The Confederation of Service Charities (COBSEO) hosts a number of different cluster groups to help collaborative working between charities and to ensure that issues are raised and solutions and actions identified.
The Non-UK cluster, jointly chaired by AFF and the Royal British Legion, is unique in that single service and MOD representatives are also invited, along with the Home Office and the Office of Veterans Affairs (OVA).
Researchers undertaking projects involving non-UK serving personnel, veterans and families also regularly attend.
This has resulted in a very effective and proactive group which is able to liaise directly with the Home Office on immigration policies and can provide relevant evidence when requested.
Most crucially, the group works together to try to minimise any disadvantage faced by non-UK soldiers, families and veterans across all aspects of life in the UK.
Recent work within the cluster has included:
- Development of a fully comprehensive non-UK tracker, bringing together issues raised by all stakeholders. This document enables issues to be prioritised and provides a route to raise issues higher where they cannot be resolved.
- A briefing paper on the armed forces immigration rules, highlighting a number of areas in which the rules disadvantage the non-UK community. A number of these disadvantages have now been removed by the new Appendix HM Armed Forces and the Home Office has agreed to a meeting later in the year to discuss the rest of them.
- Publication of two separate pieces of research by Anglia Ruskin University and RAND, both looking at understanding and improving the lived experience of non-UK service personnel, families and veterans throughout service and on transition. Research in this area has been lacking so these are very welcome.