Asylum Accommodation Contracts

Debate between Louise Haigh and Alex Cunningham

Wednesday 10th October 2018 Westminster Hall

[Alex Cunningham]

Exactly. I really look forward to hearing from the Minister how the compliance and monitoring will be improved for the new contracts.

Things may have changed in the last few days, but we believe that the Home Office has not yet received compliant bids in north-east England, Yorkshire and the Humber and Northern Ireland. With no information provided to local authorities about why that situation has happened, the people who could be left to pick up the pieces are being left in the dark. Perhaps the Minister can update the House on the current status of compliant bids and, if we do not have them, tell us about plan B.

In a report put together by Asylum Matters on asylum housing in Tyneside, it was found that there are real concerns about mother-and-child accommodation. Women with two children of different ages are still all put together in one room—a situation that would never normally be accepted in the UK. Babies are particularly vulnerable to sickness in such situations, and the cramped conditions are causing disease to spread at an alarming rate, leading to everyone suffering from a sickness bug but still having to join a queue to use the bathroom down the hall. That is intolerable and even inhumane.

One of the other more emotive issues with the proposed contract has been highlighted by the Home Affairs Committee and so many other people. I am referring to asylum seekers being forced to share a bedroom, perhaps with a person of a different culture, different nationality and different religion. Often, it can be a victim of torture who is forced to share a room. Freedom from Torture has many examples that demonstrate that the Government and their contractors are failing to consider properly the vulnerability of many of these people.

One asylum seeker was placed in a shared room, and even though his therapist wrote to UK Visas and Immigration on three occasions, outlining his depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, suicidal ideation and chronic pain, no response was received for weeks on end and the suffering continued.

[Louise Haigh (Sheffield, Heeley) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend is making a really important point. One reason why this situation happens is that the Home Office fails to effectively share the information with the accommodation provider. Does he agree that the contracts should require the Home Office to share the information and that the accommodation providers should act on it accordingly?

[Alex Cunningham]

Yes, there are always going to be all sorts of issues in relation to confidentiality, but people who are providing direct services need information if they are to provide the correct facilities for people, so that definitely has to be addressed. I see this as the Government overseeing not just bad practice, but dangerous and cruel practice.

Another example involves a young Kurdish man who was moved from Teesside, where he had settled and joined a local church, to Tyneside because an older man sharing his accommodation thought that he could tell him how to live his life simply because he was his elder. The young man was intimidated, but rather than the older man being dealt with, the young man was moved, leaving the troublemaker to start on the next young person to be accommodated there.

One of the organisations in my own patch is Justice First, and I am pleased to see Kath Sainsbury from Justice First sitting in the Public Gallery. It has stressed to me that currently the Government’s position is that a person will not have to share a room if they are determined to be “vulnerable”, yet the Government have refused to define what vulnerable means to them.

In the reply to my parliamentary question about shared accommodation, the Minister said that room sharing will continue to be permitted

“providing it complies with the strict criteria set out in the contracts and with relevant national and local housing regulations, including advice from social services and primary and secondary care bodies on whether room sharing is inappropriate…

In addition all accommodation providers will be required to continue to ensure that they take into account a service user’s individual characteristics and provide them with appropriate accommodation reflective of any changing needs, including adherence to religious practice.”

I ask the Minister today how that will work. Will she spell out what those “strict criteria” are? How does she define vulnerability? How will providers be monitored—the word “monitoring” comes up again—and managed to ensure that they do not just ignore the advice and disregard individual needs? That is quite a list of questions for the Minister and, if she is not prepared sufficiently to reply to them today, I ask that she write to me and publish the reply, because we all need that level of understanding.

We must also work to reduce the use of large-scale houses in multiple occupation. In particular, vulnerable service users such as pregnant women, new mothers, victims of violence or torture, and those with physical and mental health needs should not be in large-scale HMOs. Proper and effective vulnerability screening needs to take place regularly in asylum accommodation to identify individuals with specific support needs, such as those with mental health issues, the survivors of sexual and gender-based violence, survivors of trafficking, pregnant women, young mothers and LGBT individuals. Sadly, the existing contract often fails here, too. The experts on those issues tell me that the new contract is no better. I ask the Minister, what will change in the contract to sort this out? These people need to feel safe and secure in order to be able to rebuild their lives away from the horror they have escaped.

I received a briefing note from Doctors of the World, which recommended that the contracts be amended to ensure that those seeking asylum are provided with the right to register with a GP while housed in initial accommodation. It recommended that the contracts be amended to require accommodation providers to register vulnerable people with a GP within five working days of arrival at initial or dispersed accommodation. Does the Minister agree with those recommendations? Will she at least listen to the doctors and act on that?

The Government’s current position is that accommodation should be safe and habitable, but those are largely relative assessment factors. What is safe for someone who has experienced physical and mental torture? What is habitable to someone who has severe and advanced physical needs? Temporary accommodation should mean exactly that—not six months of never-ending uncertainty and despair. There have been cases in this country under the contracts where there has been a lack of access to suitable nutritious food, a lack of access to drinking water—right here in 21st century Britain—and a lack of a clean and hygienic environment.

There are also examples of bullying from staff at large accommodation facilities. One person, when complaining about the food at the hotel where they had been placed, was told by a manger from the hotel that they would simply, “Tell the Home Office to take you away”—a direct violation of the specific stipulation that asylum seekers should be treated with sensitivity. There must be a complaints management system to provide ways and means for asylum seekers to raise complaints. Instead, they are threatened with removal by the Home Office. That is not a proper complaints management process.

The Home Office has a choice: it can choose to work with local authorities, third-sector organisations and other hon. Members of this House, or Ministers can bury their heads in the sand and try to wipe away their responsibility for another 10 years. But we will not let them forget it and we will keep using our voices to stand up for those who are resident in our country and just want to get by and live their lives.

I have more questions for the Minister to address. Would she be content knowing that her own child was sleeping in a cold, damp house with just a duvet with a 6.5 tog rating? Could she sleep at night if she had an 18-year-old daughter who was sharing a room with a stranger, whose background she did not know? Would she be okay watching cockroaches and rodents crawl across the floor and perhaps on to the bed, while her children were trying to sleep? That is the reality that some people in asylum accommodation are going through.

I have talked extensively—I do not apologise for it at all—about monitoring provision. I wonder whether the Minister has ever visited the supposedly temporary accommodation of asylum seekers. I would be pleased if she has. Maybe next time she could come to Stockton unannounced and see what people have to put up with, rather than going to a place where a provider can set things up for a nice, pleasant ministerial experience.

We have a duty of care over people who are in this country, the conditions they live in and how they are treated. The Minister still has the opportunity to take on board the suggestions from dozens of organisations that really want to help the Government and our refugees. I hope she will take a step back, think and do just that. I look forward to her response.