Asylum Seekers: Glasgow

Debate between Keith Vaz and Chris Stephens

Tuesday 5th July 2016 Westminster Hall

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

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the provision of services for asylum seekers in Glasgow.

It is a pleasure, as always, to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hollobone. May I thank the Minister for being here to listen to this debate and for taking time to consider this matter? We met to talk about these issues when extraordinary revelations were published in The Times and by BBC Scotland on the treatment of asylum seekers in Glasgow. Since that meeting, more extraordinary revelations have been published by the Sunday Herald newspaper, showing that persistent problems are leading to perverse outcomes.

This debate is very timely. Persistent issues remain in the delivery of housing, which is the lifeline public service for a group of people—women, men and children— who are seeking protection and who, by definition, need more than most the stability that a home should bring. The asylum process is difficult enough without problems of poor housing and treatment to contend with too.

The revelations published recently in the Sunday Herald include the story of an Iraqi woman with health problems and her young child being placed in a dirty second-floor flat for months, despite a doctor’s letter and instructions not to carry her child upstairs. She also claimed that drug addicts were frequenting the shared close. Another asylum seeker said that, despite reporting to the police four times racial harassment against herself and her baby outside her flat, she and her toddler had not been moved. Serco said that a housing officer had visited and was taking the complaint very seriously and monitoring the situation. I do not believe that to be acceptable.

One asylum seeker raised alleged aggressive and intimidating behaviour by the Orchard and Shipman staff who evicted him late last month—an allegation that was reported to Police Scotland. Agencies have also reported pregnant women and families facing eviction. In the past few weeks, up to 20 single men have been bussed from Glasgow to London and Manchester at short notice, with a total of 44 expected to be relocated within a month. Twenty families will then be moved to Glasgow. Another asylum seeker case brought to my attention is that of a constituent who is a single mother of three young children living on the third floor of a tenement building where she is unable to lock her windows.

Organisations representing asylum seekers continue to have concerns. Mike Dailly, principal solicitor and director of the Govan Law Centre, has said:

“There are also repeated cases of overcrowding and severe disrepair. This organisation is largely unaccountable despite receiving significant public funds to protect some of the most vulnerable in our society.”

Shafiq Mohammed, a former Orchard and Shipman employee turned volunteer for the Asylum Seeker Housing Project—ASH—said:

“I would describe some of the properties that we’ve come across as slums. In essence, asylum seekers are living in the poorest-quality accommodation in the city.”

Others have reported insect-infested couches; dirty carpets, walls, bathrooms and kitchens; and common stairwells where people regularly urinated. Two women said that their children had developed skin infections.

Too often we have found that the housing provided through the Home Office’s outsourced commercial contract to Serco, which is then subcontracted to Orchard and Shipman, provides not stability but, sadly, aggravation and harm to those who should be treated with dignity and given housing that is safe and secure. Indeed, the Scottish Refugee Council report of September 2014 shows that what was exposed this year has roots in 2012. There has been a transition from the more locally-rooted and therefore accountable, flexible and efficient model of providing housing for those seeking protection to what we must remember is an experiment in terms of asylum accommodation—a thoroughly market-based approach to the provision of such a vital public service. There is something rather valuable in having devolved, local oversight and delivery of housing for asylum seekers in terms of weaving them into joined-up services, democratic oversight and accountability, the flexibility to, for instance, flip accommodation at the point of positive decision to enable continuity of housing for the refugee and in terms of community cohesion.

Outsourcing may well suit the UK Government, as it allows them to outsource not only service delivery but a fair degree of accountability. Many of us have lost count of how many carefully drafted freedom of information requests and parliamentary questions have not been answered, on the sometimes dubious grounds of disproportionate costs or commercial confidentiality. I trust that the Home Affairs Select Committee will look at that issue; I am pleased to see its Chair, the right hon. Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz), in his place. It may well also suit the UK Government to have their contractors on the front page of media exposés rather than Ministers. The reality is that taking such hits for future contracts could, in the long term, be worth it.

Let me return to the present issues in Glasgow. The Sunday Herald article spoke to a system that is increasingly chaotic. Symptoms of that chaos include the one and a half years that Glasgow, alone in the UK, did not have an initial accommodation facility where everyone could access the new services upon being newly dispersed to the city. In practice, that has meant that not all get their orientation briefings or health screenings done, with delays in accessing financial assistance.

[Keith Vaz (Leicester East) (Lab)]

I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on securing this important debate. I have visited some houses in Glasgow at the invitation of the hon. Member for Cumbernauld, Kilsyth and Kirkintilloch East (Stuart C. McDonald). As the hon. Member for Glasgow South West (Chris Stephens) knows, the Home Affairs Committee is conducting an inquiry into this matter.

Does the hon. Gentleman agree that one issue that should be explored is the dispersal arrangements? The dispersal map of asylum seekers shows that they are concentrated in certain urban areas, but the whole country should take a fair share of asylum seekers.

[Chris Stephens]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for his intervention. He is right that we must look at dispersal. It is to Glasgow’s credit that the city council decided 16 years ago to tell the UK Government that it was happy to take asylum seekers. We in Glasgow are proud of that approach, but the dispersal issue needs to be looked at.

As the Sunday Herald article detailed, there is persistently high use of hotels and hostel-like accommodation for asylum seekers across the board. We know that the numbers in such accommodation quadrupled between November 2015, when the figure was over 100, and May 2016, when it was over 400. This trend shows no sign of weakening. People are being lost in the system and not getting the safe and secure housing that this approach is ostensibly there to ensure.

We appreciate that priority is being given to taking newly dispersed families out of hotels and hostels as soon as possible, but we have been aware of cases over the past few months of families being stuck in such accommodation for six or seven weeks, with the consequence that they feel isolated and unable to put down roots and their children are not entitled to enter school. These specific issues are underscored by persistent reports of people being placed in unsuitable and often overcrowded accommodation and being shunted around Glasgow at short notice and between Manchester and London with insufficient regard to their wellbeing and needs, as the Sunday Herald piece suggested. With an increase in numbers, the system is struggling to cope.

The Scottish Refugee Council and other agencies, such as the British Red Cross, Govan Law Centre and many others, are finding that too often a crude housing-led approach prevails and the needs of individuals and families are a second or third consideration. What action has the Minister taken since the Sunday Herald article was published? What steps has he taken to ensure that these problems do not persist? Will he tell us what actions or penalties are in place for breaches of contract and poor performance by contractors? Can he remind us what penalties or mechanisms are in place that would result in a contractor being removed from provision of these services?

I want to touch on gender and asylum support. One persistent casualty of the housing-led approach is the visibility of women seeking protection. As the Scottish Refugee Council has articulated many times, the asylum support regime effectively silences women. In a recent written answer, the Minister stated that he had no plans to generate or publish asylum support statistics by gender. We think that is an unacceptable omission, which amounts to the UK Government stating that gender is an irrelevant or insufficiently important part of identity to merit analysis or publication in asylum support policy. In my experience of representing constituents, I believe that is a crucial factor.

Just on the asylum accommodation issue, many agencies and groups have documented that women have, inter alia, felt very unsafe in shared flats with no locks, including on bedroom doors, and that housing officers have entered the accommodation unbidden. There is a lack of women-only initial accommodation, and it is unclear what competence and training operational and management staff have in gender and preventing violence against women. Will the Minister reconsider implementing a gendered review of asylum support? Will he publish different statistics for women asylum seekers? Will he look into how women have been treated, particularly in respect of privacy issues?

There is no list of registered social landlords, but there is an issue relating to whether accommodation meets the regulations under the Housing (Scotland) Act 2010. We assume that Orchard and Shipman is not registered under the housing regulations and is therefore not a registered social landlord. That leaves the question of who, under the 2010 Act, has general consent to provide housing services. The regulation of asylum seeker housing seems to be non-existent. I wrote to the Scottish Housing Regulator, who could not tell me who was a registered social landlord under the current Act.

Does the Minister have a list of registered social landlords in Glasgow who provide asylum accommodation? Does the Home Office ensure that social landlords provide housing quality that meets the regulations of the 2010 Act, or does it have a different standard? What expectations does the Minister have to ensure that any accommodation provided by Orchard and Shipman meets the standards of the Act?

COMPASS—commercial and operational managers procuring asylum support services—contracts are priced by UK Ministers at such a low level that only large private-sector companies with no footprint or interest in areas of asylum dispersal can afford to bid for them. It is now clear that the Home Office has three current contractors over a barrel and are keen to extend them into 2017-19. I am aware that one contractor has already asked to extend a contract to 2018. Orchard and Shipman has reported that its Glasgow subsidiary is deriving profit from its asylum seeker contracts and many of us have an issue with that. Serco Group announced to the London stock exchange in February 2016 that central Government justice and immigration contracts were marked out as priorities, both globally and in the UK.

We believe that a different approach would benefit local statutory bodies and communities, and those in the accommodation. The Home Office should seriously consider at least a substantial revision of the outsourcing approach to the provision of housing. The Home Affairs Committee’s asylum accommodation inquiry is one place where I hope that that argument will be taken on. However, it will not be effective if the Home Office decides, inappropriately, to extend the COMPASS contracts to 2019 before the Committee reports and its recommendations are considered. I hope that the Minister will confirm that there will be no extension of contracts until then.

There is clear evidence in our great city of Glasgow of asylum seekers and EU nationals being in fear of their future following the Brexit vote 10 days ago. We are dealing with our fellow human beings, who are fleeing oppression and persecution. Many of them are women fleeing sexual violence. Many, like us, had professions and careers, but are now seeking sanctuary and safety. We have a duty of care to our fellow human beings, and we must treat them a lot better than we do. I hope we can treat asylum seekers as we ourselves would like to be treated if we were in their situation. I look forward to the Minister’s response.