Asylum Support Contracts

Andy McDonald Excerpts

Wednesday 10th February 2016 Westminster Hall

[Stephen Doughty (Cardiff South and Penarth) (Lab/Co-op)]

I beg to move,

That the House has considered contracts let by the Home Office for the provision of asylum support.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship today, Mr Stringer, and it is also a pleasure to be joined by many colleagues from across the House to consider this important issue this morning.

It is my hope that this debate today will elicit some better answers from the Home Office in response to the serious concerns that have been raised by many Members from all parties in the House about the provision of support to asylum seekers under contract to the Home Office.

I begin by paying tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Middlesbrough (Andy McDonald) and my neighbour, my hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff Central (Jo Stevens), who have done an excellent job, alongside many others, in bringing concerns about the practical implications of the failures of companies providing asylum support service across the UK to the attention of the House and the country. These include examples involving G4S and Clearsprings, including the two particularly shocking examples of the stigmatisation of highly vulnerable people by placing them in houses with red doors or forcing them to wear red wristbands to get food. I will come back to those shameful episodes in a moment, but it is clear that there are additional serious concerns on top of those two high-profile examples.

To begin with, it is worth putting asylum into the wider context of the immigration debate. I make it clear from the start that I believe in a tough and robust immigration system. Successive Governments—it is important to be frank, so that includes those of my own party—have failed on a number of measures regarding the immigration system, including counting people in and out. Exit checks were not introduced until recently—I had long argued that they should be introduced—and until relatively recently we had failed to begin to address the debate on, for example, EU migration and benefits, which has deeply and corrosively damaged public confidence in the many positives that immigration has brought and can bring. My own diverse city and constituency know those positives only too well.

Let me also be crystal clear that I am very proud of the role that Britain has played in offering a place of sanctuary to those fleeing persecution and violence, and it should continue to play that role. I was proud that in the midst of the Mediterranean refugee crisis last year, a cross-party group, brought together by young people from the Butetown and Grangetown areas in my constituency, stood up in my city of Cardiff and made it clear that refugees are welcome in our city, just as they always have been.

I am particularly proud of the work of organisations such as the City of Sanctuary movement in cities including Cardiff, and local organisations such as the Oasis trust in Splott in my constituency, which are working to support these vulnerable people in many different ways.

There is a huge amount of misinformation about asylum seekers and refugees, and the truth is in short supply. The 1951 United Nations convention relating to the status of refugees states that a refugee is a person who

“owing to well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country; or who, not having a nationality and being outside the country of his former habitual residence as a result of such events, is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to return to it.”

In the UK, a person is officially a refugee when they have their claim for asylum accepted by the Government, and an asylum seeker is a person who has left their country of origin and formally applied for asylum in another country but whose application has not yet been concluded.

I am sorry, Mr Stringer, to have to remind us of these raw facts, but because we are in a time of misleading information and hyperbole about immigration, when the media, debate in this House and indeed the Prime Minister himself frequently and dangerously blur the distinctions between asylum seeker, refugee, EU migrant, economic migrant, overstaying visitor and many other categories, we can come to the wrong policy conclusions, fail to support those seeking sanctuary with dignity, and, at the same time, risk community relations and the potential for integration.

To illustrate my concerns, let me give another example, which gets to the nub of some of the concerns about the issue of these contracts and the way that providers are behaving. A number of constituents and local representatives have contacted me in recent weeks with their concerns about a supposed new asylum facility opening up in a residential area of east Cardiff. They had seen the horrible crowding of people into Lynx House in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff Central, and the media reports, and they are fearful that, for example, a large group of young men might be placed in another unsuitable location, in order to make quick money for a landlord or the contracting company, and with no consultation or dialogue with local residents.

Like most good Cardiff and Welsh people, these constituents and local representatives made it clear to me that they had no objection to asylum seekers or refugees living locally. For example, one older resident told me personally how she would happily welcome in the streets or the local area Syrian families fleeing the horrors that she had witnessed on TV. However, she and others also had very natural fears, which were compounded by rumours that had circulated and the apparent lack of any consultation or dialogue.

In yesterday’s sitting of the Home Affairs Committee, I asked the chief executive of Clearsprings directly whether or not he plans to operate more facilities like Lynx House in east Cardiff, as he had indicated to my hon. Friend the Member for Streatham (Mr Umunna) that he was likely to want to expand his company. I await the chief executive’s urgent reply. Perhaps the Minister can enlighten me, if he is aware of any facts relating to the further plans of Clearsprings in Cardiff.

Many other people have expressed fears, which are often unfounded and based on the hyperbole in the media debate, and other concerns have been fuelled by disgraceful comments, such as the Prime Minister referring to a “bunch of migrants”. As I have said, herein lies the nub of this issue. We appear to have a situation in which the Home Office is contracting with a small number of companies to place highly vulnerable people, often, it seems, in crowded or unsuitable accommodation, in a very small number of areas in a small group of dispersal centres and cities, and frequently in areas of low rents and deprivation. It is good to see the Minister for Immigration himself here in Westminster Hall today, but he admitted yesterday that he had most likely zero or very few asylum seekers accommodated in his own constituency.

[Andy McDonald (Middlesbrough) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend is making an excellent speech. Regarding how these properties are let, was he as amazed as I was to discover that different people can be put into a single bedroom quite inappropriately? A young man in my community who is gay and who has come to this country is having to share a bedroom with somebody who was once a member of the Taliban. Does my hon. Friend not find that an utterly ridiculous state of affairs?

[Stephen Doughty]

I find that absolutely extraordinary; my hon. Friend gives a shocking example. As a gay MP myself, I would find it horrendous to be placed in accommodation with somebody who potentially had persecuted me or potentially would persecute me. However, that is the reality of many people’s experience—they find themselves in unsuitable accommodation. Yesterday in the Home Affairs Committee, we heard one example of 11 people being crowded into a room, and I have heard examples of individuals being placed with people who allegedly may have persecuted them in the past. Some very serious concerns are being raised.

The asylum dispersal and integration process appears to have stopped, and the principle behind it appears to have been abandoned, not only at the limited number of dispersal locations but at the localities within them. I would be interested to hear the Minister’s views on that and on whether we are getting things right. Simply put, the system as it stands is not good for those seeking sanctuary, not good for the communities that those people are being placed in and not good for wider integration, and I also question whether it is good value for the Government.

--- Later in debate ---

[Stephen Doughty]

My hon. Friend makes an excellent point. People who have been through those fearful situations—many of them are fleeing such places as Eritrea, Syria, Iraq or Afghanistan—will be fearful of expressing concerns.

The situation is apparently not unique to Cardiff. My hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Yardley (Jess Phillips), who unfortunately cannot be present today, wanted me to highlight her experience of working in the asylum system. She noted how women who have fallen through the gaps of the national referral mechanism for victims of human trafficking have suffered greatly under the lack of specialist provision in Government-contracted asylum accommodation. She told me that, for the women who end up housed in G4S accommodation in the centre of Birmingham, none of the same stringent checks and balances that are normally in place for victims of human trafficking are catered for. There are no non-gendered services and there is next to no security in place to protect that vulnerable group of people. Indeed, she was able to walk into the accommodation and witness the name of a woman who had been trafficked written on the wall in the hall, displaying to anyone who might have walked in looking for her that she was there. That is totally unacceptable and raises serious concerns about the special provision needed for some of the people fleeing such situations.

On the COMPASS contract, an answer from the Minister made it clear that in 2012 Clearsprings Ready Homes was awarded two contracts for the provision of asylum accommodation, transport and related services. The estimated contract value for Clearsprings over the seven years—that is, five plus two—for each region is £75 million for Wales and £55 million for London and the south of England. The Clearsprings chief executive admitted yesterday that in 2015, while things were not quite as profitable as he would have liked, he received a salary package of more than £200,000 in return for delivering the contract. His chair, Mr King, received a package totalling £960,000. Most people, whether they are taxpayers or vulnerable asylum seekers, would find those figures astonishing. Other significant and valuable contracts have been let to other providers, including G4S—I am sure we will hear more about those.

The COMPASS contract has a statement of requirements for dispersal accommodation and transport providers. It is worth being specific about the key requirements under the contract. The first is to provide safe, habitable, fit for purpose and correctly equipped accommodation to asylum seekers and to ensure that properties adhere to the standards established in the decent homes standard. The second is to provide adequate transport to and from initial accommodation, dispersal accommodation and medical appointments. The third is to abide by contractual management regulations at all levels, ensuring that there is a complaints procedure for those living in dispersal accommodation and that organisations report on their performance against the specified standards. Each of those duties must fulfil the broader contractual duties to promote and safeguard the welfare of children in particular, to ensure the safety and security of those living within dispersed accommodation, and to ensure that staff have an overview of the asylum process and the needs particular to those seeking asylum.

Yesterday, I made that point directly to the chief executive of Clearsprings, who appeared to imply in his evidence to the Home Affairs Committee that his duties relate only to the bare provision of housing. The words he used were that he was “contractually compliant”. Given the very specific needs of the group of people he is accommodating, I argue that his company and the Home Office should be acting proactively to ensure that the duties set out in the contract are fulfilled.

I have given a number of examples already, but it is not only from my experience that I question whether the standards are being met. During 2015, the Welsh Refugee Council collated a series of complaints demonstrating persistent failings to meet the standards. Analysis of the data reveals a series of persistent concerns around standards of accommodation, size of accommodation, and harassment and antisocial behaviour experienced in accommodation from other tenants and members of staff.

The complaints reveal that it is not simply the physical condition of the properties provided by Clearsprings—we have heard about the situation at Lynx House—that are of concern for service users and providers; the standards of service provision were identified as a serious concern, and there was a general feeling that the service provider had little appreciation of the difficulties faced by asylum seekers and their reasons for seeking sanctuary in the UK. There was a common perception in the survey that there was a greater focus on internal targets and profit generation than on providing a service that protected and supported vulnerable people.

[Andy McDonald]

My hon. Friend is eloquently analysing the structure of the contracts. Does he share my frustration that Jomast, a subcontractor in my area, has some 3,000 properties, and if they are paid £11.50 per person per night, the back of an envelope calculation shows an income of £12 million a year? Such access to taxpayers’ money could surely provide a better service than the one we are currently enjoying.

[Stephen Doughty]

I wholeheartedly agree with my hon. Friend’s comments. Serious questions need to be asked when such a large amount of taxpayers’ money is provided under the quite stringent terms of the contract, but are those terms followed through and delivered? Given that Home Office inspectors regularly visit the properties, as the chief executive of Clearsprings made clear yesterday, why have those concerns not come to attention before?

The concerns that sanctuary seekers face are a constant source of worry and anxiety, often aggravating pre-existing experiences of trauma in what should be a place of sanctuary. Some have reported that their interactions with Clearsprings staff are not consistently facilitated through interpreters, and there have been multiple incidents of perceived hostility and verbal abuse from staff towards residents. Another issue that has been raised with me is the question of male versus female staff in the properties. It has been suggested that there is a significant weakness in terms of the numbers of female members of staff, so can the Minister tell us what the numbers are?

The Welsh Refugee Council and various other charities that deal with refugees and asylum seekers have strongly advocated a radical change in the Home Office’s approach to housing. It is clear and evident that more care must go into supporting this distinct group of people with complex needs, many of whom have experienced persecution, torture and violence.

I will conclude shortly because I know other Members wish to speak, but I want to talk about what needs to happen with the COMPASS contract, and I have specific questions for the Minister. It is my belief that the Home Office should initiate and lead a comprehensive review of the COMPASS contract in Wales and nationwide to deal with housing standards and the experience of users. The review should be multi-agency and should involve, at the very least, the Welsh Government, local authorities, key housing bodies, refugee representatives and the support organisations that work with them.

The review needs to have clear objectives, including improving the monitoring and contract compliance practice within COMPASS, and it needs to underscore the existing COMPASS statement of requirements with a new person-centred framework and guidelines to ensure that high-quality planning, policy and practice exist within COMPASS for all asylum applicants in the UK. It needs to look at the Home Office’s wider equalities duties and its commitments to those who face human trafficking, because it is clear that there are failings in that area. It also needs to look at the experience of users. At a senior level, a contractor might promise to deal with X, Y or Z and to uphold certain standards, but if that is not filtering down to those who actually interact with the relatively small group of vulnerable people, that is simply not good enough.

My final questions for the Minister are these: is he satisfied with the compliance of Clearsprings and other asylum contractors with the terms of the COMPASS contract? Does he consider that they still represent good value for money? Why did no Home Office inspector raise concerns with Clearsprings about the red band issue prior to its exposure in the media? What other concerns have been raised with him about Clearsprings operations in Cardiff or elsewhere in the UK?

Does the Minister consider the salaries and remuneration of the Clearsprings directors and CEO to be appropriate for a public sector contract of this nature? The chief executive of Clearsprings admitted yesterday that the £960,000 payment to his chair resulted from a discussion with Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs about the best “tax approach” to take to a loan. Can the Minister tell us any more about that and whether he was aware of any such discussions involving HMRC? How many individual sites does the Clearsprings contract house asylum seekers at in Wales? Is he aware of plans to expand those facilities? Obviously, I have specific concerns about the plan to expand into another potentially unsuitable facility in the east of Cardiff.

Finally, is dispersal evenly spread across localities and local government wards in Cardiff and other dispersal locations across the UK? I have a concern that we are not dispersing to enough locations in the UK. There is a question of what happens within cities and the localities into which individuals are placed, which is crucial when we consider integration and balance within a city.

I conclude by reminding Members that we are not asking for special or VIP treatment. We are simply asking for human beings to be treated with the dignity and compassion that they rightly deserve, and it is the Home Office’s duty to ensure that that is the case.

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[Andy McDonald (Middlesbrough) (Lab)]

It is an honour to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Stringer. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff South and Penarth (Stephen Doughty) for securing this incredibly important debate. My constituency has the highest concentration of asylum seekers anywhere in the United Kingdom. In December 2015, we had 1,042 asylum seekers, which is way in excess of the cluster limit. The Minister may say that the number has been reduced by some small amount, but the figures are clear. In some communities, there is an asylum seeker for every 18 residents, and I hope the Minister will take that fact on board.

I am terrifically proud of Middlesbrough’s long history of compassion and support. We have Justice First, the Churches—Methodist Action, the Catholic Church and the Anglican Church—and other faith groups, charities and individuals. A fantastic network of love and compassion underpins all that work, and I am delighted to celebrate it.

It was the red doors issue that brought this matter into focus. While I do not criticise Andrew Norfolk of The Times for his excellent piece of work that brought the issue into the light, I do not agree that the local contractor, Jomast, deliberately set out to mark the properties occupied by those seeking sanctuary, but it was clearly known to the contractor. They were its properties and it painted the doors red, so for it to plead ignorance of the issue is indicative of the arrogance that characterises how it goes about its business. However, it was not deliberate so let us paint the doors in other colours and move on.

G4S is the main contactor in my region. It has no record of running housing contracts and yet it still got the contract. The local subcontractor, Stuart Monk of Jomast, then had them over a barrel. He held out for the best deal that he could possibly extract, because he had the properties and G4S did not, and he has made a mint. G4S says it does not make any money out of the contract. Well, diddums. If it does not like it, let us bring the contract to an end and get G4S out of the picture as quickly as possible. It has demonstrated that it should be nowhere near Government public service business. Just look at what it did in our prisons. We only have to cast our minds back to the dreadful fraud it perpetrated on the taxpayer over the prisoner tagging contract. It is not a fit and proper company and the sooner it is out of our national life, the better.

The arrogance and contempt that characterises so much of G4S’s behaviour was never more evident than when John Whitwam, a managing director, recently appeared before the Home Affairs Committee. He quite deliberately tried to leave the Committee with the impression that the local authority was totally engaged throughout the process, but that is simply not true. Indeed, the problem is that local authorities have no standing in the business of housing asylum seekers and have been cut out of the loop. Following Mr Whitwam’s suggestion that local authorities are somehow involved in the approval and inspection of properties, I trust that the Minister will speak to the Chair of the Home Affairs Committee because I think that Parliament was grossly misled and I hope that action follows.

What on earth are we doing as a country? Why do the Government think that the right thing to do in response to a humanitarian crisis is to create a structure that is all about making money—profits created by handing over taxpayers’ money to private companies? There is something wrong here. Of course, we want to carry on providing succour and support for our sisters and brothers, but the Government simply abuse our good nature. That support and sanctuary should come with a commitment to support the local services that have to respond. My town has been hammered by the lunacy of austerity. My local authority has suffered cut after cut, so that I am now questioning whether it can even begin to discharge the barest of statutory functions.

In addition, what do we learn today on the back of the abolition of the revenue support grant, which will cripple communities up and down the country? In The Guardian this morning it is laid bare: again, the Tory Government punish Labour councils and give support to their Tory boroughs. The Government’s behaviour is partial, inequitable, grossly discriminatory and ill-becoming a party that purports to govern for the entire country. It is beneath the shires and City bankers to trouble themselves with such matters—leave it to the northerners, the Scots and the Welsh—because those in their cosy world do not want to be troubled.

It will escape no one’s attention that in the Prime Minister’s constituency we will not find a single person seeking sanctuary, even though areas such as his receive the favourable local government finance settlement transitional relief, while areas that take asylum seekers get nothing at all. The unfairness is stark. Perhaps the Prime Minister’s mother should write him a letter. Understandably, the Tories will say, “Look to the regions, look to the Labour heartlands. They won’t protest, they won’t complain, so we can get away with it.” Therein lies the dilemma.

We are proud of our compassion and of the welcome given to strangers in our communities—many of us and the people we represent have been strangers too. We try to recognise our good fortune and to be generous to those who have not been so fortunate. Yes, we will not walk by on the other side of the road and we will try to treat people as we would like to be treated ourselves, but we look to the Government to behave in a patriotic, fair and balanced way. That means that we respond generously as a nation and we do not leave it only to those parts of our country that are already facing immensely difficult times.

We look proudly at our history as a nation. We are rightly marking the 71st anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau. We rightly remember the Kindertransport of the 1930s as a positive response to the crisis faced by thousands of children throughout Europe. It therefore pains me to hear the Prime Minister of Great Britain and Northern Ireland describing the modern-day Kindertransportees as a “bunch of migrants”. I want better from our country’s Prime Minister and so do millions of our fellow citizens. I am afraid that that laid bare the true thinking of this cruel and pernicious Government.

If every town and city in the United Kingdom welcomed 5% of the distressed, vulnerable and persecuted people that my wonderful town of Middlesbrough does, no one would even notice that they were here. What happens instead? The whole exercise has been turned into a profit-making, value-extracting one for the likes of Stuart Monk and his company Jomast to make millions of pounds of profit from.

The Minister is a decent man and I look forward to further discussions with him about how things might be progressed. However, I met with him in November 2014 and many of the issues that are being raised now were raised with him then. I regret to note that absolutely no progress has been made since. I hope that he takes on board the comments of hon. Members from throughout the United Kingdom today and accedes to the request for a formal review of a rotten contract. Let us start behaving properly.

[Graham Stringer (in the Chair)]

Before I call Stuart McDonald, I advise the Minister that the proposer of the motion does not require the two minutes or so at the end of the debate.

--- Later in debate ---

[Stuart C. McDonald]

The hon. Lady makes an excellent point and I agree wholeheartedly. Having only 17 Home Office inspectors for some 36,000 placements seems wholly inadequate. Furthermore, the lack of complaints is not surprising given the vulnerable nature of many of the people who use the services, as hon. Members have said, and given the evidence that induction packs are often insufficient, if they are even given out at all. It is little surprise that it is not the KPIs, inspections or complaints that are throwing the problems up—it is campaign groups, non-governmental organisations and diligent investigative journalists.

The question is, what more would we discover if we had a thorough inquiry into how the contracts are working? At the moment we can only speculate, but we can all agree that there are enough danger signs for us to say that we definitely need such an inquiry. I have asked for the Home Affairs Committee to undertake that task, although I agree that other possibilities exist.

In fairness to the Immigration Minister, he did not make the decision to switch to the COMPASS contract. That decision was made in 2009, with the then target contracts phased out in time for COMPASS kicking off in 2012. As the hon. Member for Stockton North (Alex Cunningham) pointed out, the ambition was to save £140 million on services over seven years by replacing 22 separate contracts with six larger COMPASS contracts.

Although the Minister was not responsible for instigating the contracts, he will soon have to decide whether to extend them and I hope that he will not do so without a thorough and wide-ranging review of contractor performance. I also hope that the Home Office will wait for such a review before pressing ahead with the welcome plans to broaden the number of local authorities involved in dispersal.

We on the Opposition Benches doubt whether such services can ever be amenable to contracting when the only possibility to maximise returns is cutting corners and costs and the people accessing services have no choice in who provides their housing. In other words, they have to like it or lump it, and many asylum seekers will lump it silently. Serious consideration should be given to changing fundamentally how we provide housing for asylum seekers, including a possible return to provision by local authorities. We also have to consider whether the savings envisaged by the COMPASS contracts have been delivered.

[Andy McDonald]

The hon. Gentleman is making an important contribution. On local authorities stepping back into the breach, does he share my concern that while that is desirable, it would be a disaster if money did not follow that move? If that path is pursued, my fear is that Government will simply expect local authorities to take that on without that qualification.

[Stuart C. McDonald]

Absolutely. There is a huge question mark over whether sufficient resources have been provided to fund the contracts and that remains as a question whether services are returned to local authorities or not.

We must consider whether the savings envisaged in the COMPASS contracts have been delivered by so-called efficiencies or simply by lowering accommodation standards. I thank the hon. Member for Cardiff South and Penarth for ensuring that the House considers asylum support contracts, which will require even more detailed and thorough consideration in the months ahead.