Support for Asylum Seekers

Philip Davies Excerpts

Tuesday 27th April 2021 Westminster Hall

[Philip Davies (in the Chair)]

I remind hon. Members that there have been some changes to normal practice in order to support the new hybrid arrangements. Timings of debates have been amended to allow technical arrangements to be made for the next debate. There will be suspensions between debates. I remind Members participating, physically and virtually, that they must arrive for the start of a debate in Westminster Hall and are expected to remain for the entire debate. I must remind Members participating virtually that they are visible at all times, both to one another and to us in the Boothroyd Room. If Members attending virtually have any technical problems, they should email the Westminster Hall Clerks’ email address. Members attending physically should clean their spaces before they use them and before they leave the room. I remind Members that Mr Speaker has stated that masks should be worn in 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.

[David Simmonds (Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner) (Con) [V]]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship today, Mr Davies. I commence, like the hon. Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark (Neil Coyle), by drawing the House’s attention to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests as a principal of the Refugee, Asylum and Migration Policy Project and as a vice-president of the Local Government Association.

It is vital to put today’s debate into its context. The hostile environment and a move away from treating asylum seekers as simply part of the wider welfare system began in the early 2000s, as the Blair Government recognised the political toxicity of the public perception that people newly arrived in the UK would be able to potentially jump social housing waiting lists. True or not, that was a serious political concern that they faced at the time.

In the mid-2000s, Andy Burnham, then the Immigration Minister and now the Mayor of Greater Manchester, signed off on the implementation of dispersal, creating a new route for asylum seekers, whereby they were placed in parts of the country where local authorities, recognising that there was a surplus of housing locally, offered to accommodate them and to provide them with support in those local communities. Subsequently, the Home Office looked to economise on the cost of delivering those services, by delivering through a set of national contracts with private companies.

Hard as it is to believe for those of us in London constituencies and city constituencies with lengthy housing waiting lists, there are parts of the country, such as Stoke-on-Trent, that were proactive in seeking to be dispersal areas because they recognised the benefits to their communities of bringing in new people who could revitalise the schools and other public services on which their communities depended.

The other significant factor remains the distribution of unaccompanied asylum-seeking children, which is not a matter for the Home Office but sits with the Department for Education, under the Children Act 1989. It means that local authorities that have ports of entry—airports or sea ports where people arrive into the UK—bear significant responsibilities. The Home Office’s national transfer scheme has been a step towards addressing that distribution.

The other big part of that picture is that refugees, once they are granted that status in the UK and have the right to asylum, often do not stay in the communities where they are placed through dispersal. That is why we see very large numbers of refugees living in London and the south-east of England, for example. They have not been placed there by the Home Office, but have moved there under their own volition.

It is very clear from my engagement with contractors who have administered the scheme that the new set of Home Office contracts has represented a significant improvement on what was there before. The funding that is available, the flexibility and the volunteering of new local authorities that are keen to be dispersal areas have all helped to ease some of the pressure.

However, we recognise that there are remaining issues with the system. In particular, as the hon. Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark alluded to, there is a very clear desire, first, to ensure that asylum seekers are not competing with local people to access social housing where that is in short supply; by definition, that means that people are being placed in parts of the country that do not already have a significant housing waiting list. Secondly, we need to ensure, given that around two thirds to three quarters of people who apply for asylum in the UK are granted it, that asylum is the start of a path to integration.

So, my ask today of the Minister is fairly simple—it is a shopping list of things that we need to do better and that we can consider as part of this wider consultation. First, we need to think about how dispersal is part of a path to integration, given those figures about people being granted asylum. Secondly, we must ensure, regarding things such as move-on period and the recognition that most people who come for asylum in the UK will remain, that we are realistic about how we support them to integrate. Thirdly and finally, and this is the most important point, there must be real consideration of how Departments work together. The challenge for local authorities and communities often arises because the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government and the Department for Education are not aligned with the Home Office. So, I ask the Minister: can we please ensure that the approach to this issue is joined up across Government so much better than it is today?

[Philip Davies (in the Chair)]

I now have to drop the time limit to three minutes.

--- Later in debate ---

[Alex Sobel (Leeds North West) (Lab/Co-op) [V]]

Thank you, it is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Davies. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark (Neil Coyle) for securing this debate.

The Government are now presiding over the worst asylum accommodation shortage in history, and the result is that almost a fifth of all supported people seeking asylum are currently living in hostels and other large, full-board facilities. We can thank the Home Office and their extreme mismanagement of contract providers for that. In Leeds, like many other parts of country, asylum seekers have been living in hotels round the city. Contrary to what the Daily Mail would have you believe, the conditions make them completely unfit for short-term emergency accommodation, let alone the months many have endured.

Around 40 people recently took part in protest in one such hotel, drawing attention to the poor living conditions, lack of nutritional food and mistreatment by hotel staff. One man was on hunger strike for nine days. With the help of my office, I have pursued complaints about the standard of the accommodation and care provided in Leeds, and we discovered a worrying picture. Residents are subject to strict rationing for the most basic supplies such as soap and toilet paper, both of which are often unavailable. Many people to whom I have spoken have also been denied access to hygiene facilities. Some asylum seekers only have one set of clothes, and are unable to wash them. One resident reported that he had not been given clean bedsheets for a month. Complaints have been made about insufficient and unhealthy food. Residents did have fresh juice and milk for months, but after complaining about other elements of their living conditions that was removed by the hotel manager: a punitive measure that sent a clear message to asylum seekers telling them not to complain.

Worryingly, there have been severe difficulties in accessing dental and medical care, and legal help. Many residents have no phone credit or do not speak much English and so cannot call for help themselves, and yet staff fail to assist them. In one case, a resident was in severe pain because of a broken foot yet his prescription was not collected for a week. It appears that the regional contract handling of the coronavirus crisis added to the misery of those living there. On more than five occasions, residents were forced to isolate with no explanation.

In many areas, racist far-right activists—no doubt emboldened by the hateful rhetoric spewed by the media and, I am saddened to say, certain Members of the House—visited the hotel to intimidate those living there. Unfortunately, it is not just far-right thugs from outside who have racially abused asylum seekers in hotels. One hotel manager told a man, “If you don’t like it, go back to your own country.” Another resident claimed that the same man said, “I am a citizen of this country and I have a right to do whatever I can. You don’t have the right to complain.” A further two people said that they heard the manager say that if they are not happy they can be deported. That is the tip of the iceberg. The stories I hear in my surgeries are a tiny fraction of what is happening in Leeds and across the country.

In 2018, I spoke physically in Westminster Hall about the poor condition of housing for asylum seekers in Leeds. That continues to persist without any improvement. My colleagues describe similar shocking conditions in constituencies around the country. G4S lost its contract and another private sector company made promises, but the same problems persist. It is time that these contracts were run by public, not-for-profit providers that are not driven by profit—

[Philip Davies (in the Chair)]

Order.

--- Later in debate ---

[Holly Lynch (Halifax) (Lab) [V]]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Davies. Let me start, as others have, by thanking 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, for their outstanding opening contributions and for their leadership on asylum and migration issues. I also want to thank the Backbench Business Committee for allocating the time for the debate. It is often said that debates are timely, but with just a week to go before the end of the incredibly short consultation on the Government’s new plans for an immigration policy statement, ahead of the sovereign borders Bill, it could not be more timely.

There are pre-existing weaknesses in the asylum accommodation and dispersal scheme, combined with the pressures of the pandemic, which we accept have been significant. Added to the direction of travel under this Government, outlined in the policy statement, that creates a pretty toxic outlook.

On contingency accommodation, we recognise the increased need for accommodation, with the early, welcome pause on negative cessations taking the numbers in the asylum system from around 48,000 to around 60,000. Inevitably, that would have brought logistical challenges, and we were sympathetic to that, but over 12 months on, there are no justifications for the shocking conditions that persist in asylum accommodation and the questionable motivations behind Home Office decision making. Contingency accommodation has become far more widely used as the norm than it ever should have been.

The Minister may have read the Refugee Council’s report published last week on the use of hotel accommodation. It outlines just how difficult life has been for people who have been confined to the same room for days and weeks on end and for those who arrived without basics, such as shoes and coats, and who simply were not provided with any. People had insufficient access to drinking water, and there were widespread failures to register them with GPs so that they could access healthcare. In some instances, as we have heard children were not enrolled in schools for months.

I pay tribute to my hon. Friends the Members for Dulwich and West Norwood (Helen Hayes) and for Reading East (Matt Rodda), who shared with us the contributions of their local charities and communities. I am grateful to my hon. Friend for Reading East for introducing me to a number of his local organisations that support those accommodated in hotels.

The Government have said that the use of hotels will end as part of the new plan for immigration. That is incredibly welcome, but what is the plan? Where will those people be accommodated instead? The Home Office provided a quote to The Guardian on Friday, saying:

“As part of our New Plan for Immigration, the use of hotels to accommodate new arrivals will end and we plan to introduce new asylum reception centres.”

I understand that Operation Oak sought to move people out of hotel accommodation and into more appropriate dispersed accommodation, as should be the process. However, that Home Office spokesperson seems to suggest that those currently housed in hotels will instead be housed in reception centres.

At the end of February, an estimated 8,700 asylum seekers were accommodated in more than 90 hotels across the UK. Some were there for months. What exactly will these new reception centres be for? My hon. Friends the Members for Bermondsey and Old Southwark and for Sheffield Central (Paul Blomfield) have stressed how unhappy we are about the proposals. I hope the Minister will explain just how many centres he envisages will be required, how long people will be required to stay in them and what the terms of their stay will be. That quote suggests that the centres will be a form of initial accommodation, but everything else we are hearing sounds much more comparable to detention than initial accommodation. My hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Central and my right hon. Friend the Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) made it clear why that would be a disaster. My fear is that this is a policy choice from this Government—a point already made by my hon. Friend the Member for Hammersmith (Andy Slaughter) and others.

Although I have outlined just some of the problems with hotels, it is clear that there has been a deliberate attempt to conflate initial accommodation with immigration detention, with the use of disused barracks to accommodate asylum seekers. I made a number of these points in last week’s debate. As with the use of hotels, the Government initially claimed that the use of barracks at Penally and Napier was due to the unprecedented pressures of the pandemic. Yet, the equality impact assessment we have seen, which was conducted by the Home Office in September, revealed that use of that particular type of accommodation was born not out of necessity but out of political choice. It suggested that providing nothing but the absolute bare minimum to those seeking asylum is in the interests of community relations. It reads more like a hard-line right-wing manifesto than any equality impact assessment from a Government Department ever should.

The Government’s reluctance to provide anything deemed beyond what is necessary has led to people with conditions such as leukaemia, diabetes or tuberculosis being housed 28 to a dorm and sharing limited toilet facilities, with communal areas cleaned only once a week, during a pandemic.

On 8 March 2021 the then independent chief inspector of borders and immigration published initial findings from site visits in mid-February to Penally camp and Napier barracks with Her Majesty’s inspectorate of prisons. They confirmed that, given the

“cramped communal conditions and unworkable cohorting at Napier”

a large-scale outbreak of covid was virtually inevitable, which is exactly what happened. There were 197 positive cases of covid at Napier barracks between 1 January and late February. We secured the Kent and Medway clinical commissioning group’s infection prevention report undertaken at Napier through a freedom of information request, and that also confirmed that the site does not facilitate effective social distancing. The CCG report also made it clear that the Home Office had a disregard for the wellbeing of not only those accommodated at Napier, but the staff working on the site. At the time of the inspection there had been nine positive cases among staff members. The report also found that all staff took breaks at the same time and that, unbelievably, staff were being asked to sleep three to a room at the site.

The ICIBI report raised serious safeguarding concerns about those who were most vulnerable at Napier, stating:

“There was inadequate support for people who had self-harmed. People at high risk of self-harm were located in a decrepit ‘isolation block’ which we considered unfit for habitation.”

In evidence provided to the Home Affairs Committee last month the Government claimed that they had been

“following guidance in every single way”.

My hon. Friend the Member for Coventry South (Zarah Sultana) spoke of the simply untrue assurances that she was given about the quality of the accommodation. The CCG and ICIBI reports could not be clearer that at no time were such assurances true. On leadership and management, the latter report concluded:

“The Home Office did not exercise adequate oversight at either site and Home Office staff were rarely present. There were fundamental failures of leadership and planning by the Home Office.”

That was not someone else’s failure. It was the Home Secretary’s failure, and those barracks must close immediately.

The wider failures of the system and the nature of dispersal are now putting local authorities under enormous pressure, and there is a sense that the Government are just not listening, which is pushing the system to breaking point. I have seen a letter that was sent to the Home Secretary at the end of March from the leaders of the asylum dispersal areas for the west midlands. They are keen to stress that they recognise their responsibility as a region to contribute to the UK’s asylum and immigration challenges, and they have supported the dispersal scheme since 1999, but they feel they have no choice other than to suspend their participation.

They clearly state that, despite their attempts to engage Government in finding solutions to the challenges they face,

“the absence of any strategic plan has meant we lack confidence on the next steps around engagement to resolve the range of complex and serious challenges we face. What we do know is that the current position is untenable and that we simply cannot continue to support in the same manner going forward.”

When Government’s biggest partners are walking away from dispersal, they have to come back to the table and work constructively to find solutions. Has the meeting sought in the letter happened—with leaders from not just the west midlands but all dispersal areas—to work through the challenges? The former Minister, the right hon. Member for Romsey and Southampton North (Caroline Nokes), made a characteristically powerful contribution, inviting the Minister to work with the Local Government Association to find the solutions we all want.

The letter also makes the point that the use of hotels has been a reality of initial accommodation since the new contracts were agreed in 2019, so any sense that they are used because of the pandemic alone is nonsense. It says that their use

“feels more like an unsatisfactory business as usual arrangement rather than short term contingency.”

That point was made clear in the Red Cross’s report, published today and mentioned already by a number of hon. Members.

The Minister knows that in rule changes made in December the Government gave themselves the ability to deem claims inadmissible if someone arrives in the UK outside of a resettlement scheme, regardless of whether asylum should be granted, and without any agreements having been struck with European partners on returning anyone to anywhere else. Over the weekend, May Bulman at The Independent newspaper broke the story that Belgium, France and Germany have all ruled such an agreement out:

“Belgium’s asylum and migration secretary…said the country had no intention of negotiating unilateral readmission agreements with the UK and that he had already explained his position to the immigration minister”.

The German embassy in London told The Independent that

“no negotiations between Germany and the UK on return arrangements had taken place”,

indicating that bilateral returns deals are simply not on the cards. France echoed those remarks, with a spokesperson saying:

“We will naturally continue our operational co-operation to prevent departures and fight against smuggling networks. With regards to readmissions, asylum is a European subject, which calls for a European response.”

[Philip Davies (in the Chair)]

Order. I am sorry to interrupt the flow of the hon. Lady, but to give the Minister a fair amount of time, can I ask her to bring her remarks to a conclusion?