Solidarity, Hope and Dignity: Refugee Action’s Vision for Refugee Protection

What does it really mean to give someone a fresh start? For Tim Naor Hilton, Chief Executive at Refugee Action, it begins with dignity, safety, and the chance to be seen as more than a statistic. Speaking at the Supporting Asylum Seekers and Refugees Conference 2025, Hilton laid bare the realities of the UK asylum system – negative rhetoric, unsafe housing, and a lack of safe routes. He called for a powerful shift in the national conversation. This article explores his keynote insights, the challenges refugees face, and why changing the narrative is key to real change.

Refugee Action is dedicated to helping refugees who’ve survived some of the world’s worst regimes. The charity helps get them basic support to restart their lives with dignity, through safety, security and integration. Tim has worked proudly at Refugee Action for 23 years, making him an expert within this industry. He attended our Supporting Asylum Seekers and Refugees Conference 2025 on the 9th of July, hosting a keynote session ‘Understanding the Migration Landscape: Challenges and Policy Developments’ in which he underlined how refugee protection is fundamentally a human rights issue. Real change requires solidarity, hope and recognition of refugees as more than “service users”.

One of the services that Refugee Action runs is the Frontline Immigration Advice Programme, which supports organisations, staff and volunteers to receive immigration legal advice. Alongside this, they have The Insight Hub, which is where they get organisations together to discuss relevant issues and share resources and best practices within the refugee crisis. Indeed, a lot of Refugee Action’s work is about educating people on ways to support refugees and asylum seekers, rather than on helping the refugees themselves. This is because the charity believes that half of the battle is changing the way people perceive these individuals, to create more understanding and connection. It allows for support to be more readily available and sympathy being presented.

Hilton went on to talk about how in his experience, a lot of the refugees he has worked with feel like they are not recognised for everything that they are. They feel pigeonholed, reduced, stereotyped and not made to feel fully human. This degradation will lead to more mental instability for refugees and asylum seekers, who are already traumatised by the places and people they are leaving behind. Refugee Action believes that something as simple as emotional resonance – that psychological shift of solidarity and trust can make such a big difference to refugees and asylum seekers.

Policy and Rhetoric

“It’s time the government changed the narrative. It must stop using criminalising, scapegoating and dehumanising language, defend the rights of people to seek safety and work to unite our communities. – Refugee Action

Refugee Action have noticed a relentless increase in negative rhetoric and policymaking, with very little cut through recently opposing these anti-refugee viewpoints and policies. A powerful example of recent anti-refugee policy was The Rwanda Plan in 2024, which saw the deportation of asylum seekers to Rwanda to have their claims processed there, regardless of their circumstances or ties to the UK. It must be noted that the plan was scrapped when the Labour party came into office, perhaps highlighting a pivot in opinion on the treatment of asylum seekers.

In terms of rhetoric, a huge example recently of anti-refugee narrative was the Southport riots in July 2024, where a hotel that was temporarily housing asylum seekers was set on fire. These riots occurred because of the spreading of fake news, which ignited anti-immigration riots and demonstrations up and down England. You can imagine how negatively this would have impacted asylum seekers in the UK who were just trying to escape the threats of the places they lived. It would have made them feel alienated, afraid to leave their homes and upset about the treatment they were receiving. The mentality of these riots, ‘us and them’, two different types of people, is a disgraceful act of racist and anti-immigrant rhetoric.

“Who is putting the positive side of migration? Who’s putting the positive side of why we have an asylum system and rooting that in human rights?” – Tim Naor Hilton

Tim believes that plenty of people are supporting refugees and asylum seekers, but Refugee Action thinks it’s not enough to steer the national dialogue. Which is therefore having a huge impact on the policies and the experiences that people have in the system. Anti-social behaviours, like those seen in the riots last year, alienate refugees and asylum seekers even more, creating more of a divide and making them feel even more displaced than they already do. Anti-social behaviour needs to be tackled in the UK, and our upcoming conference, the The Tackling Anti-Social Behaviour Conference 2025 is taking place on the 12th of November. It will be a day full of learning and networking between industry leaders and experts.

Housing

Currently, around a third of people in the asylum system are living in temporary accommodation, often hotels. These hotels were only supposed to be very brief housing, for a few days or weeks, but the lived experience now for thousands is staying in these hotels for months on end – sometimes even years.

It is a similar situation to the one that we saw in the GE Insight Article The Asks Around Social Housing: Tackling the UK Housing Crisis, where these people are being forced to live in these cramped, unhomelike buildings where they never feel truly comfortable. How can they raise children in those conditions? How can they relax, knowing that the term ‘temporary’ hangs over them?

“A safe home is the foundation for everything else. And people living in asylums, hotels or poor quality dispersal accommodation, are not able to think in that kind of way.” – Tim Naor Hilton

Refugee Action is actively opposing the fact that these temporary accommodations are often privately owned and are being rented to local councils for an extortionate amount. To fight this, they ran a campaign called ‘Most Wanted’, which highlights the vast profits that organisations like the Clearsprings Group, Serco, Corporate Travel Movement and the Mears Group are making out of this system. There are debates going on around decentralising this system, bringing it back to public management.

Safe Routes

Refugee Action state that there are virtually no safe routes for people seeking asylum in the UK. They are resorting to dangerous acts like crossing the channel, which has led to a rising death toll as these boat trips are often unorganised, unregulated and over-crowded. This graph, courtesy of The Migration Observatory, is quite stark.

Refugee Action believes that there needs to be a narrative change to focus on people’s crossing being safe, more than the modes of travel. Safe routes at the moment mostly consist of resettlement schemes, like getting VISA’s and application processes that can take time to process. These are only available to certain countries, and can take a long time to process. People are desperate to escape the dangerous places they are fleeing, and are often not carrying enough food, water and clothing to wait around.

A good example of this was when the UK gave out over 200,000 VISA’s to Ukrainians in March 2022. Hilton notes that cases were not assessed on individual protection needs. If you were Ukrainian, you had access to it. So, Hilton believes that if there is political will, a better, more inclusive system can be found.

Tim Hilton then expressed how important it is to support local organisations and charities. The support sector is vital for refugees and asylum seekers to receive help, but the ecosystem is fragmented across the UK. Refugee Action recently held a survey of refugee and asylum seeker charities across the UK. They found that 85% of the organisations they surveyed face pressures when accessing grant funding. Indeed, one organisation they surveyed laid out how dire their situation was through how staff were leaving sooner than they could train them. Staff retention and engagement was that low because the charity couldn’t access funding to do the work they wanted to do. There was a general sentiment in the survey that many organisations were having to constantly fundraise just to stay afloat, which can be exhausting. It leads people to constantly worry about the financial side of the charity, always checking numbers and worrying about staying open more so than delivering charitable work.

“Change is not going to come on from isolated policy wins or from sidelining the voices of people with lived experience. I want to remind you all again of these core areas, momentum, solidarity, being seen. Momentum isn’t always about visible outcomes.”  – Tim Naor Hilton

In summary, Hilton highlighted the urgent need to reframe refugee protection as a human rights issue, emphasising solidarity, safe housing, and safe routes for those seeking asylum. Hilton spoke about the damaging impact of negative rhetoric, the failures of temporary accommodation, and the lack of accessible safe migration pathways. He called for a national narrative shift towards dignity, hope, and recognition of refugees as full members of society. You can find out more about Refugee Action here.

We’d like to thank Tim Naor Hilton for his excellent keynote. It was powerfully insightful and illuminating, providing us with sad, but necessary information. Driving change is a powerful part of Refugee Action and it radiated in this session. If you found this article interesting, our upcoming Tackling Anti-Social Behaviour Conference will look into ways of dealing with anti-social behaviour, which has been brewing around the issues of refugee and asylum seekers in UK temporary accommodation.