This blog is written by Jawad Anjum, the Migrants Organise Housing Justice Organiser.
Kudos to the Home Affairs Committee for shining a light on the serious failings in the Home Office’s management of asylum accommodation. You can read the full report here.
While it criticises the cost of hotels and contractor profits, it stops short of calling for a system that centres the dignity of people seeking asylum and freedom. Without meaningful recommendations to move away from short-term, profit-driven placements, the underlying issues will persist.
They’re not “hotels” if staying there sends you to the hospital.
We, at Migrants Organise, along with many other organisations in the Homes4All coalition submitted first hand evidence from our own members living in so-called ‘asylum hotels’. We’ve worked with the residents in these quasi-detention centres and seen bed bugs, overcrowding and medically unsuitable food. Clearsprings, Serco and Mears have been mistreating residents ever since they took on the contracts to run asylum accommodation while making eye-watering profits at our expense and funnelling money offshore.
If there was a recycling plant for bad ideas, this government would be its number one customer.
Large sites like military barracks and barges don’t work. The Minister for Housing knows this. There is a mountain of evidence showing they do not meet people’s needs, they are isolating, squalid prisons that ruin your mental health, sometimes to the point of suicide.
So, in whose name is this heinous policy being reconsidered? Not the people seeking refuge and freedom. Not you. Not me.
This is the Hostile Environment at full blast – intentionally brutal and cruel by design. Pandering to the right wing agenda.
Asylum Accommodation can be done better
There are so many alternatives to this shambolic mess that does nothing for anyone but a few wealthy elites. Asylum accommodation can be done better. Community housing and settlement programs have done wonders for people fleeing conflict in Syria, Ukraine and Afghanistan.
You can have direct placement into social housing or private rental accommodation, with state assistance for landlords and tenants. Some have called for a capital subsidy programme to repurpose disused buildings that would pay itself off in seven months.
When people have stable, secure accommodation, they can access education, work, and social networks, building the foundations for a fairer, kinder and more humane society.
The solutions already exist but the political will needs to match it.
The housing crisis affects everyone and the right solutions benefit everyone.
One of the biggest problems with all this is that it says nothing about the plan for decent housing for all, yes, that means each and every person living in the UK. The roots of the housing crisis are clear, the solutions clearer still. Build social housing. Rent controls. Buy back poor private rentals. Stop treating housing as a profit making investment, it’s a basic human right.
A leaked memo from the Ministry of Housing clearly shows the minister’s priorities on his ‘build, baby, build’ agenda: “The key test is that developers welcome the package strongly on the day”. No, it’s not – it’s whether people can afford decent housing.
End the hostile environment and stop scapegoating migrants. It fixes nothing. It’s the dying wail of the wretched beast, clawing and swiping at anything it can in a desperate attempt to prevent its long overdue demise. It is symptomatic of an establishment that has nothing of substance to offer Britain but the same old, recycled, washed out policies that never worked in the first place.
We can’t keep pretending that housing people seeking asylum and fixing the wider housing crisis are separate issues. They’re part of the same hostile system. When we let landlords, developers, and private contractors profit from people’s desperation, everyone loses.
The alternative is simple: invest in communities, not corporations.
That means building and refurbishing genuinely affordable homes; giving councils and local people the power to decide how housing is used; and ensuring no one, whether born here or newly arrived, is left in a mouldy room waiting for a future that never comes. If we start from a place of dignity, justice and solidarity, we’ll see that providing secure, dignified housing for people seeking protection is exactly the same work as building a fairer, decent and affordable housing system for everyone.
Read more about the Migrants Organise campaign for better housing here.
