Paul Blomfield
Main Page: Paul Blomfield (Labour - Sheffield Central)Department Debates - View all Paul Blomfield's debates with the Home Office
(2 years, 12 months ago)
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Paul Blomfield (Sheffield Central) (Lab) [V]
I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark (Neil Coyle) and the hon. Member for Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner (David Simmonds) for securing the debate, in which I speak as a representative of the UK’s first city of sanctuary.
Many of us know from our constituents that asylum seeker accommodation is too often substandard, with large providers contracted by the Home Office at rates that drive them towards substandard provision. But since 2019 we have seen problems with the new Home Office contracts, which have been mentioned. As the Red Cross explains in its report published today, from the start of the new contracts there was a sharp rise in the use of emergency forms of asylum support accommodation across the UK, including hostels, bed and breakfasts and hotels. By December 2020, around one in every five people accommodated by the Home Office was living in such temporary accommodation—an almost fourfold increase in just one year.
But let us be clear that the solution is not the apparent move from the Home Office towards the use of detention centres on arrival. We have already seen, as has been mentioned, shocking reports of those who have experienced the provision in ex-military barracks, which are unsuitable for helping to heal the traumas those people have experienced and are in extremely poor conditions and away from the services those people need.
The Government’s new plan for immigration includes proposals for new “reception centres” that would “provide basic accommodation”, but as the Red Cross points out, it is likely, given the huge delays in the system, that those seeking asylum could live in such centres for several months, potentially in remote locations, reducing contact between communities, increasing social isolation and harming their health and wellbeing. We know that that is the experience of immigration removal centres, which were set up to fulfil a short-term function but have ended up detaining people sometimes for months, even for years—indefinite detention, described by those detained as worse than prison and rejected by the House in its support for our 2015 cross-party inquiry into immigration detention.
The Government were right to set up pilots to develop community-based alternatives, and I commend the former Minister, the right hon. Member for Romsey and Southampton North (Caroline Nokes) for her work on them. It now appears, however, that the Government are abandoning those pilots. The consultation paper on the new plan for immigration states that one of its aims is to change the system
“so that we can better protect and support those in genuine need of asylum.”
If that really is the case, the Minister needs to be clear in his response about how the Government plan to improve housing for asylum seekers and to be clear that increased use of detention will play no part whatsoever.