Five years ago, I went to Coventry to meet a married couple from Sri Lanka who were stuck in the UK’s asylum system. Under the auspices of a deal between the Home Office and one of its favoured private contractors, they and their two children lived in a house just outside the city centre. Two of the rooms were riddled with damp. A faulty central heating system meant the house was either impossibly cold, or so hot that it inflamed their baby daughter’s eczema.
Then, as now, the law dictated that neither parent could work, so the family were living on an allowance of just over £20 a day. “We worry about the kids’ health,” they told me: everything they said was full of dread and anxiety, thanks to a day-to-day existence that was seemingly going to grind on indefinitely.
