Vermin, filth, threats: the scandal of Britain’s housing for asylum seekers
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Version 0 of 1. In a week when crowds gathered across the country to protest at Donald Trump’s Muslim travel ban, Britain would do well to also look at its own treatment of refugees: like a Congolese torture survivor and her two young sons, housed by the state for more than three years in a cockroach-infested single room. Jane and her boys, David and William, are identified by pseudonyms here to protect them. Jane, in her 30s, has spent over a decade trying to be safe. She escaped war – and the rape she endured with it – only to be kept for a year in a British detention centre and sent back to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Then some years later – now pregnant with William – she fled again and claimed asylum in England, as David remained at home. “I didn’t know [where I was going],” she says. “I just had to go somewhere to be safe.” Instead, as she waited for the Home Office to process her asylum claim, Jane found herself dumped in squalid London housing: from a cheap hostel to an overfilled block where, heavily pregnant, she had to share a bedroom with a stranger. When the authorities let David – only a toddler – come to England to join her, the family was moved again, to a house with men, women and children crammed in each room. Less a home and more a holding pen for refugees: all waiting for the Home Office to decide if they would be permitted to stay. Seven families – all refugees – had to use one kitchen and bathroom. Bugs crawled on the dirty surfaces. The stench of cigarettes and urine filled the air. The kitchen was so small that it was full with two adults standing. “If someone’s in it, you couldn’t feed your children until they were out,” Jane says. It was normal for the bathroom to be out of bounds – either occupied or in no condition to be used – and Jane had no way to bath the children. For two months, the bathroom didn’t even have a light in it. One night, Jane tells me, David fell over trying to go to the toilet. To sleep, the three of them crowded in one bedroom; two twin beds pressed together. Bugs infested the room. “When you sleep, cockroaches come in the bed,” Jane explains. Each morning she would sweep the cockroaches out of the bed and off her sons’ faces. Once, William swallowed one. “When he coughed the cockroach out, he coughed blood,” Jane says. “I’d never seen such a thing before.” This is not a rare case but reflective of how the British state treats families who come here asking for help. This week the House of Commons home affairs select committee highlighted what campaigners are calling the “systematic neglect” of asylum seekers in Britain. The government is said to be housing 38,000 asylum seekers in properties infested by rats, mice and bugs, as well as failing to provide healthcare for pregnant women or support for victims of rape and torture. For Jane, being housed with men triggered memories of her torture and rape. David had also been abused in the DRC, but both mother and son had to sleep in a room next door to male strangers. “It was very, very hard for me,” Jane says quietly. Besides the squalor, it’s the powerlessness that stands out. When Jane – a single mother who could barely speak the language of the country she had found herself in – tried to complain about where the Home Office had housed her, she was threatened with eviction by the landlord and told her children would be put on an at-risk register. Last year Jane finally had her asylum claim processed: she was granted “temporary leave to remain” for 30 months on humanitarian grounds. It means that after three and half years in the bug-infested shared house, the family was moved to a social housing flat in December – though not before being sent to another hostel. Jane now also has the right to social security but after three months waiting for her claim to be processed, she hasn’t received any benefits. Over the years it took for her asylum claim to be processed, the family survived on a £35-a-week “Azure card” – the much-criticised system where, rather than money, asylum seekers are provided with a card that can be used to purchase only food, essential toiletries, and clothing – but as her status has now changed, she no longer even has this. Instead, as she tries to settle into a new flat and take English lessons, Jane is reliant on a hardship fund from Women for Refugee Women to feed her boys. “I thought I’d be safe here but I wasn’t,” she says. “I keep thinking, it’s like I’ve awoken in another nightmare.” |