The Times Magazine 13As soon as refugees started fleeing Ukraine,
Emily Eavis applied to host a family here at
the farm.
“We are the dream really, in terms of being
able to offer accommodation and work as well
- either on the farm or at the festival,” Eavis
says, sitting down in a back room. The family’s
labrador, Clover, wags in agreement from
under a desk. “But we’ve just come up against
lots and lots of brick walls.”
Across Britain, tens of thousands of people
are in the same position as Eavis. They have
offered to take in a family, filled in all the
forms, prepared their spare rooms, gathered
together communities to provide all the help
refugees will need when they get here – and
then, nothing.
Eavis, however, is unlike most who’ve
offered to host, in that she is unusually used
to dealing with administrative roadblocks. The
festival is, after all, a temporary city the size of
Oxford – with its own hospital, water supply,
security and permanent staff. It’s hosted,
among millions of others, Prince Harry,
Beyoncé and the Dalai Lama – so it’s a safe
pair of hands, admin-wise. At first, Eavis
thought it would simply be a matter of being
more determined.
“I contacted the local authorities, our MP,
charities, the government. I’ve called the
Home Office. I can’t tell you how many letters
I’ve written, saying, ‘Come on, speed this up.
Make this happen.’ I’ve spoken to pretty much
every organisation that works with refugees.
We’ve even got people working here with
long experience of this kind of thing – Steve,
who runs the Common [one of the fields at
Glastonbury], looks after a refugee kitchen in
Calais, so he’s got loads of contacts.”
The festival has a long history of helping
refugees – aside from their massive annual
donation to charity, every year they donate
thousands of abandoned tents to refugee
camps, and freight over all their unused
infrastructure to charities: “Stuff like 2,
buckets; brooms – practical stuff like that.”
However, despite all this experience and
contacts, none of Eavis’s communications have
worked: “We always end up at the same point.”
Which is? “We’re waiting for the visas, and
no one knows how long they’ll take.”
Initially, Eavis – like many people with
a platform who’ve applied to host refugees - didn’t intend to make public her commitment.
“I totally understand people getting
annoyed about ‘virtue signalling’...” She
stops. Earlier, we were discussing people
we know – the lead singer of a big British
band; a very famous writer; an actor – who’ve
all offered to host refugees, but have not
spoken about it publicly, as they don’t want
to be accused of disclosing it for “the wrong
reasons”. Virtue-signalling. Most people
see their offers of help as a very private
matter. Eavis too was initially very reluctant.
“We don’t want to look like we’re doing
more than anyone else, you know?” she says
eventually. “Tens of thousands of people
in this country want to house refugees. It’s
just obvious the process is flawed – and so,
because we have a public platform, we need to
speak about that. We need to talk about the
fact this isn’t working. It isn’t working. I want
to go [to the government], ‘Do you need help?’
We’ve got such a good team [at Glastonbury],
maybe we could help here in the West
Country. We could draft people in. We’re good
at admin here! Frankly, though,” Eavis says,
finally looking frustrated, “you just want
to say, ‘Drop the visas.’ That’s the problem.
No other country has them. It’s just totally
unnecessary. It’s log-jammed the whole
system; there’s no movement. My MP this
morning said they’d only let one person into
his constituency, in Wells. One. We know it’s
an easy decision to make – it only ever takes
one person to decide to scrap them. Just- scrap the visas.”
It’s only the visas that are preventing
Veronika and her son from being here right
now, drinking tea with us. Earlier in the week,
bunk beds were delivered to the farm, for
Veronika’s son, “so he can have a mate from
school sleep over, if he wants”. Eavis’s husband,
Nick – a former chef – has been researching
Ukrainian cookery. “Because it’s always
comforting to have something that tastes like
home, right?” They’ve even booked a place on
the school bus, so Veronika’s son will be picked
up and dropped off every day. Everything is in
place – except the people they’re waiting for.
We go and look at where Veronika and her
family will be staying – a self-contained annexe
to the main farmhouse, nicknamed “Boxes”.
“I keep having to explain, we’re not actually
making them sleep in a box! We call it ‘Boxes’
because it used to be the old dairy, and people
would sit on boxes to milk the cows.”
Boxes sits in the shade of a huge willow
tree. It has a bedroom, bathroom, kitchen and
music room, full of every instrument under
the sun. Many of Glastonbury’s headliners
have stayed here. Eavis lists a few worldwide
names she doesn’t want in print, before ending
with, “And David Bowie. You can say he slept
here. He’d be into Veronika being here now.”
We look at Boxes. It looks lovely. But
so... empty.A few weeks earlier, as part of her effort to
home a Ukrainian family, Eavis took part ina Zoom meeting with Krish Kandiah, head of
the Sanctuary Foundation, a collection of
charities that specialise in placing refugees
with host homes in the UK. Previously,
Sanctuary has worked to rehome both
Syrian and Afghan refugees, and is in regular
government meetings – giving advice on how
to manage both sudden influxes of those
needing help and the communities who’ve
offered to host them. Before the government
opened its Homes for Ukraine initiative,
Sanctuary was the biggest organisation trying
to co-ordinate the Ukrainian exodus to the
UK. It has experienced exactly the same
problems as Eavis.
“We’ve had 31,000 individuals, families and
communities signing up to us – WhatsApp
groups, schools, universities. So far, out of
those 31,000 offers, we’ve had fewer than
50 Ukrainians actually get their visas and
arrive here. Fewer than 50.”
Kandiah sighs. He’s the epitome of
diplomacy. “The metaphor I like to use is
of a tanker. Until recently, to be blunt, theimmigration system in this country was
designed in a way to stop as many immigrants
as possible. Now, of course, we’re suddenly
trying to get as many over as possible – but
that’s a big tanker to turn around in a short
amount of time.”
Would it not just be best to scrap the need
for visas? No other country is insisting on
them. “Well, we’ve heard the number of visas
is increasing – and, indeed, if we’re being
cup-half-full, a lot of Ukrainians we’re talking
to are glad the visas mean there’s some kind
of safeguarding in place. We’ve all seen the
stories about unsavoury people on Facebook
contacting Ukrainian women and making
unsafe and abusive offers.”
At the moment, Sanctuary is trying to
be on the front foot on safety issues. It’s
currently organising a pilot scheme whereby
whole groups of Ukrainians who know
each other are brought over here together- “between 20 and 50 individuals” – and
housed within “5 to 10 miles” of each other:
“Then, if something dodgy happens, you’ve
got mates there to help.”
Kandiah is flying to Poland this week, to
try to finalise this test scheme. He’s hoping
both the government and local authorities
will see the safeguarding benefit of keeping
communities together.
“We’re just trying to help the government,
in any way we can, come good on its promise
of an uncapped humanitarian response,” he
‘Our charity has 31,000 offers of homes; we’ve had fewer
than 50 Ukrainians actually get their visas and arrive here’