Asylum Accommodation Contracts

Jess Phillips Excerpts

Wednesday 10th October 2018 Westminster Hall

[Jess Phillips (Birmingham, Yardley) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to follow my neighbour and colleague in the midlands, the right hon. Member for Meriden (Dame Caroline Spelman). I associate myself with what she said. I also want to talk about the financial element of the contracts and how the money works. I do not know whether I am in an exclusive group in this room or perhaps this House, but I am somebody who has applied for a commissioning contract through a national Home Office contract, so I know what it takes to win a contract with the Home Office. I did it for accommodation for victims of human trafficking. When the Home Office, another Government Department or a local authority commissions things through the voluntary sector, I can tell Members that the monitoring, the length of contracts and the amount of money in the contracts is certainly not what has been suggested today when we have talked about the private sector. The idea of a 10-year contract—even a 10-minute contract—in the voluntary sector would be manna from heaven.

However, I have applied and was successful in the commissioning round of national contracts for accommodation and support services for victims of human trafficking. I remember the very detailed stuff I had to learn about special secure thumb turns for security, specialist issues around single-sex accommodation, specialist support that had to be provided, and the training that my staff had to have. It was very detailed, and rightly so. Nobody would criticise that.

The women we supported in the community—we provided support both in the community and within accommodation support services—were largely women who had been trafficked into sexual slavery and forced to have sex with 15 or 20 men a day. “Raped” is what I should say. Because of differences in where they came from and different immigration statuses, even though they were trafficked, some of those women stayed in National Asylum Support Service accommodation. So we would go out and support them in the community, and that took me to Stone Road in the centre of Birmingham.

I had to go and give financial support to a woman who had been through the national referral mechanism and been identified as being trafficked. I remember the level of security that I had to go through: the police checks and the training I had to do to get the contract as a voluntary sector provider. I went to Stone Road and asked to see the woman. She was on the run from a trafficking gang who had trafficked her for sex, and as I walked through the Stone Road accommodation I saw her name written on the wall with a message that said she had to pick up her post. It was just written there. Anyone could have walked in. Now that was not in the contract that I had to sign up to. The standard seemed to be different for G4S at Stone Road from what it was for me, the provider of secure accommodation for victims of human trafficking. The Home Office loves to trumpet how brilliantly it behaves, but it is the same people living in that accommodation.

When I meet the woman, she is pregnant and sleeping on a mattress on the floor. She looks a size 10, but she is nine months pregnant. We have managed to find her decent trafficking victim accommodation, but it is in Sheffield and I have to tell her she cannot go because the standards that my contract stipulate say that we cannot move a woman at that stage in her pregnancy because she needs continuity of care, and she cries and begs me to let her go because she cannot bear to live there any more. I simply want to ask the Minister why, for the same people and the same commissioning body, the standards are so different for me and for G4S.