Asylum Accommodation

Debate between Chris Stephens and Yvette Cooper

Thursday 14th December 2017 Westminster Hall

[Yvette Cooper]

That is immensely important, and it shows the stark difference between the national contract-based asylum accommodation scheme and the Syrian vulnerable persons resettlement scheme, in which local authorities have a central role; local communities and faith groups are involved in providing support and there is extensive planning for the kinds of support services needed. That community support is crucial. Too often in the asylum accommodation system, local communities feel they have had no say, and that asylum accommodation in their area has no links to either the community or local services. It feels distant and detached. That is when difficulties, tensions or misunderstandings can arise.

In the interests of community cohesion and of being able to draw on the very best traditions of our country and of those who want to provide support for people fleeing persecution and seeking asylum—people in desperate need of help—we should give local authorities a much more central role in the process.

[Chris Stephens (Glasgow South West) (SNP)]

I thank the Chair of the Home Affairs Committee for giving way, and I commend the Committee on its report. Is there not another reason for greater local authority involvement, in that they will know better how to integrate the services for those seeking asylum—for example, by making sure that women fleeing sexual violence have appropriate access to social work and general practitioner services?

[Yvette Cooper]

That is exactly right. A whole range of additional services might be needed, such as specialist support for those who have fled sexual violence, those who have been through family bereavement and separation, and those who need additional support for children or from education services. A whole range of different kinds of support might be needed, including different sorts of housing support. I was going to come on to this point later, but I will mention it now: there is also a need for proper support once refugee status is granted, to ensure that people can find a future in the local community, settle and get the support they need.

In response to that point, the Government have set up a handover pilot. I welcome that and would like to see the results of the pilot; that would be very welcome. As I understand it, the concern of some of the charities working with asylum seekers and refugees is that it is quite sporadic and it has not worked effectively in some places. I would be interested to know the Minister’s assessment of how that work is going, because if we can swiftly help people into work and help them to be embedded in their local community, that is extremely important. It is another good example of what has happened in the SVPRS and, again, something that should be provided more widely. I flag up the concern that the delays in the universal credit scheme, which have been widely discussed in other debates in this House, could make things worse for the settlement of refugees once they have successfully claimed asylum.

Returning to the point about commissioning contracts and providing accommodation, the Committee made a series of recommendations that the Government have not engaged with, including the recommendation that local authorities be given more say and control over where in their area asylum accommodation should go. Alongside that, we should be prepared to oblige local authorities to do their bit. If we give local authorities more flexibility and ability to shape the services, then we should also ensure that there is an obligation on them, so that they cannot just turn their backs and walk away without doing their bit for any of the difficult refugee and asylum schemes in place. Everybody has to do their bit.

We also recommended looking at devolving the commissioning of contracts, rather than having big, national contracts that end up being divorced from local communities, centrally managed and therefore not responsive to local circumstances. For example, we recommended handing commissioning over to the regional strategic migration partnerships that have played a central role in the SVPRS. Why not let them do the commissioning? Why not allow for more flexibility in local areas, so that in some areas the accommodation could be provided by local authorities or charities, rather than it all being done through a small number of national companies—particularly given the challenges we have had over the last period with the way those contracts have worked?

It is disappointing that, instead, the Government have stuck to basically the same contract model, rather than learning from an alternative scheme that is working or looking at alternative ways of doing this. Given the challenges and problems, I am also concerned at the idea of locking in those contracts for 10 years, seemingly with no review period built in during which we could change, adapt or get out of the contracts. We also argued for local authorities to be given a role in inspecting the contracts, because we identified that some of the problem—and this was the evidence we heard—was that the quality inspection regime is not working effectively enough. Giving local authorities that role, and the resources that must go with it, might make for more effective inspections.

[Yvette Cooper]

I do. Giving responsibility for commissioning to the strategic migration partnerships would give us the ability to look at the links between accommodation and broader services, and allow those partnerships to take decisions on a mix of different kinds of accommodation provision within a region. Those could include local authorities bidding to provide accommodation themselves, or working in partnership with other local authorities, charities, housing associations or different kinds of organisations. That allows for wide variety, and for different kinds of bids and proposals to come forward. That was our recommendation in the report.

The remainder of my remarks will be on perhaps the most troubling and distressing part of the evidence we took and of the conclusions we came to in our inquiry. This concerns the quality of the accommodation provided. In our report, we warned that some of the accommodation that we saw or took evidence on was just not fit for human habitation. Committee members visited accommodation, and we certainly saw some that was good quality, but we also saw some that really was not adequate.

In one initial accommodation that I went to, I talked to a women who had I think three very small children. She and her husband had to take it in turns to come down to the communal room to eat because they could not manage to get all the kids down the stairs. They had been put in an upstairs room that was not appropriate for them, and they basically had not taken the kids out of a small room in weeks. That was clearly not appropriate accommodation for that family, who had been through very difficult experiences.

Our report listed serious failings, such as infestations of bugs or cockroaches, unsafe accommodation and inappropriate sharing of accommodation. Our conclusions were that some of the accommodation is a disgrace, and it is shameful that some very vulnerable people have been placed in such conditions. There are different bits of the Government’s response that I disagree with, and we will have disagreements about the policy way forward, but the bit of the Government’s response that troubled me most was in response to our conclusion about the serious inadequacy of some of the accommodation. It simply said:

“The Government does not agree with this conclusion”.

Had the Government said that they recognised that some of the accommodation falls below acceptable standards, and told us the action they were taking to resolve the problem, we would of course have pressed them on their progress, but we would have welcomed the commitment to action.

I am quite disturbed by what appears to be the Government’s failure to recognise that there is a serious problem with the quality of some of the accommodation. We have a responsibility to make sure that the accommodation that people are in is fit for human habitation, but the conditions that some people are stuck in are inhumane. I will give hon. Members an example that I received from the Red Cross since our report and the Government’s response came out:

“My furniture was very old. Some had blood on them. I couldn’t sleep on the bed; there was blood on the bed, like menstruation blood. They gave me new sheets but no duvet. I couldn’t use it. I used my own clothes/wrap as sheets until I got the first money as an asylum seeker and I used this money to get new sheets.”

It is really troubling that somebody is being put in accommodation with that kind of quality problem.

[Chris Stephens]

Does the right hon. Lady agree that any accommodation provided to asylum seekers should be from a registered social landlord? Is she aware of instances in my city of Glasgow in which landlord accreditation has been taken away from providers, but Serco has still used them to provide accommodation to asylum seekers?

[Yvette Cooper]

I am not aware of the case the hon. Gentleman refers to, but I will certainly be troubled if the companies involved continue to use providers who have failed to meet basic standards. The quality of accommodation is immensely important, as is a swift response when facilities or services are inadequate. We need to recognise the importance of providing adequate standards of accommodation.

In another example, a mother and baby were forced to stay in the same accommodation, even though the child had been bitten by bed bugs. This is another example:

“I was not allowed to live in the same accommodation as my heavily pregnant wife and was put into a house more than 3 miles away from her when I first arrived. Despite repeatedly asking to be moved to a house together as the situation was affecting her health, we were not given our own house until the baby was 3 months old.”

Somebody else said:

“it eventually took 5 months for someone to come out and fix the cooker. The G4S officer said we should ‘just eat salad’ in the meantime.”

Those are examples received from the Red Cross and other refugee charities, and they are very troubling. While I recognise that there will always be a programme of work in order to raise standards, I urge the Minister to recognise that some of the accommodation that asylum seekers are being placed in is really not fit for habitation and needs urgent improvement. More action needs to be taken, because if we do not recognise the problems under the last contract, how can we be sure that the issues will be recognised in the new contracts and the new system, and make sure that the problems do not continue?

The Committee also made recommendations on making sure that asylum seekers know how to complain if there are problems and are not prevented from complaining about the quality of accommodation by the fear that it will affect their asylum case, and also on sharing rooms. Serco and Clearsprings do not allow the sharing of rooms, but G4S continues to do so. That is a serious problem. Will the Minister reassure us that, as part of any new contracts, that will not happen?

I will finish where I started. The Government have done some really good work in the last few years with the Syrian vulnerable persons resettlement scheme. I applaud the Government’s work in making sure that that quality support continues, and I hope they will be able to extend and continue not only that scheme for those who have fled the conflict in Syria, but a refugee resettlement scheme for people more widely. However, that good work is being undermined by the lack of quality, standards and safeguards, and the lack of an effective commissioning process around the wider asylum and refugee system.

I urge the Minister to respond in more detail to some of the Committee’s recommendations, and to set out what action the Home Office is taking in response to those recommendations, and how it is making sure that we do not lock in for the next 10 years the problems that have blighted some accommodation over the last few years. Some of the most vulnerable people in the world are dependent on us for accommodation and support—those who have fled torture, trafficking, rape, violence and persecution, and those who have lost their homes, families, friends and countries. We are already doing more for some groups; we can do better for those who really need our help.