David Cameron must do more for refugees this year, charities say

David Cameron must do more to alleviate the global refugee crisis in 2016 after the government’s “clearly inadequate” response last year, the heads of more than two dozen aid agencies and charities have said in a letter to Downing Street.

In a joint message to the prime minister, organisations including Oxfam, theRefugee Council, Christian Aid, Cafod and Amnesty International say the UK should establish safe and legal routes for refugees into and across Europe.The letter calls on Cameron to do more than take in people who had fled conflict in Syria, and instead “approach this new year with new resolve to address the appalling plight of refugees in Europe”.

Individual charities who signed the letter also made their own parallel appeals to Cameron, with the Refugee Council saying the prime minister should “open his heart and show true statesmanship”. Oxfam, meanwhile, called the UK response so far to the crisis “lacklustre at best, mean-spirited at worst”.

The joint letter says: “Last year’s announcement that the UK will resettle 20,000 Syrian refugees over five years was a welcome first step, but given the numbers of people searching for safety across the globe, this response is clearly inadequate: it is too slow, too low and too narrow. The UK can and should be doing much more to ensure that refugees are not compelled to take life-threatening journeys or forced into smugglers’ hands.”

It comes as a child who drowned off the coast of Greece was confirmed as the first known casualty of the refugee crisis this year.

The letter demands safe and legal ways for refugees to reach the EU and travel across it, noting that in 2015 3,770 people died trying to reach Europe via the Mediterranean. Britain, it adds, “should take a fair and proportionate share of refugees, both those already within the European Union and those still outside it”.

Refugees should have “access to fair and thorough procedures to determine eligibility for international protection”, the letter argues. It says the various signatories, including humanitarian and refugee aid charities, as well as rights groups, “bear witness to the full arc of this refugee crisis”.