Robert Jenrick has barred a leading refugee charity from offering help to asylum seekers at a Home Office accommodation centre over claims the charity encouraged people to “complain” and talk to journalists, it has emerged.
The order from the immigration minister was uncovered when Care4Calais made a freedom of information request to the Home Office after their teams were banned from the Napier barracks site in Kent. Earlier this year Jenrick ordered a reception centre for child migrants to paint over its cartoon murals.
Care4Calais, which began helping asylum seekers in the unofficial migrant camps of the northern French port, has been a regular critic of government immigration policies.
Its teams had worked with asylum seekers at Napier for several years but it was told in late September by Clearsprings Ready Homes, the contractor which runs the site for the Home Office, that it was no longer permitted to do so.
Among the services Care4Calais offered at Napier were legal clinics, advice on filling out forms and assistance for asylum seekers facing potential deportation to Rwanda.
The charity has previously been blocked from providing services such as haircuts and clothing to asylum seekers at another site, the former RAF Wethersfield base in Essex, where some people living there staged a protest in late September about the conditions they faced.
Care4Calais believed the ban could be connected to a Home Office perception that their advice had partly prompted the protest, and so submitted a freedom of information request.
The FoIs, initially shared by the charity with the i newspaper, showed that two days after the Wethersfield protest, a Home Office accommodation manager emailed Clearsprings to say they had been “directed yesterday by the minister for immigration’s office that Home Office is not to engage with Care4Calais either directly or indirectly”.
A reply from an official whose name is redacted, but who appears to work for Clearsprings, asked if staff at the Napier site should also bar Care4Calais teams, adding: “We certainly have considerable evidence that Care4Calais have been encouraging individuals not to travel, to complain, to engage with the media et cetera, so would be happy to disengage from this lobby group if you so wish.”
A reply seemingly from the Home Office confirmed that this should also happen.
Steve Smith, the chief executive of Care4Calais, said: “So ingrained has the government’s lawless proxy-war against refugees become that we have the immigration minister personally intervening to prevent a charity from distributing clothes to a group of asylum seekers for the unholy crime of said asylum seekers making complaints or speaking to the media.
“Why is Mr Jenrick so scared of asylum seekers having a voice to speak out about their treatment?”
A Home Office source said it was not accurate to portray the barring of Care4Calais as an order by Jenrick, even though it was issued by his office, because the original idea was suggested by officials, who put it to Jenrick, and he agreed. They declined to explain how this differed from decisions made routinely this way throughout government.
A Home Office spokesperson said that it took “the welfare of those in our care extremely seriously”.
The statement added: “We work closely with our contractors, the NHS, local authorities and non-governmental organisations to ensure that people can access the support they need and operate a Safeguarding Hub to support vulnerable individuals in accessing these services.”
