This extract is taken from an interview I conducted in 2013 with Clare, head of a children's centre in Luton, UK. She clearly expressed her confusion about UK migration policies and the unwanted responsibility and life-changing decision-making power that had recently befallen her and her employees. In the same interview Clare described the large budget cuts the children's centre had to make in the previous three years. It would be a familiar story for anyone working in public services in the UK. She had no ‘core funding’ for her centre. Instead, all of her budget was ring-fenced and targeted for particular projects, such as parenting classes. One of her main concerns was to register and engage with ‘vulnerable’ mothers in her local area.

As we have already seen, locating encounters with the state in the home changes the nature of any negotiations with frontline workers (Chapter Four) and has gendered effects on the intimate everyday lives of Romanian Roma families (Chapter Five). This chapter will show how home encounters go to the heart of negotiations over access to state resources and contestations of migrants’ belonging and explores how these intractable issues are reconciled by individual, low-level frontline workers or volunteers who have wide areas of discretion, increasing responsibilities and decreasing resources. In order to make sense of their roles they draw on their own life experiences, professional training and relationships within the network of frontline workers. It is also worth reiterating here that the patterns that emerge through home encounters are shaped by the UK policy context of the hostile environment and the restructuring of the local authority (Chapter Two), which directly affect the life chances of migrants and our understanding of the governance of marginalisation in the UK (Humphris 2018a).

The home encounter opens spaces for some mothers to develop long-term, personal connections with frontline workers that blur formal bureaucratic roles with informal relationships.