there are a limited number of CCS projects involving such activities. The majority involves selling CO₂ for Enhanced Oil Recovery, i.e. for getting more oil out of the ground.

[5] See www.bakermckenzie.com/-/media/files/people/rlms/rlm_amsterdam_weerokoster_20141015.pdf?la=en . RWE’s Eemshaven coal power station in the Netherlands opened in 2015 and it was specifically designed to be ‘CCS-ready’ even though RWE has announced no concrete plans for capturing any carbon.

[6] For example, www.iea.org/topics/ccs/ and www.globalccsinstitute.com/news/institute-updates/role-ccs-explained-latest-ipcc-report

[7] For example, Rajendra Pachauri, then Chair of the IPCC at the time, said after the publication of the latest IPCC Assessment Report: “With CCS it is entirely possible for fossil fuels to continue to be used on a large scale.” (www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/nov/02/rapid-carbon-emission-cuts-severe-impact-climate-change-ipcc-report)

[8] Climate Change 2014: Synthesis Report Summary for Policymakers, International Panel on Climate Change

[9] Acid-based hydrolysis processes for ethanol from lignocellulosic materials: A review, Mohammad J. Taherzadeh and Keikhosro Karimi, BioResources 2(3), 2007

[10] Dried wood contains 39-54% cellulose and 14-37% hemicelluloses. Cellulose consists of glucose, which is the sugar most commonly metabolised by organisms, including by yeast which would normally be used for ethanol fermentation. Hemicelluloses consist of different types of sugars, which cannot be fermented by any of the microorganisms used to ferment cellulose.

[11] This excludes bolt-on technologies introduced in some US corn ethanol refineries to extract some additional ethanol from cellulose in corn kernel fibre. Such technologies are classed as ‘cellulosic’ by the US authorities but do not involve any of the challenges faced by cellulosic ethanol plants.

[12] See Enzyme-based hydrolysis processes for ethanol from lignocellulosic materials: A review, Taherzadeh and Keikhosro Karimi, BioResources 2(4), 2007

[13] Expression of multiple horizontally acquired genes is a hallmark of both vertebrate and invertebrate genomes, A. Crisp et al., Genome Biology, 2015 AND Eukaryote-to-eukaryote gene transfer events revealed by the genome sequence of the wine yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae EC1118, Maite Novo et al, PNAS, August 2009

[14] Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits, Gordon E. Moore, Electronics, April 1965

[15] Beyond the learning curve: factors influencing cost reductions in photovoltaics, Gregory F. Nemet, Energy Policy (34), 2006

[16] Note that others believe that he referred to future energy prices in general rather than nuclear energy in particular: www.thisdayinquotes.com/2009/09/too-cheap-to-meter-nuclear-quote-debate.html. Of course, the latter prediction would have proven just as mistaken.

[17] Historical construction costs of global nuclear power reactors, Jessica R. Loverin et.al., Energy Policy, 91, April 2016

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