Before the switch went ahead, a mix of local authorities, housing associations and private contractors had been responsible for the accommodation of asylum seekers. Cross says the shift away from local authorities was ‘very obvious’ and the private sector offered much lower cost contracts, but that came with ‘absolute pairing down in the contracts’. Support for people was ‘pretty much annihilated’, putting more pressure on organisations like WERS. Though these private companies claim to take housing quality into account, there is a growing body evidence to the contrary.
In 2016, G4S – a company that paid no corporation tax in 2012, the same year it was given the contract – was fined £5.6 million for the low standard of the asylum housing it provided in 2013/14. In Middlesbrough, when G4S inspected housing provided by Jomast – a company G4S subcontracts to – they found urgent defects in 14 per cent of properties. Later, Home Office inspections found urgent defects in 91 per cent of properties. Jomast was reported to be taking £8 million from the taxpayer.19 As asylum seekers were being sent to live in squalid conditions, the government was still handing millions of pounds’ worth of contracts to the private housing providers.
The people I speak to aren’t just victims of the immigration regime; they’re much more than their immigration status. But they’re angry about the way they’ve been treated; they talk about their experiences to expose the impact of the UK’s immigration and asylum rules and to advocate for change. ‘You know they’re really brutal the way they treat people,’ Kelly says. ‘I’ve been here since I was nine years old. I feel like they treat me like some kind of alien. There’s no sympathy or any form of understanding. They have to look at everyone as an individual, not just “you’re a migrant, get out”.’
Kelly describes the treatment she receives when she goes to sign in at the immigration reporting centre at London Bridge – part of the requirement for those waiting for a claim or appeal to be processed, so the state can keep track of them. She has been made to queue outside in the rain – ‘When we told them oh it’s raining, they’re like “it’s only water, do you not bathe?”’ – and describes the policy proscribing phone use: ‘Because they know that if you use your phone you can record something. If you use your phone, they’ll kick you out.’ One undercover report exposed an official at this same reporting centre telling a thirty-nine-year-old man,
We are not here to make life easy for you. It’s a challenging environment we have got to make for people. It’s working because it’s pissing you off. Am I right? There you go. That’s my aim at the end of the day, to make it a challenging environment for you. It’s pissing you off. You’re telling me it’s pissed you off. There you go, I’ve done my job.20
It’s become common sense to think too much immigration of a certain kind is bad for the UK in all kinds of ways – for wages, public services but also ‘integration’ and ‘cohesion’ – and that ‘controls’ are a solution. But look at what they do: force people to leave the country, even if it means being separated from friends and family, or stop them from staying long enough to make local connections if they want to. ‘Controls’ are making people’s lives a misery; they are part of the problem.
To find an example of the inhumanity of migration policy in the UK, look no further than ‘immigration removal centres’. This name works as a sanitiser, obscuring the brutal reality of these ‘centres’. Andy knows this all too well.
Originally from Ghana, his family – made up of his dad and his younger siblings, two brothers and two sisters – moved around before they settled into life in the UK in 1997 when Andy was twelve years old. Andy never knew the specifics of his dad’s job, just that he was often away on business: ‘I remember my dad always travelled, no matter where we lived he always travelled.’ One day, the woman who was looking after Andy and his siblings while his dad was away with work packed up and left: at the age of fifteen, Andy had to become the adult of the household. Without any means to contact their dad, he dropped out of school, got a job in a nearby market and looked after the family. His dad never returned. To this day, Andy still doesn’t know what happened to him.
Before long, the circumstances of their makeshift family were discovered. With Andy still under the age of eighteen and trying to support his siblings single-handedly, his brothers and sisters were taken into care and social services told him he could go into accommodation provided by the council, but that he needed ID.
‘Low and behold I get there and they say – first time in my life – “Where’s your passport or birth certificate, where’s your ID?” What? What’s an ID? I don’t know. They say, “Well unless you’ve got one of these things we can’t help you”. So, I went back to social services and they said go and search the house. I turned the house upside down. Nothing.’
Andy was left homeless. He got protection from, though never joined, a gang. But it was enough that he’d entered the gang’s network. To survive on his own and find a way out, he left London and bought an ID from someone who specialised in identity fraud. Desperate to get a job and without any form of documentation – not so much as a birth certificate – he felt he had no choice.
A hard worker, he did well, but after one of many promotions, he was eventually found out. He went to prison for identity theft. His sentence was supposed to be ten months, then, out of the blue, the day before he was going to be released, he was told he was being put in immigration detention. But even that didn’t happen straight away. ‘I was supposed to be released from prison on 21 May 2010. That was the day. That was my release date. I stayed in prison until 13 June 2011, over a year.’21 No one ever explained why.
After a year in Morton Hall, a detention centre in Lincolnshire, Andy was moved to Brook House, next to Gatwick airport. When he arrived, he realised what was in store for him: he was going to be quietly put on a plane and deported to a country he hadn’t been to since he was a child; a place where he knew no family or friends.
Andy had already been encouraged by a volunteer in Morton Hall to apply for asylum: he is bisexual and could face persecution if he goes back to Ghana. To stop what he believed was a plan to deport him, he pointed out he was waiting on the asylum decision, so they could not deport him until he heard the outcome. This gave him more time. After applying for bail fourteen times, he was finally successful, and in October 2016 he was granted asylum by the courts, but the Home Office decided to appeal the decision. When we meet he’s still in limbo, forced to carry around a biometric ID card – a policy introduced under New Labour – which is his only official piece of identification. He takes it out of his pocket to show me and the first thing I see is the words it has stamped across it in bold black writing: ‘forbidden from taking employment’. Andy ended up being abandoned by the state because he had no ID; now he’s made to carry one that marks him out as different. ‘I’ve been out three years,’ he says. ‘I can’t work, I’m not allowed to work paid or unpaid, I can’t work but they expect me to survive … I don’t get nothing.’
Between 2009 and 2016, 2,500 to 3,500 people were in detention at any given time. Most were held for less than a month, but some much longer. It’s thought the longest someone has been detained for was 1,156 days.22 In 2015, the Chief Inspector of Prisons noted in a report that high numbers of women put in Yarl’s Wood detention centre were released, which, he wrote, ‘raises questions about the validity of their detention in the first place’.23
Until the 1990s, the UK didn’t have any permanent detention centres; people were put in prisons or held in a converted car ferry called the Earl William. Within two years of being in office, New Labour had dramatically increased the number of detention centres, and the country now has one of the biggest immigration detention estates in Europe. Almost as soon as they came into existence, these centres have been sites of hunger strikes and suicide attempts.24 Andy says his experience
