Support for Asylum Seekers

Neil Coyle Excerpts

Tuesday 27th April 2021 Westminster Hall

[Neil Coyle (Bermondsey and Old Southwark) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the effectiveness of asylum accommodation and the dispersal scheme in providing support for asylum seekers.

I draw the House’s attention to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests for the support that I have received, for research capacity in my office in relation to my work on asylum seekers, refugees and migrants, from RAMP, the Refugee, Asylum and Migration Policy Project, which I thank also for supporting the hon. Member for Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner (David Simmonds) and me in seeking this debate. It is a pleasure to serve under you in the Chair, Mr Davies.

Let me start with some more thanks to all colleagues, across almost every party, who have backed the debate, and to all those organisations that not only have briefed for this debate, but work on this issue day in, day out, supporting some of the most vulnerable people across our country. I thank all my constituents who have messaged me to bemoan the awful system imposed by the Home Office, and all those out there who retain faith in the UK’s historic contribution to shaping international law on asylum and our equally historic contribution in not just settling asylum seekers in our country, but benefiting from the contribution that they have made to enrich our country’s economy and culture over very many decades.

Some people seek to cloak themselves in our flag, but wish to sidestep or even ignore our traditions and our historic sense of duty in always being there to support people in need—and people are in need in growing numbers across the globe, which is why an effective and efficient policy is so important. The world remains a dangerous place—from armed conflict, from growing resource and climate conflict and from growing aggression and human rights abuses in China, Russia and other countries, putting even more people at risk. Despite those growing risks, I am unsure whether there is another area where Tory rhetoric on global Britain clashes more harshly with the reality of this Government’s policies, given the planned cuts to our armed forces and the massive reduction to our international aid budget, despite manifesto commitments.

Many of the people in need will reach our shores, and when they arrive, we have responsibilities—legal duties. It is essential that we live up to our responsibilities—responsibilities to asylum seekers and responsibilities to the British public, who want to see an effective system that not only weeds out the tiny, minute, fraction of bogus claims fast but, equally quickly, resettles the overwhelming majority of genuine asylum seekers at the best price for the UK taxpayer. Sadly, that is in no way what we have currently. Instead, we have a fragmented system, badly mismanaged by the Home Office and, at the very start of the process, getting even the basics wrong. The British Red Cross has reported that 81% of asylum seekers do not even receive information in their own language. They are not told what is happening and will happen to them; and two thirds did not get health screening, even during the pandemic.

Then the Home Office shunts people into short-term asylum accommodation while their eligibility for support is assessed. Usually, people should then be moved to dispersal accommodation across the UK, where they will live until a decision is reached on their full application —often after a lengthy delay. During that period, people are prevented from working. They have no choice over where or how they are housed, and they are provided with just £39.63 a week to support themselves. That is a far cry from the £150,000 a year that the Prime Minister gets, and he is apparently still reliant on someone else to cover redecorating bills.

This is a crumbling, pernicious system, which has directly contributed to covid infections, crime and chaos, but it is overseen—ironically—by the Department with overall responsibility for tackling crime and disorder in the UK: a Department that has been warned so many times about this inhumane, inefficient and expensive system, which the National Audit Office and Public Accounts Committee have laid bare. The National Audit Office reported last July that the system that the Government have adopted caused costs to escalate by 28% to £568 for each accommodated asylum seeker, and saw a 96% increase in short-term, more expensive accommodation. In November last year, the Public Accounts Committee warned of a system in crisis and recommended:

“The Home Office should, within three months, set out a clear plan for how it will quickly and safely reduce the use of hotels and ensure that asylum seekers’ accommodation meets their individual needs.”

I look forward to hearing from the Minister today, six months later, how that is being delivered.

Understandably, the Minister will say that covid is responsible for some of the rising costs and inefficiencies of his Department’s policies. I hope he will outline when those costs will fall and the strategy adopted in response to repeat NAO and PAC concerns. I also hope he will acknowledge how Home Office policies go back to before covid. There were more than 1,000 people in hotels in October 2019, before covid was identified in China, let alone before it began to be responded to by a Government headed by a Prime Minister whose own delayed decisions contributed to covid deaths in the UK. I will not repeat his sickening comments about piling up the bodies, as they are so raw for the 127,000 families who have lost loved ones.

I think the level of interest in this debate is due in part to the dramatic rise in hotel and other inappropriate accommodation use. At the end of February, almost 8,700 people were living in hotels across the UK, according to the Refugee Council. It is important to remember that the increased number of people living in contingency accommodation is due not to a rise in applications, but to a Home Office backlog. Also, these are hotels where people might stay for a short stop en route, not for a holiday or extended break, as they are often on the edge of towns, far from amenities and certainly far from the healthcare services needed by people who have been through trauma elsewhere, and who in some cases have acute mental health needs.

In London, more than 6,000 asylum seekers are in hotels, and roughly 1,200 are children, some unaccompanied. Again, this is not a holiday; it is isolating, lonely, and also exposed. “Line of Duty” has made more people familiar with the term OCGs. As a direct result of Home Office policy, organised crime groups have targeted asylum seekers in Home Office-funded premises to engage them in illegal work and other crime, including drug trafficking. Vulnerable people are made worse off by the Home Office, with criminals benefiting from Home Office policy. The fact that the Department oversees law and order policy in the UK is a joke when it cannot even ensure that the premises it funds are off limits to OCGs.

The people in hotels were originally scheduled to be moved out by March 2021. In February, the Home Office announced its intention to move people out of hotels again, through Operation Oak, but the process has yet to be completed, and the Home Office has said that it simply intends to complete it by the summer. I hope the Minister will today confirm the new date, full plans and staging post for delivery. The fear is that this is still “Operation Acorn”.

Of course, some costs in the system are avoidable if the decisions are made quicker. The Home Office website still claims, ludicrously, that someone seeking asylum will “usually” have a decision within six months. That is simply untrue and has been for some time. More than 64,000 people are awaiting decisions, according to the Refugee Council, and the British Red Cross says that 72% have waited more than six months. Perhaps the Minister will update us on the average time today. I will be amazed if colleagues can stay in their seats both here in the room and at home, given the previous claims and the average delays that we see for our constituents.

I will give two examples from Bermondsey and Old Southwark. I have raised the cases of an Eritrean woman and a Mongolian man seeking asylum since 2017. Not only do they not have a decision four years later, but the Home Office cannot even give a timeframe for when their cases will be concluded. Perhaps the Minister can tell us today when and how the Home Office will cut the horrific backlog that his Government have created.

The vast majority of asylum seekers have their claims upheld—more than 90% for many countries—so the delay is a needless burden that affects the asylum seeker and also imposes massive cost penalties on the taxpayer: first, in expensive, avoidable temporary accommodation; secondly, because the Home Office prevents people from working; and thirdly, because of the avoidable and lengthy delays to decisions and eventual settlement and work.

At the end of September 2020, there were 3,621 Sudanese, Syrian and Eritrean nationals who had been waiting longer than six months for a decision on their application. The grant rate across those three countries at initial decision was 94% in the year ending March 2020. It could be faster, but it requires a focus from the Home Office that simply has not been there, and that I suspect we will not see from the Minister today.

The system was bad enough before covid, but covid has brutally exposed the inadequacies of the asylum process, with routine delays, inflated costs, needless waits, and prevention from work, even for the one in seven asylum claimants who have a professional background in health and social care. People that this country could have desperately done with working in our services to support people through the crisis were prevented from doing so by Government policy.

But no one could have been prepared for the horrors of the Napier barracks—a cross-party issue on which, I think, 45 questions have been asked since January from all parts of the House. The interest was because Napier exposed the worst excesses of this system, which fails people fleeing torture, genocide, war and persecution, but also fails the taxpayer, our historic contribution and the British tradition of not passing by on the other side of the street. The Napier barracks issue is likely to result in further costs to the taxpayer, with legal cases resulting from this inhumane system imposed on people fleeing to the UK for help, but forced to live in accommodation that public health bodies had said was unfit for use and likely to increase the risks of infection.

The Government claimed a few years ago that the Home Office was reviewing the hostile environment, but it was proved to be only too alive and kicking during the pandemic, perhaps inevitably under a Home Secretary who proved to be the most hostile of bosses. Will the Minister update us today on where that review is, or if it even still exists? Napier shows that, at the same time as wider Government was telling the public to stay home, isolate where possible and protect the NHS, this bit of the Government, the bit that solely determines where asylum seekers live, chose to accommodate people in dormitories of 28: communal, unhygienic spaces that contravened Government guidance and public health recommendations—a shameful episode.

The shadow Minister for Immigration, my hon. Friend the Member for Halifax (Holly Lynch), wrote to the Government in December calling for a review of covid safety in all establishments being used for accommodation. In a response at the end of the year, the Home Office claimed it was committed to upholding statutory duties, including providing safe covid-compliant accommodation to those who need it, but failed to undertake that review. Does the Minister have an answer or explanation for that failure today, or better still an apology to the people put in those horrific circumstances?

Sadly, instead of learning from this hideous mistake, which rightly caused public outrage, Ministers planned to extend the use of communal rooms, with proposals for cabin-style accommodation on former MOD land in Barton Stacey. The indications are that Ministers have learned nothing, but I hope we will hear today that Napier will be no longer used and other proposals will be dropped.

I asked for this debate not just to highlight the issue of short-term, costly and dangerous asylum accommodation, but to look at the wider problem that the Government have created surrounding long-term housing through the dispersal scheme, introduced under the Immigration and Asylum Act 1999, which was designed to try to ensure an even spread of support across the country. However, under that scheme, local authorities reach voluntary agreements with the Home Office to accept asylum seekers, and the Home Office has not negotiated well.

Many local authorities have no agreement with the Home Office at all. In Scotland, only Glasgow City Council accommodates asylum seekers. At the end of last year, 223 local authorities throughout the UK were taking no asylum seekers. The system is simply not working. I hope the Minister will explain how the Home Office is delivering the Home Affairs Committee recommendation that it should pursue the commitment he made to a more equitable and sustainable system by expanding the areas participating in dispersal.

Resources are, of course, part of the issue. Councils stress that after a decade of cuts to their budgets, there is no incentive to participate. The costs to local authorities supporting asylum seekers come from social care, homelessness services and other additional support needs. There appears to be no strategy or plan from the Home Office to address this issue to work with local authorities or better support asylum seekers moving out of contingency accommodation and into communities.

The ICIBI report in March stated that there was little focus on helping residents to prepare for next steps and next to zero focus on driving up the quality of the accommodation provided. Despite promises that improvements to accommodation be made, there is increased use of inappropriate emergency sites without wraparound support.

The 10-year contracts the Home Office is using are valued at £4 billion, but information about how these services are performing remains closely guarded. Perhaps Government secrecy is unsurprising when it comes to admitting failings or trying to improve services.

I hope the Minister will tell us his plans to address these issues today and when that plan might start. There is currently no sustainable plan. The only prospect is more of the terrible same, or worse, as numbers continue to rise and costs continue to escalate for emergency temporary accommodation for asylum seekers and costs to the taxpayers.

There are, of course, options on the table. The Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government might be better placed to provide some supported accommodation. Local authorities are often overlooked by this authoritarian, centralised Government. The need for a place-based, more equitable approach to dispersal has been consistently raised by the Local Government Association, which resulted in the Home Office and Local Government Chief Executive Group, co-chaired by the LGA, with representation of each region and devolved Administration, established in 2019 to develop a 10-year plan for a more equitable distribution of support. I hope the Minister will give us an update on that equitable distribution today.

Others suggest a local authority public health-driven approach. Incidents in hotels and barracks in recent months have highlighted the importance of advance notice, engagement and the sharing of data, so that local services are aware of who is in their locality and what their health needs are.

Sadly, as things stand, the Local Government Association states that the dispersal structure has been abandoned during covid. It is unclear how it will return or what is in place for when the pandemic ends. Partnership is needed on this issue. Will the Minister tell us how relations will be rebuilt? How will the Government address local authority concerns and deliver a more affordable system to the taxpayer, in partnership with the communities that will provide the ultimate long-term address for asylum seekers? At a minimum, I hope the Minister will today explain plans, if any exist, for how the Home Office will move away from its over-reliance on emergency accommodation and improve information sharing with councils and health bodies.

I end by quoting one of the amazing organisations that I thanked at the outset, the British Red Cross, whose report “Far from a home: why asylum accommodation needs reform” is out today. It is based on the real experiences of people living in asylum accommodation, including barracks and finds that

“too many asylum-seeking women, men and children in the UK are living in unsafe, unsanitary and isolated accommodation. This falls far short of expected standards, for months and even years at a time. These issues have been compounded by mounting backlogs in asylum application decisions in recent years, the failure to secure enough community dispersal accommodation and more recently, the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic.”

Worryingly, the report also suggests that:

“Far from addressing these issues, the UK Government’s New Plan for Immigration…includes plans to house people seeking asylum in reception centres.”

It goes on:

“As we have witnessed in the use of military barracks, institutional-style accommodation can have significant negative impacts on people’s mental and physical health, as well as isolating people seeking asylum from wider communities, ultimately reducing social integration and cohesion…We believe this would be a mistake.”

I wholeheartedly agree with the report’s findings. I hope the Minister will give an initial response to the report in his comments, reassure us that the Home Office will no longer run a dangerous policy that puts people at risk of ill health and exposed to organised crime, and explain how he will seek to restore our proud tradition of being there at times of need.

[Philip Davies (in the Chair)]

I am going to have to impose a time limit, beginning at four minutes and rapidly dropping to three minutes for people further down the list.

--- Later in debate ---

[Neil Coyle]

I thank everyone for contributing to the debate and the Backbench Business Committee for granting it. What we are seeing is a poverty of ambition from this Government, with aid cuts and Army cuts that reduce our ability to intervene abroad to prevent the creation of asylum seekers in the first place. There is no ambition to end the backlog and delays in decision making for those who are already here, no ambition to end hotel use, leaving taxpayers footing the bill for inappropriate accommodation, and no ambition to work better with councils. Southwark and the Salvation Army offered to take more unaccompanied children, but the Home Office failed to take them up on that.

We see a reliance on a new plan that says we cannot do better than barrack accommodation, when Napier should be seen as a hideous aberration and a break with British tradition, for all the reasons exposed by my hon. Friend the Member for Halifax (Holly Lynch). That new plan relies on a bilateral arrangement with the European Union that Germany and France have already said no thanks to. The Minister should be resolutely focused on delivering the humane, efficient system that the public want and that people fleeing war desperately need, and should be fixing the existing problems in the system before creating new ones through a new plan that is a mess before it has even begun.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House has considered the effectiveness of asylum accommodation and the dispersal scheme in providing support for asylum seekers.