Asylum Seeker Dispersal Policy

Keir Starmer Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd May 2016 Westminster Hall

[Keir Starmer (Holborn and St Pancras) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hanson. I congratulate the hon. Member for Rochdale (Simon Danczuk) on securing this debate.

The asylum seekers dispersal policy and the contracts for providing accommodation have something of a sorry history. As we know, the six contracts were signed in March 2012 and taken up by G4S, Serco and Clearel. Only Clearel had any experience of the asylum housing sector, and that soon began to tell. The most significant findings of the National Audit Office’s January 2014 report were that G4S and Serco took on stock without inspecting it, that the Home Office did not apply the key performance indicators in the transition period and that, although the intention and hope was for savings of £140 million, the savings in the year 2012-13 amounted to just £8 million.

Those are not teething problems, but clearly ongoing problems with the current system. The Home Affairs Committee, the Public Accounts Committee and the National Audit Office all highlighted serious flaws in the operation of the current dispersal system. The use of red doors and wristbands in Middlesbrough and Cardiff, which arose earlier this year, led to disquiet among the public and in the media.

There are five big issues. The first is the standard of the accommodation being used, about which the Public Accounts Committee and the National Audit Office expressed concern. The Public Accounts Committee concluded that

“The standard of the accommodation provided was often unacceptably poor”.

I visited Oldham earlier this year—I will mention this a number of times in my speech—and I was struck by the quality of the accommodation provided on the ground in some of the towns in the north-west, where lots of asylum seekers are housed.

Secondly, there is a concern about the oversight and inspection regime. The Home Affairs Committee concluded that

“the complaints and inspection processes…appears to be flawed”.

Asylum seekers have little opportunity to make complaints, and the inspections by the local authorities and the Home Office are ineffective. The issues of the red doors and the wristbands exemplify the flaws in the system. In the end, those issues were exposed by the media, not the complaints and inspection regime, which is intended to deal with such issues.

Thirdly, there is the issue of clustering, which has been touched upon already. There are clearly marked differences in where asylum seekers are housed. Some local authorities take very large numbers—Glasgow has the highest, with some 3,000 or so—but 177 local authorities have refused to take any and a further 100 have taken five or fewer. There are clearly limits, which the Minister will point to, to the policy of not housing in London and the south-east and to the voluntary opt-in for local authorities—in other words, it cannot be mandated—but there are some marked differences. Let me take three examples at random. Swansea has rehoused 843 asylum seekers, whereas neighbouring Carmarthenshire has rehoused none and neighbouring Neath Port Talbot has rehoused only one. Middlesbrough has taken 917, whereas Redcar and Cleveland has taken just 10 and Hambleton has taken none. Glasgow, as I mentioned, has got 3,000, East Renfrewshire has got none and Renfrewshire has got just four. There are clearly big differences across the country.

Fourthly, there is a lack of appropriate support services. In other words, the dispersal of asylum seekers is not matched by appropriate support—whether healthcare, schooling or language classes—leaving asylum seekers isolated and vulnerable.

Fifthly, rising demand is outstripping housing and service supply. We all know that the number of asylum seekers has increased from about 18,000 in 2010 to 32,400 in 2015. All three providers of dispersal accommodation have emphasised that it is proving very difficult to get more accommodation for housing at a viable rate. The 2014 NAO report recommended that the Home Office share forecasts and flow with the contractors. I would be interested to hear from the Minister whether that is happening and, if so, how it is being managed.

The policy questions and issues that arise are these. We need to underline that the dispersal system should be fair, affordable and humane, and that it should protect and promote community cohesion. There is no doubt that, under the current scheme, none of those things are being achieved. I have real concerns about clustering. In Oldham—no doubt, the situation is the same in Rochdale and some of the other areas that have been touched on—I witnessed large numbers of asylum seekers being housed not only in one local authority, but in a particular area within the local authority, predominantly because housing is simply cheaper there than anywhere else. The high concentrations in the areas I visited in Oldham were causing real concern for the asylum seekers, who felt isolated because of how they were being housed, and for the people of Oldham, who felt that they were taking on too much, in one small area and more than they could cope with. So there are real problems for community cohesion in the way that the dispersal system works.

The system cannot be based purely on the bottom line. In other words, the cost of accommodation cannot be the driver—there has got to be a wider approach. Cheaper provision is not synonymous with better provision. A resonating question that has already been asked is, what are the Government doing to encourage more local authorities to take part in dispersal? To be clear, I am not suggesting that the Home Office should be mandating local authorities to take asylum seekers at this stage. I can see real problems with that if that is the fall-back position. Letters have been written, but what more can be done? In addition, what support is being offered to local authorities to make it more likely that more of them will offer to provide accommodation and other services?

What are the Government doing to improve oversight and inspection of dispersal accommodation? I have already mentioned the revelations in Middlesbrough and Cardiff; they throw up a failure of the complaints and inspection system, which needs to be looked at again.

I, too, would like an update on the savings. According to the NAO, the savings in 2012-13 were £8 million of the expected £140 million. We are now nearly four years into the contracts, and it is important for the Minister to give an update on what the savings have been, because they were the driver of the contracts.

It is time to review the overall costs, not only the cost of providing the accommodation now, compared with before the contracts, but the cost that takes the prohibition on work into account. That has been touched on. The only reason why many of the families and individuals who are seeking asylum need to be housed under such arrangements at all is that they are prohibited from working. They fall into the destitute category because they arrive with little in the way of cash or other assets and are prohibited from working. It is therefore inevitable that large numbers within that group must then be accommodated.

Measures have been taken to improve the period within which decisions are made, but many decisions are still not made or concluded within the six months—many more beyond the 12 months—so, for a prolonged period, asylum seekers are prohibited from working and are inevitably dependent upon housing at public expense, which they could otherwise pay for if they were working. All the evidence suggests that at the end of the process, if people are granted refugee status, there is a strong likelihood that they will stay within the local authority where they have been temporarily housed— perhaps inevitably. Furthermore, because they have not been able to work for the period it took for the decision to be made, the likelihood is that the local authority will still have to house them, because they will not be able to go straight into work at the end of it.

I have a probing question for the Minister. Is it time to step back and ask what the overall cost of the dispersal policy is, factoring in the prohibition on work? Would it be better in most, if not all, cases to allow people to work after a given period, so that they can pay for their own accommodation? They would not need to be in a particular local authority to do so.

That supports my wider call: it is now time to review the dispersal policy. There are clearly ongoing problems that have not been resolved. I think that the contracts expire in 2017, with a possible two-year extension, so there is a window of opportunity to review the situation before the contracts are renewed for either two years, or even longer in 2017.

--- Later in debate ---

[James Brokenshire]

I can say to the hon. Gentleman that my local authority is a dispersal area; equally, other Conservative authorities do take asylum seekers in dispersal. As I indicated, we seek to expand those numbers further and I will continue on that in the months ahead.

I want to respond to this point specifically: despite the increasing numbers, we continue to process claims promptly. Indeed, the inspection by the independent chief inspector of borders and immigration found that the Home Office had made significant improvements in the efficiency and effectiveness of its management of asylum casework during 2014-15. It had met its aim of deciding all straightforward claims made on or after April 2014 within six months, while successfully clearing all straightforward claims lodged before 1 April 2014 by 31 March 2015. The inspection also found that non-straightforward cases were being monitored effectively and decided quickly once barriers were removed.

We continue to focus on driving further improvement and ensuring that cases are determined promptly. Of course there are some more complex cases, where we may have concerns over issues of previous criminality or perhaps even war crimes that individuals may be linked to in some way. It is therefore appropriate that we consider matters carefully and cautiously in those circumstances. However, I am clear about the need for an efficient and effective service. We have been driving that through change over recent years and we intend to retain a focus on that.

On the COMPASS contracts, the suppliers are contractually required to provide safe, habitable, fit-for-purpose accommodation to comply with the Housing Act 2004 and the decent homes standards. All Home Office contracts include performance standards that are defined in the contract and managed using key performance indicators. Any failure in delivering the critical service levels may result in deductions against submitted invoices in the form of service credits. The Home Office and the providers regularly inspect asylum seeker accommodation. All three contractors are currently meeting the key performance indicators for property standards. When any defects are found through the inspection regime, such defects are being rectified promptly and within contractual time limits.

I stress the change we have made in the inspection regime. We are listening more closely to service users—I think we had not previously listened and had that rightful feedback from them to a sufficient degree—and working with non-governmental organisations to pick up on issues where they arise, so that we are better able to target the inspection regime and address any concerns about the quality of accommodation that asylum seekers use. The Home Office regularly inspects properties in Rochdale and did so only last week. The inspections found that the accommodation was of a good standard and that the asylum seekers living there felt adequately supported.

To take the point raised by the hon. and learned Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Keir Starmer), the COMPASS contracts, as well as improving accommodation standards, remain on target to deliver £136.4 million of financial benefits during their lifetime compared with the cost of the previous arrangements. As I made clear at the recent, passionate Westminster Hall debate on 19 April on unaccompanied children, the Home Office takes its

“responsibility for the welfare of children seriously.”—[Official Report, 19 April 2016; Vol. 608, c. 286WH.]

We have stringent and statutory policy safeguards in place regarding child welfare. Ensuring that we treat children with care and compassion is a priority.

Last year saw a 56% increase in the number of unaccompanied asylum-seeking children arriving in the UK, particularly in Kent. The Government are grateful to all those in Kent and to other local authorities meeting that challenge for the excellent way in which they have responded to those pressures and we are keen that there should be no repetition of the situation that occurred in Kent last summer. That is why I have announced that we will put in place a national transfer scheme this summer to ensure a fairer distribution of unaccompanied asylum-seeking children across the UK. I am extremely grateful for the collaborative way in which the Local Government Association and the Association of Directors of Children’s Services have engaged with that work. I will be writing to all local authorities again after the local elections to provide further information about the scheme and the support mechanisms.

I am sure hon. Members will agree that the outpouring of support we have seen in response to the Syrian crisis has been incredible, from local authorities that have volunteered to take refugees as part of the Syrian resettlement programme, to offers of help from the general public, businesses and voluntary organisations. Less visible is the ongoing support in communities such as Rochdale and what they have been doing to provide for asylum seekers over a number of years. I pay tribute to those communities.

[Keir Starmer]

I have said before that I think the scheme to resettle Syrian families is very good, but I have a growing concern about a two-tier system. I know that there is much greater financial support for local authorities that house Syrian families than for those that house other asylum-seeking individuals. Does the Minister share my concern that there is a growing perception of a two-tier asylum-seeking system evolving?