Suitcases and bin bags full of simple possessions strewn across a central London street have become a powerful symbol of the government’s ramping up of the hostile environment against people seeking safety in Britain.
Up to 40 people who had escaped war and atrocities in countries including Eritrea, Somalia, Iran and Iraq took to the streets last week after being given a hotel sleeping area of just 2 sq metres: four in a room with two bunk beds.
Westminster council leader Adam Hug critiqued a strategy that crams people who have been through significant trauma into pint-sized rooms with strangers. It “defies common sense and basic decency”, he said. And few would argue.
It is cruelty by design: the consequence of a significant shift from government ministers to purposefully make conditions for men, women and children seeking asylum in the UK as harsh as possible. Operation Maximise, the Orwellian-sounding plan to cram people into absurd room-sharing arrangements, has been driven through by ministers, despite government sources telling the Telegraph that it is “outrageous behaviour”.
And it’s now par for the course. For many months ministers have ignored concerns raised by councils that conditions in hotels are unsafe and inappropriate. Council leaders have highlighted cases of single women and families being harassed and abused by hotel security guards, families being dumped in hotels without council social services or safeguarding teams being told they are there. One council leader told me the Home Office has shown a total disregard to meeting the safeguarding needs of very vulnerable people.
I met a young man this week who has been living in a hotel for months and been threatened by security staff for “staying out too late”. If he does it more than six times he faces being thrown on to the street.
The Windrush scandal was born of the Conservative government’s obsession with creating a hostile environment to send a message to immigrants that they are not welcome.
That approach is back on an even more disturbing level with refugees seen as second-class human beings without rights: a faceless sub-class of humanity labelled “illegals”.
Refugee Council staff are finding that the day-to-day reality of this new hostile environment is leading to acute stress, anxiety and suicidal thoughts among those we support. Asylum seekers are frightened they will be moved – like pieces on a chess board – to a barge or a large-scale accommodation centre.
Despite the lessons from the Windrush scandal, ministers stick to the view that hostility and inhumanity will act as a deterrent. Yet the Home Office’s own research shows that the harshness makes no real difference to the numbers that come. Connections to family and communities here, the English language and historic links are the reasons they seek sanctuary in the UK.
And they are only ever a fraction of those seeking asylum in Europe. The Home Office’s most recent data reveals that asylum applications in the UK account for only 7% of all such applications in Europe.
There is a backstory to this systemic chaos and inhumanity. Hotels, barges and vast accommodation sites would not be necessary were it not for all the years of gross mismanagement, which has led to an asylum backlog of more than 150,000 cases, with initial decisions taking an average of over 18 months. A UNHCR audit published last month found poorly trained staff using ill-equipped systems: a service clearly unfit for purpose.
But underpinning this appalling incompetence is a strategic choice: a decision to treat those in fear of their lives, who have escaped tyrannical rule in countries such as Iran and Afghanistan or bombs and bullets in countries such as Syria and Sudan, with contempt.
It’s what ministers think the public wants, despite clear polling evidence indicating that even those concerned by immigration want people treated with dignity and humanity. Cramming desperate people into a shoebox-sized space, putting them in barges or warehousing them in former military barracks fails on both counts.
Enver Solomon is chief executive of the Refugee Council
