‘Immigration status’ is the kind of permission people have to be in the UK.

These include:

• • A person seeking asylum.

• • Refugee Status: ‘Given to a person who has been recognised as a Refugee under the definition in the UN Convention on Refugees 1951. Normally five years Leave to Remain. People with Refugee Status are eligible to apply for Indefinite Leave to Remain (ILR) towards the end of their initial 5-year grant of leave.’ (Universities Scotland and Scottish Refugee Council, 2021, 10)

• • Humanitarian Protection: ‘If a person does not meet the criteria of the 1951 Refugee Convention but the Home Office believe a person is at risk of serious harm or human rights violations should they return to their home country, they may be granted Humanitarian Protection. As with Refugee Status, Humanitarian Protection is awarded for 5 years. People with Humanitarian Protection are eligible to apply for ILR at the end of their initial 5-year grant of leave.’ (p. 11)

• • Separated children and young people seeking sanctuary (Unaccompanied Asylum-Seeking Children) leave: ‘Specifically given to children who cannot be returned to their country of origin because there are no safe reception arrangements in place in the country of origin. Leave until the young person is aged 17½ years old when arrangements will be made to return them to their country of origin on or near their 18th birthday. This is not a protection status and young people can challenge the Home Office for a protection status (Refugee Status or Humanitarian Protection) and while this is being considered they will not be returned to their home country.’ (p. 14)

• • Discretionary Leave: ‘If the applicant's asylum claim has been processed and they have not been recognised as a Refugee nor been granted Humanitarian Protection, they may be granted Discretionary Leave, ‘‘Leave Outside the Immigration Rules’’ or Limited Leave.’ (p. 11)

• • Limited leave to remain.

• • Indefinite leave to remain.

• • Visa.

• • European Union citizen.

There are further complexities for young people, according to information on the London Assembly web page:

• • Many children and young people who arrived in the UK at a very young age and have lived here ever since may be undocumented. This means they might not have any legal immigration status.

As noted in Chapter 4: ‘Libraries’ responses in the UK – historical background’, a constant running theme has been the supply of books and other materials.

One model for provision was that developed by the Polish Library which was established in the 1940s, lending collections of books in Polish to libraries across the UK (see for example Sen and Listwon, 2009), and which continues today (Biblioteka Polska POSK w Londynie, 2021).

During the 1960s and 1970s, as Claire M. Lambert noted (Lambert, 1969), a numbr of library authorities were building up individual collections; during the 1970s, Birmingham Library Service took this a step forward and established its collection as a ‘Library of Asian Languages’, lending titles in bulk to other local authorities (Dolan, 1992); by 1976 it had a stock of some 18,000 books (Library Advisory Council and Community Relations Commission, 1976).

The Cooperative of Indic Language Library Authorities (CILLA) was founded in 1980 by LASER. The aims were: to improve the quality of cataloguing of Indic language material throughout the LASER region and to lay down guidelines for standardisation; to increase the possibility of interlending the material, in particular by creating a worthwhile union catalogue; to provide facilities for book selection meetings for all LASER authorities wishing to take the CILLA service; to increase the bibliographical control of Indic language material; and to increase co-operation between Indic language specialists in the LASER authorities (see for example Lipniacka, 1994b; Plaister, 1985). By the early 1990s CILLA had grown to include groupings in the South-West, Midlands, northern England and Scotland (Lipniacka, 1994a, 181).

In parallel, schemes were being developed elsewhere in the UK, including SEALS in the West Midlands Regional Library System, which covered ‘… languages of the European Union, i.e. French, German, Spanish and Italian, and is more a co-operative regional purchasing scheme than a circulating library.’ (Lipniacka, 1994b, 167)

Again according to Ewa Lipniacka, in the early 1990s, CILLA, The Polish Central Circulating Library, SEALS, the Bradford Subscription Library (Indic language material), the Westminster Chinese Circulating Library and several others got together under the auspices of the Library and Information Cooperation Council to form LINGUALINC, an umbrella group for the co-operatives providing access to materials in community languages (see Lipniacka, 1994b, 167–168).

Introduction

This section draws together examples of the work that different types of library and information service are currently providing, together with some ideas about what more could be developed. We are looking at library work as broadly as possible, including examples of provision by public libraries, information about which is also still available in the Libraries of Sanctuary Resource Pack (Vincent, 2021b).

There is a danger that this – as with any area of library and information work – is seen as too large, too new, too political or too complex. This section breaks down the key areas of work involved so that it is clear that most can be built on existing frameworks, especially with the involvement of new arrivals themselves, people from the wider community and from across your organisation and other partners.

City of Sanctuary have outlined the key components that are at the heart of this work, summarised as Learn, Embed and Share; we will use this as a framework for this next practical section of the book.

Learn

Learning about what it means to be a ‘new arrival’, seeking sanctuary, facing racism, etc.

Before starting work in this area, it is vital that library staff learn what it really means to be a ‘new arrival’ (and particularly a person seeking sanctuary) – in general (especially the political issues behind and meanings of the different terms used for new arrivals); in the context of overall health and mental wellbeing; and specifically in terms of information and support needs and how a library might help. This can involve:

• • Organising training and learning activities: for example, Birmingham and Newcastle public library services have organised short courses for their staff, looking at who new arrivals are; what we know about new arrivals in the local area; the response of libraries (and the cultural sector) in the past and currently; barriers to the take-up of services; and practical ways in which we can improve library provision (a possible course outline is included in Appendix 5). Other library services have organised training provided by their local City of Sanctuary (e.g. Greater Manchester) or local refugee organisations (e.g. Southampton).

During the spring and summer of 2001 there were a number of disturbances in towns and cities in England (including Bradford, Burnley, Oldham and Stoke-on-Trent). The government's response was to establish a Ministerial Group on Public Order and Community Cohesion and also a Review Team to seek the views of local residents and community leaders. The Review Team produced a report (Home Office, 2001) which led to the widening use of the term ‘community cohesion’. ‘While continuing to emphasise the need to tackle inequalities, community cohesion programmes were radically different in that they attempted to build understanding between different groups and to build mutual trust and respect by breaking down stereotypes and misconceptions about the “other”.’ (iCoCo Foundation, 2022)

This definition was set out initially by the Local Government Association in its guidance for local authorities:

Community cohesion incorporates and goes beyond the concept of race equality and social inclusion.

There were critics of the idea of community cohesion, primarily arguing that the way it was interpreted focused too strongly on race and did not, for example, take on board and explore fully other issues that can lead to conflict, such as class, inequality and poverty (see for example Ratcliffe, 2012; Burnett, 2004).

However, organisations – especially local authorities – are continuing to use the term, linking it to inclusion (for example: Wrexham County Borough Council, 2022); to the Equality Act 2010 and the Public Sector Equality Duty (Tower Hamlets Council, n.d.); and also to their welcome for new arrivals – for example, at the time of writing, Birmingham has a community cohesion strategy in place, which highlights this work:

Half-day course, approx. 3 hours

Course aims

• • to provide a greater understanding of new arrivals and their needs

• • to share good practice

• • to examine what services we need to develop

• • to consider how we might all be involved in providing library and information services for new arrivals.

Course outline

Welcome & Introductions

Introduction to key themes/aims of the day

Overview – who are new arrivals to the UK?

What do we know about newly arrived communities in this area? And the wider region?

What has been the response of libraries (and the cultural sector) in the past? And

what is the current response – UK-wide? What's the response locally?

What are the barriers to the take-up of library services by new arrivals?

How can we improve our library provision? What could we do immediately?

Longer term?

Plenary session/Evaluation

The main focus of this book has been on practice and experience in the UK, but, of course, that does not mean that we should become insular.

It is vital that we all keep up to date with world news, especially events that are likely to have an impact on people seeking sanctuary and other new arrivals. It is also vital that we find out as much as possible about what libraries outside the UK are developing – there will be things we can learn!

In preparing this book, I have regularly asked libraries other than public libraries for examples, case studies, lessons learned, but with very little in the way of response (except the terrific examples included elsewhere), so have decided to fill in some of those gaps with some examples from outside the UK. (There will be more about this lack of response in the Conclusions chapter.)

Academic libraries: ‘Project Welcome’

With funding from the US Institute of Museum and Library Services, ‘Project Welcome’ began as a one-year planning grant (May 2016–April 2017) that was extended an additional year until April 2018. The project: ‘… aims to learn about and articulate ways libraries can address the information needs of refugees and asylum seekers in order to support and empower them in their resettlement and integration process.’ (Project Welcome, n.d.)

An article published in 2017 (Bowdoin et al., 2017) summarised some of what the project achieved:

Academic libraries also support research and the teaching of refugees forced into migration as well as library users who are refugees and asylum seekers.

Introduction

Before looking in detail at examples of some of the work that different types of library and information services are currently undertaking and developing, it is important to understand the barriers that may stand in the way of new arrivals actually taking up these services.

These barriers can be seen as falling into four main areas:

• • personal and social

• • perception and awareness

• • environmental

• • institutional.

This chapter outlines what some of these barriers are – brief practical examples of how to overcome them are included here and then fleshed out in the following chapter.

Overcoming barriers: personal and social

• • New arrivals’ previous experiences may make them fear institutions (or, indeed, anything official). Libraries can go some way to overcoming these fears by making the building welcoming and ensuring that all library staff are aware of the issues that new arrivals may have faced and can respond positively to them.

• • New arrivals may not have used a library before, and may also not understand what its purpose is.

• • Cultural barriers, such as the attitudes of men in some cultures towards women in public places; attitudes to queuing.

• • Lack of literacy: all libraries can help new arrivals find literacy classes – and some may have organisations running classes in the library.

• • Lack of IT literacy and experience.

• • Digital exclusion.

• • Lack of spoken English: all libraries can also help new arrivals find ESOL classes.

• • Health/mental health issues: all libraries can signpost people to organisations where they can get health and mental health support.

• • Feelings of not belonging, social isolation and lack of social integration: by being community hubs, libraries are creating places where people have an opportunity to meet others and begin to integrate.

• • Low income/poverty: libraries are places which new arrivals can visit without, in general, having to pay (although there may still be issues about the cost of travel needed to reach a library – bus passes to allow people to attend activities may go a long way to help).

• • Feelings of shame/embarrassment about having to ask for money and help.Overcoming barriers: perception and awareness

Overcoming barriers: perception and awareness

• • A common perception – and not just by new arrivals – is that libraries are ‘not for us’ or that libraries ‘do not have anything that we need’; new arrivals may also be unsure exactly how to ask for what they need.

This introduction to the background to libraries’ relationship with sanctuary has been written by Molly Newcomb (at the time of writing, Molly was a PhD student at the Information School, University of Sheffield, supervised by Dr Briony Birdi and Dr Anna Barton).

Introduction

The discussion about the relationship between public libraries and the concept of ‘sanctuary’ has spanned almost the entirety of public library provision in UK. Having its roots in the height of the public library legislative debates of the 1850s but also continuing into the present day, this discussion has involved academics, historians, public figures and local communities. Although rarely explicitly using the word ‘sanctuary’ to describe public libraries and the services they provide to users, nevertheless historical conversations consistently equate public libraries with a place that, in a time when conflict and societal norms controlled daily life, ‘. . . encapsulates the aspirations of the modern self: a liberal desire for progress, self-realisation, social emancipation, freedom of thought, the questioning of “things established” and, although respectful of tradition and history, for release from the chains of custom.’ (Black, 2000a, 169)

Primary source periodicals and journals of the late 19th and early 20th centuries often included arguments, from the public and from members of Parliament, that both praised and criticised the diversity of communities of public libraries (Chambers's Journal, 1875; Lubbock, 1891; Leigh, 1906). John Lubbock articulated that users of the public library should not be discriminated against because of their economic background or social standing, that ‘all are welcome in the house of knowledge’ of the free library (Lubbock, 1891, 60). This was particularly relevant for working class people of the 19th and 20th centuries, who, hemmed in by strict Victorian class standards and the start of the largest conflict the world had seen, needed to give their life meaning beyond their poor living and health conditions, poverty, and less than pleasant working environments (McColvin, 1942; Black, 2000b).

The public library provided the opportunity for people to choose what to read, a place where they could socialise, a place that kept them sheltered from the elements and a place where they had the freedom to think.

Introduction

At least since the 1960s – and probably longer – there has been a debate about how library developments should be funded: should additional money be sought (and where should it come from?), should existing budgets be redefined or, without these, can new work not be taken on?

This section looks briefly at some of the sources of funding and surrounding issues.

Home Office funding

As noted earlier, in the 1960s the ‘problem’ of provision of materials in community languages had been referred to the then Department of Education and Science – this was as part of an argument that public library provision could not be developed without additional central government funding.

In 1966, Section 11 of the Local Government Act made funds available to meet the needs of people ‘… belonging to ethnic minorities whose language or customs differ from those of the rest of the community.’ (Great Britain, 1966). This included 75% of the salary costs of staff required to make special provision in the public library for these groups – but this was intended to be a temporary measure. However, as noted by Nicola Matthews and Vincent Roper (Matthews and Roper, 1994), there was no guidance as to the types of posts that could be funded, and local authorities were expected to find the remaining 25% of salary from their mainstream budget; it was also widely thought at the time – and echoed by Matthews and Roper – that such provision was viewed as ‘added on’ to the mainstream service and therefore seen only as an ‘extra’. As Jaswinder Gundara and Ronald Warwick commented, whilst giving the impression that public libraries were embracing multicultural provision, in fact: ‘… one or two individuals have responsibility for running such a service (to ethnic minority groups), thus liberating the others to provide a traditional, middle class-oriented, Eurocentric service.’

I have worked in libraries long enough to remember angry responses from some library staff when it was suggested that they might go out into the community and meet people! These responses were often accompanied by comments about ‘not being social workers’ or something similar.

Yet, at the same time, other library staff saw the immense opportunities that outreach and other community-based working offered, and grabbed them enthusiastically!

These varied views as to what a library is for can lead to healthy debates about our work – but can also lead to polarisation.

Statements of ethics by library associations

In order to start to pull the different kinds of library and information service together, CILIP agreed an Ethical Framework to define a core element of library work:

It also published a set of Clarifying Notes, which includes: ‘Library and information professionals should stand for diversity and challenge prejudice wherever it is found in the information, knowledge and library sector. We should uphold, promote and defend the contribution of a diverse workforce across and at all levels of the profession’. (CILIP, 2018, 2)

Following on from this, in 2019, CILIP published Libraries, Information and Knowledge Change Lives, its: ‘… commitment on behalf of librarians, information and knowledge professionals to tackle some of society's most urgent challenges. It outlines our plan to become an ‘activist’ organisation, through proactive advocacy and the promotion of inclusive, participatory and socially-engaged knowledge and information services’.

Introduction

The world continues to change rapidly – for example, just in the relatively brief time that I have been writing this book we have had the withdrawal of troops from – and subsequent disasters in – Afghanistan, and the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, which, at the time of writing, had led to possibly more than 12 million Ukrainian people fleeing their homes (BBC News, 2022). Such events, combined with an increasing number of economic and environmental disasters, mean that the likelihood of people having to move around the world increases almost daily – an estimate by Zurich Insurance, for example, suggests that there could be 1.2 billion climate refugees by 2050 (Zurich, 2022).

Responses to people seeking sanctuary and other new arrivals

Responses by different countries to different groups of people seeking sanctuary vary considerably. As we have noted throughout the book, responses are shaped by a range of factors (including poverty, racism, perceptions of ‘others’): this means that some refugees are perceived as ‘good’ refugees and some as ‘bad’. The UK's response to Ukrainian refugees in 2022, for example, is noticeably different to that towards Syrian or Afghan refugees, for reasons outlined in a blogpost by LSE (Pettrachin and Abdou, 2022). There is considerable contrast between the welcome (in theory, at least) being offered by the UK government to Ukrainian refugees and the real welcome on the ground, which has been described as ‘underwhelming and out of step with the rest of Europe’, with problems over obtaining visas and even accessing the visa processing centres (Sigona, 2022) – and, even with these problems, there is a huge difference in this approach compared to the likelihood of being sent to Rwanda: ‘The Home Office has said that people who arrived in the UK after crossing the Channel will be among the first group notified that it plans to send them to Rwanda.’ (Cooney, 2022)

Political responses to new arrivals

We know too that sanctuary can be a political ‘hot potato’, especially with pressure from right-wing media and politicians and, in Chapter 2 particularly, we have looked at the impact that politics have had on the UK's stance towards new arrivals from the 1940s to the present day.

According to the Home Office (Home Office, 2022), in 2021–22, the main countries of origin of people seeking asylum were:

• • Iran

• • Iraq

• • Eritrea

• • Albania

• • Syria

• • Afghanistan

• • Sudan

• • Vietnam

• • Pakistan• India.

In addition, the UK also hosts resettled refugees: ‘Unlike asylum seekers, who can apply for asylum only in the UK, resettled refugees are identified abroad by the UN, and then transferred to the UK.’ (Walsh, 2021, 3). ‘From 1 January 2010 to 30 June 2020, 29,506 people were resettled in the UK under its four resettlement schemes … ‘ (p. 11). Around 70% of these people were Syrian citizens. The remainder were from: Somalia; Iraq; Democratic Republic of Congo; Sudan; Ethiopia; Bhutan; Eritrea; Afghanistan; and the Occupied Palestine Territories (p. 14). From early 2022 onwards, the UK has also been hosting people who have fled Ukraine.