Pregnant and disabled people among hundreds of asylum seekers placed in hotels for months during lockdown

Hundreds of asylum seekers including pregnant women, disabled people and young children have been living in hotels across the UK for months, where they claim they are restricted to set meals and given no financial support for travel and basic essentials, The Independent can reveal.

People waiting for decisions on their asylum claims began being moved into dozens of hotels at the end of March, after the Home Office ordered its asylum housing contractors to source additional accommodation in anticipation of backlogs in the system following the decision to pause asylum evictions in response to Covid-19.

Charities have warned of a deterioration in mental health and wellbeing among those in the 33 hotels that have been procured by the contractors across the country. While in the hotels, asylum seekers are stripped of their financial support of £5.39 a day on the basis that they are provided with meals, leaving them unable to buy additional supplies such as toiletries and baby milk, and unable to use public transport.

The Home Office admitted on Wednesday that there may be problems around leaving people without financial support for three months, with the second permanent secretary telling MPs that the immigration minister was “looking at” the issue. All three contractors, Mears, Serco and Clearsprings, have raised concern about the cuts to asylum support.

It comes after concerns about the conditions for asylum seekers living in hotels were heightened in the wake of an unprovoked knife attack at one of the hotels in Glasgow, where a resident stabbed three other asylum seekers, two staff and a police officer.

One wheelchair-bound asylum seeker living in a hotel in Coventry said he was rarely able to leave the premises as he had no money to afford a taxi. The man, who is in his early forties and has been living in the hotel since March, told The Independent he felt like a “caged animal”.

“I thought it was just a temporary arrangement. But it seems it is indefinite. There’s no timeframe. When you’re kept in a hotel for a long time, subjected to the kind of food you want them to eat, at only certain times, you become more or less dehumanised, because you don’t have any choice. Life revolves around being in the hotel,” he said.

The asylum seeker said that when he did occasionally leave the hotel to do voluntary work for a local charity, it meant he would miss mealtime slots during the day, leaving him with nothing to eat.

“It’s like mental torture, it drives you crazy. When you’re subjected to a point where you don’t have a choice in what you’re eating and you’re just eating round the clock, you don’t feel your sense of humanity anymore, you become like a domestic animal,” he added.

“It’s even worse when you’re disabled. It’s more expensive to be disabled. I need to take taxis to get anywhere. It’s like double the trauma.”

Another asylum seeker, from the Middle East, who was placed in a hotel in the West Midlands when he claimed asylum at the start of January, said: “I was told the hotel would be initial accommodation and would be for six weeks maximum. It was okay at the start. I could manage that, but I was counting weeks and then months. It’s become so stressful.”

The man, who is in his thirties and suffers from PTSD and depression, said that because he didn’t have money to pay for public transport, he had to walk for an hour and a half in order to get to the nearest city to obtain basic essentials such as toiletries, donated by charities.

Describing the food provision, he said: “You have to go down for breakfast between 7 and 8am. If you miss it there is no food for you. You have to go for lunch at 12:30, you have to go for dinner at 6pm. If you miss it you will sleep hungry. You’re tied to this difficult system. And the food isn’t nutritious.”

He said he believed that the incident in Glasgow was the result of “the continuous stress” asylum seekers are under in hotels.

“There are a lot of guys who are so isolated, they don’t talk to people. They are always quiet and withdrawn. I worry that some of them are about to blow. If they don’t solve their problems and move them out, the same incident that happened in Glasgow will happen again,” he added.

A Home Office spokesperson said there was a helpline in place that asylum seekers could call for mental health support or other issues run by its Advice, Issue Reporting and Eligibility Assistance services (Aire), and that there was a welfare officer at each hotel, while asylum seekers could also access NHS services if required.

They added that asylum seekers were required to eat their meals in hotels at set times in order to comply with social distancing measures.

Tim Naor Hilton, head of asylum at Refugee Action, said the charity knew of a number of pregnant women currently in hotels, including a woman who gave birth recently has gone back to hotel, but can’t afford to buy formula or nappies for her newborn child.

“She’s in the hotel with a new baby with no cash support, relying on these meals for nutrition, when she’s just been discharged from hospital,” he said.

Mr Hilton added that the charity was also getting reports of people feeling hungry because the portions were small or because they had missed mealtimes, while some said the food didn’t meet their dietary requirements.

“I don’t think it’s a terrible response to use hotels as emergency short-term accommodation for people if that situation is very temporary, as long as they’re properly run and the support is still within them. But they’ve been used very long-term for very vulnerable people, and the provision of support isn’t adequate,” he said. “People can tolerate being in difficult situations as long as they understand what’s going on. But this has been interminable. There is a general lack of information, they feel very stuck, no one can tell them when it will end.”

During an evidence session with the Home Affairs Select Committee on Wednesday, Shona Dunn, second permanent secretary at the Home Office, admitted that there were concerns about asylum seekers being left for more than three months without financial support, and that the immigration minister, Kevin Foster, would be “looking at” this issue.

During a separate evidence session with the committee on 7 May, all three companies contracted by the Home Office to manage asylum accommodation said the cuts to financial support were a “concern”.

John Taylor, chief operating manager at Mears, told the committee: “Service users have expressed concern that they don’t have access to a small amount of money for a few bits and pieces, and that is unfortunately where we are at the moment.”

Raising concerns about the conditions in hotels, Andy Hewett, head of advocacy at the Refugee Council, told The Independent: “We recognise that there will be times when the Home Office needs to use hotels as temporary contingency accommodation. The concern we have is the length of time people are having to remain in hotels, and the level of support they are able to access.

“The longer people are in hotel accommodation, the more issues of isolation and dependency become exacerbated. They’re not able to go out and buy basic essentials and are often unable to access the same level of wraparound support they would get in initial accommodation.

“It’s not clear to what degree the Home Office and the accommodation providers are proactively carrying out vulnerability assessments as they move people. And it’s very difficult for NGOs like us to respond to the needs to those people because we don’t always have sight of where they are being accommodated. This is a huge missed opportunity.”

A Home Office spokesperson said: “Asylum seekers, like the rest of the UK population, have been asked to remain inside to stop the spread of coronavirus, which has increased the amount of accommodation needed. Accommodation and support is paid for by the taxpayer so there is no cost to the individual.

“We have worked closely with local authorities across the country to house people who may have become destitute during the current crisis. Hotels are only ever a temporary measure and people will be moved to longer term accommodation as soon as it is safe to do so.”