Refugee Family Reunion Letter

Please read, share, and sign our letter raising deep concerns about plans to stop refugee family reunion.

We urge you to recognise that family reunion is not a marginal element of refugee protection and resettlement; it is central to it. For many refugees, the presence and safety of close family is essential for their stability, wellbeing and integration. For people of faith, family is foundational to human belonging, resilience, and hope. To further restrict safe routes for family reunion is to push desperate people toward the very smuggling networks we all wish to dismantle. 

We are mindful that there are public concerns about current levels of immigration. However, refugees represent a small proportion of immigrants to the UK, and in many communities, anxieties arise not from hostility towards refugees, but from long-standing pressures on housing, health services, and local infrastructures. It is therefore deeply troubling to see refugees and asylum seekers presented, sometimes explicitly and sometimes by implication, as the cause of strains for which they are not responsible. 

In recent history our nation has repeatedly shown that compassion can rise above fear. When the world recoiled at the image of Alan Kurdi’s lifeless body on a Turkish beach in 2015, and when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, people responded with generosity to those who needed sanctuary. That spirit did not arise from indifference or hostility; it arose from the recognition that every child is precious and every family deserves safety. 

Governments can either champion such compassion or be led by the loudest calls against it. We urge you to choose the former. 

We also respectfully remind you of your own earlier advocacy on this issue. In 2017, you urged the Government to extend family reunion rights – not restrict them – so that unaccompanied refugee children in the UK could be joined by their parents. You argued then that “surely it would be far better for that child, and for the care system, to have their parents in the UK to support them,” and that aligning with European standards would not create a “pull factor” but would express the UK’s long-standing commitment to protecting vulnerable children. We offer this reminder in the hope that the moral clarity, practical wisdom and commitment to family life expressed then, might continue to guide your decisions. 

Making family reunion inaccessible and/or contingent on a fee-paying route will neither reduce journeys nor create a more settled country. It will simply deepen suffering and place Britain at odds with values long central to our national identity and to every major faith tradition in this land. 

We therefore urge you to reconsider these proposals, to protect the right to family reunion, and to demonstrate the moral leadership that this moment demands. 

Yours sincerely, 
Adwoa Burnley, Clerk of Britain Yearly Meeting, Quakers in Britain
Catriona Wheeler, General Assembly Moderator, United Reformed Church
Cecilia Eggleston, Moderator, Metropolitan Community Churches
Rt Revd Christopher Chessun, Bishop of Southwark
Rabbi David Mason, Executive Director, HIAS+JCORE
David Thomson, CEO, All We Can
Elizabeth Slade, Chief Officer, General Assembly of Unitarian and Free Christian Churches
Rt Revd Dr Guli Francis-Dehqani, Bishop of Chelmsford
Shaykh Ibrahim Mogra, Co-chair, Christian Muslim Forum
Inderjit Bhogal OBE, Founder, City of Sanctuary (UK)
Rt Revd John Arnold, Roman Catholic Bishop of Salford
Revd Dr John Bradbury, General Secretary, United Reformed Church
Dr Krish Kandiah OBE, Sanctuary Foundation
Revd Lynn Green, General Secretary, The Baptist Union of Great Britain
Rt Revd Malcolm Chamberlain, Bishop of Wakefield
Most Revd Mark Strange, Bishop of Moray, Ross and Caithness, and Primus, Scottish Episcopal Church
Matthew Forsyth, Vice-President of the Methodist Conference
Bishop Mike Royal, General Secretary, Churches Together in England
Dr Nicola Brady, General Secretary, Churches Together in Britain and Ireland
Rt Revd Rose Hudson-Wilkin, Bishop of Dover and Chair of Churches Refugee Network
Rt Revd Rosie Frew, Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland
Rt Revd and Rt Hon Lord Rowan Williams of Oystermouth, former Archbishop of Canterbury
Imam Dr Sayed Razawi OBE, Chief Imam, Scotland and Director General, Scottish Ahlul Bayt SocietyLord Singh of Wimbledon, Director, Network of Sikh Organisations UK
Revd Dr Tessa Henry-Robinson, Moderator, Free Churches Group, Churches Together in England
Most Reverend William Nolan, Roman Catholic Archbishop of Glasgow

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