Support for Asylum Seekers

Holly Lynch Excerpts

Tuesday 27th April 2021 Westminster Hall

[Holly Lynch (Halifax) (Lab) [V]]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Davies. Let me start, as others have, by thanking my hon. Friend the Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark (Neil Coyle) and the hon. Member for Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner (David Simmonds) for securing the debate, for their outstanding opening contributions and for their leadership on asylum and migration issues. I also want to thank the Backbench Business Committee for allocating the time for the debate. It is often said that debates are timely, but with just a week to go before the end of the incredibly short consultation on the Government’s new plans for an immigration policy statement, ahead of the sovereign borders Bill, it could not be more timely.

There are pre-existing weaknesses in the asylum accommodation and dispersal scheme, combined with the pressures of the pandemic, which we accept have been significant. Added to the direction of travel under this Government, outlined in the policy statement, that creates a pretty toxic outlook.

On contingency accommodation, we recognise the increased need for accommodation, with the early, welcome pause on negative cessations taking the numbers in the asylum system from around 48,000 to around 60,000. Inevitably, that would have brought logistical challenges, and we were sympathetic to that, but over 12 months on, there are no justifications for the shocking conditions that persist in asylum accommodation and the questionable motivations behind Home Office decision making. Contingency accommodation has become far more widely used as the norm than it ever should have been.

The Minister may have read the Refugee Council’s report published last week on the use of hotel accommodation. It outlines just how difficult life has been for people who have been confined to the same room for days and weeks on end and for those who arrived without basics, such as shoes and coats, and who simply were not provided with any. People had insufficient access to drinking water, and there were widespread failures to register them with GPs so that they could access healthcare. In some instances, as we have heard children were not enrolled in schools for months.

I pay tribute to my hon. Friends the Members for Dulwich and West Norwood (Helen Hayes) and for Reading East (Matt Rodda), who shared with us the contributions of their local charities and communities. I am grateful to my hon. Friend for Reading East for introducing me to a number of his local organisations that support those accommodated in hotels.

The Government have said that the use of hotels will end as part of the new plan for immigration. That is incredibly welcome, but what is the plan? Where will those people be accommodated instead? The Home Office provided a quote to The Guardian on Friday, saying:

“As part of our New Plan for Immigration, the use of hotels to accommodate new arrivals will end and we plan to introduce new asylum reception centres.”

I understand that Operation Oak sought to move people out of hotel accommodation and into more appropriate dispersed accommodation, as should be the process. However, that Home Office spokesperson seems to suggest that those currently housed in hotels will instead be housed in reception centres.

At the end of February, an estimated 8,700 asylum seekers were accommodated in more than 90 hotels across the UK. Some were there for months. What exactly will these new reception centres be for? My hon. Friends the Members for Bermondsey and Old Southwark and for Sheffield Central (Paul Blomfield) have stressed how unhappy we are about the proposals. I hope the Minister will explain just how many centres he envisages will be required, how long people will be required to stay in them and what the terms of their stay will be. That quote suggests that the centres will be a form of initial accommodation, but everything else we are hearing sounds much more comparable to detention than initial accommodation. My hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Central and my right hon. Friend the Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) made it clear why that would be a disaster. My fear is that this is a policy choice from this Government—a point already made by my hon. Friend the Member for Hammersmith (Andy Slaughter) and others.

Although I have outlined just some of the problems with hotels, it is clear that there has been a deliberate attempt to conflate initial accommodation with immigration detention, with the use of disused barracks to accommodate asylum seekers. I made a number of these points in last week’s debate. As with the use of hotels, the Government initially claimed that the use of barracks at Penally and Napier was due to the unprecedented pressures of the pandemic. Yet, the equality impact assessment we have seen, which was conducted by the Home Office in September, revealed that use of that particular type of accommodation was born not out of necessity but out of political choice. It suggested that providing nothing but the absolute bare minimum to those seeking asylum is in the interests of community relations. It reads more like a hard-line right-wing manifesto than any equality impact assessment from a Government Department ever should.

The Government’s reluctance to provide anything deemed beyond what is necessary has led to people with conditions such as leukaemia, diabetes or tuberculosis being housed 28 to a dorm and sharing limited toilet facilities, with communal areas cleaned only once a week, during a pandemic.

On 8 March 2021 the then independent chief inspector of borders and immigration published initial findings from site visits in mid-February to Penally camp and Napier barracks with Her Majesty’s inspectorate of prisons. They confirmed that, given the

“cramped communal conditions and unworkable cohorting at Napier”

a large-scale outbreak of covid was virtually inevitable, which is exactly what happened. There were 197 positive cases of covid at Napier barracks between 1 January and late February. We secured the Kent and Medway clinical commissioning group’s infection prevention report undertaken at Napier through a freedom of information request, and that also confirmed that the site does not facilitate effective social distancing. The CCG report also made it clear that the Home Office had a disregard for the wellbeing of not only those accommodated at Napier, but the staff working on the site. At the time of the inspection there had been nine positive cases among staff members. The report also found that all staff took breaks at the same time and that, unbelievably, staff were being asked to sleep three to a room at the site.

The ICIBI report raised serious safeguarding concerns about those who were most vulnerable at Napier, stating:

“There was inadequate support for people who had self-harmed. People at high risk of self-harm were located in a decrepit ‘isolation block’ which we considered unfit for habitation.”

In evidence provided to the Home Affairs Committee last month the Government claimed that they had been

“following guidance in every single way”.

My hon. Friend the Member for Coventry South (Zarah Sultana) spoke of the simply untrue assurances that she was given about the quality of the accommodation. The CCG and ICIBI reports could not be clearer that at no time were such assurances true. On leadership and management, the latter report concluded:

“The Home Office did not exercise adequate oversight at either site and Home Office staff were rarely present. There were fundamental failures of leadership and planning by the Home Office.”

That was not someone else’s failure. It was the Home Secretary’s failure, and those barracks must close immediately.

The wider failures of the system and the nature of dispersal are now putting local authorities under enormous pressure, and there is a sense that the Government are just not listening, which is pushing the system to breaking point. I have seen a letter that was sent to the Home Secretary at the end of March from the leaders of the asylum dispersal areas for the west midlands. They are keen to stress that they recognise their responsibility as a region to contribute to the UK’s asylum and immigration challenges, and they have supported the dispersal scheme since 1999, but they feel they have no choice other than to suspend their participation.

They clearly state that, despite their attempts to engage Government in finding solutions to the challenges they face,

“the absence of any strategic plan has meant we lack confidence on the next steps around engagement to resolve the range of complex and serious challenges we face. What we do know is that the current position is untenable and that we simply cannot continue to support in the same manner going forward.”

When Government’s biggest partners are walking away from dispersal, they have to come back to the table and work constructively to find solutions. Has the meeting sought in the letter happened—with leaders from not just the west midlands but all dispersal areas—to work through the challenges? The former Minister, the right hon. Member for Romsey and Southampton North (Caroline Nokes), made a characteristically powerful contribution, inviting the Minister to work with the Local Government Association to find the solutions we all want.

The letter also makes the point that the use of hotels has been a reality of initial accommodation since the new contracts were agreed in 2019, so any sense that they are used because of the pandemic alone is nonsense. It says that their use

“feels more like an unsatisfactory business as usual arrangement rather than short term contingency.”

That point was made clear in the Red Cross’s report, published today and mentioned already by a number of hon. Members.

The Minister knows that in rule changes made in December the Government gave themselves the ability to deem claims inadmissible if someone arrives in the UK outside of a resettlement scheme, regardless of whether asylum should be granted, and without any agreements having been struck with European partners on returning anyone to anywhere else. Over the weekend, May Bulman at The Independent newspaper broke the story that Belgium, France and Germany have all ruled such an agreement out:

“Belgium’s asylum and migration secretary…said the country had no intention of negotiating unilateral readmission agreements with the UK and that he had already explained his position to the immigration minister”.

The German embassy in London told The Independent that

“no negotiations between Germany and the UK on return arrangements had taken place”,

indicating that bilateral returns deals are simply not on the cards. France echoed those remarks, with a spokesperson saying:

“We will naturally continue our operational co-operation to prevent departures and fight against smuggling networks. With regards to readmissions, asylum is a European subject, which calls for a European response.”

[Philip Davies (in the Chair)]

Order. I am sorry to interrupt the flow of the hon. Lady, but to give the Minister a fair amount of time, can I ask her to bring her remarks to a conclusion?

--- Later in debate ---

[Holly Lynch]

Thank you, Mr Davies. I will take that on board.

Let me say in closing that this approach is utterly unworkable. We will only see more people who are likely to be deserving of asylum not even having their claims considered, while they remain trapped in a wholly inadequate and inhumane system for longer, costing the Government significantly more money to deliver nothing but failure. I very much hope that the Minister will reflect on those points.