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2. The Express On Sunday: We Get Action Over Squalid Flats From Hell 3. The Guardian: Refugees’ Flats To Be Improved 4. The Guardian: National Roundup: Refugees’ Flats To Be Improved 5. The Observer: Straw Backs Down Over Asylum Seekers THE OBSERVER: ASYLUM BARONS CASHING IN: REFUGEES FLED OPPRESSION AT HOME ONLY TO BE HARASSED AND HOUSED IN DECAYING TOWER BLOCKS OVER HERE. MARTIN BRIGHT AND BURHAN WAZIR VISIT THE GHETTOS OF THE NORTH WEST 8-May-2000 ON THE eleventh floor of The Landmark, a crumbling Liverpool tower block long abandoned by locals, Adnan Mohammed turned to point at the smashed lock of flat 42: a ripped piece of plywood was nailed where the keyhole once was. Politely furious, this Iraqi doctor, who claimed asylum in Britain this month, told The Observer: ‘I lived through 10 years of sanctions in Iraq and I never saw people living like this.’ The Landmark is one of two rotten 15-storey blocks abandoned by the council as unfit for their own tenants. But they are now being filled with asylum-seekers by the Home Office as part of the Government’s dispersal programme. This week, the Audit Commission will publish a highly critical report, ‘Another Country’, which will say the Government’s dispersal policy will not work without a massive injection of cash into local health and education services. And it will raise serious questions about housing people in places such as the Landmark. This urban monstrosity and its nearby twin, The Inn on the Park, dominate the skyline of Everton Park, one of the poorest inner-city areas in western Europe. They are owned by Farial Sabbagh, one of a band of asylum entrepreneurs making fortunes from the Government’s dispersal of tens of thousands of refugees. Last month, the Home Office signed a contract with Sabbagh’s company, Landmark Liverpool, to house more than 600 asylum-seekers. The Home Office refused to reveal how much it was paying Sabbagh. But in some places contractors are paid pounds 150 per asylum-seeker per week. Council sources in the North West told The Observer that one company - Clearsprings, of Rayleigh, Essex - is negotiating a contract for 7,500 places in that region. Clearsprings has dumped nearly 100 asylum-seekers from a dozen countries in a similar scheme in Nelson, a former mill town in Lancashire. Neither the health authority nor the council has been told of their presence. Last year more than 70,000 asylum claims were made in Britain, and there is a backlog of 100,000 cases. New legislation last month gave the responsibility for accommodation to a new National Asylum Support Service. To ease the pressure on London and the South East, which deals with more than 85 per cent of cases, the support service has had to rely on private companies to help hit the target of rehousing 6,000 asylum-seekers in each region of Britain. The Home Office says it monitors the private companies, but The Observer has discovered a failure to ensure the most basic of freedoms. In the case of Landmark, residents are forced to sign contracts saying they can have no visitors without the prior consent of the landlady. Asylum-seekers no longer have any choice about where they are placed and lose access to all state help if they refuse to cooperate. The dispersal policy was designed to place ethnic groups together in clusters, with health, education and translation services geared to the different communities. In Liverpool this was clearly not the case. At the Landmark properties The Observer met residents from Chad, Cameroon, Lebanon, Iraq, Kosovo, Albania, Syria and Afghanistan. In one flat intended for two people we found two Iraqi Kurds, an Iraqi Arab, an Afghan and an Iranian. But residents said the sordid living conditions meant ideological differences had been set aside. ‘Living together is not the problem,’ said Dr Mohammed. ‘It’s the building and the way we have been treated since we arrived here.’ Hadi, a 30-year-old from Lebanon, said he and his room mate from Chad had spent two days cleaning the bath in their flat on the eleventh floor when they arrived. As with every other flat here, the windows had been painted shut and there was no central heating - when the sun shone the flats were uninhabitable; when it rained the men relied on a handful of bar heaters shared among the residents. Residents complained of intimidation and lack of privacy: individual rooms do not have locks and Landmark staff have access to all flats. Sabbagh has refused to comment about conditions in the blocks, saying she would lose her contract by breaking her confidentiality agreement. But her daughter Joanna, who acts as her agent, said the loss of the contract for the two blocks would make little difference, because she had properties all over the city. Residents complained about harassment, and while we were there Joanna Sabbagh told them that if they talked to the media they would be ‘sorted out’ later. Louise Ellman, the Labour MP for Liverpool Riverside, wrote to the Home Office more than a year ago about Landmark’s treatment of asylum-seekers. She wrote again on 19 May to object to the Home Office contract. ‘I have visited the premises and have extreme concerns about the welfare of vulnerable people being placed there,’ she said. She has received no response. Richard Kemp, the Liberal Democrat leader of Liverpool City Council and head of the North West Asylum Consortium, said: ‘These private companies are often run from an office over a shop. You can’t organise something on this scale with an operation like that.’ In Nelson,30 miles from Manchester, John Kirk, director of services for the local council of Pendle, was only alerted to his town’s intake of asylum-seekers three weeks ago - when some locals gave a teenager from Chad directions to the college. ‘And since then, we’ve had no help,’ says Kirk. ‘I’ve asked the landlords for details -they tell me they’re bound by the Official Secrets Act. The Home Office has ignored our requests for information. I don’t even know how many asylum-seekers there are in Nelson.’ Kirk called the Home Office on 15 May, requesting information on the number of asylum-seekers allocated to Nelson. A reply, dated 17 May, stated: ‘We have planned dispersal on the basis of language, ideally using areas where there are existing ethnic communities The languages we now intend to send to the Nelson area are Punjabi, Urdu, Mandarin, Romanian and Czech.’ ‘Punjabi is like our second language here,’ laughs Kirk. ‘But Mandarin? We have a couple of Chinese takeaways - but that doesn’t make us experts.’ Two weeks ago the council alerted local MP Gordon Prentice to the fact that ‘asylum-seekers are being placed in private sector accommodation in areas where a high proportion of the properties is known to be unfit for human habitation’. Prentice last week asked asylum Minister Barbara Roche in the Commons for clarification. For the first time the names of the companies were made public. It showed Clearsprings also had contracts for Manchester and Leeds. To date,168 asylum-seekers have been bussed up to Pendle Borough - Nelson houses 80, while Burnley is home to 88. All have been transported by Clearsprings, which transfers the responsibility for their housing to local landlords. Though few are prepared to say it on the record, the increasing concern for people working with asylum-seekers is that their poor treatment is part of a concerted campaign to dissuade others from applying for asylum. Richard Kemp said: ‘We don’t care if they are millionaires or paupers. But this Government wants to make Britain so nasty that people don’t want to come here.’ THE EXPRESS ON SUNDAY: WE GET ACTION OVER SQUALID FLATS FROM HELL 11-Jun-2000 THE owners of two squalid tower blocks which are used to house asylum seekers in degrading conditions have been ordered to make urgent improvements following a Sunday Express expose. The Government has stepped in after we highlighted the scandalous state of the twin 15-storey Liverpool blocks, where up to 600 people were living in damp and freezing conditions. The blocks, named the Landmark and Inn on the Park in a bizarre parody of luxurious hotels of the same name, were sold into private hands a decade ago because council tenants would not live in them. But it took a Sunday Express investigation to reveal the truth about life in the blocks, where hundreds of asylum seekers had been pushed north from Kent to ease pressure on the south coast. Three years ago, local authorities and refugee charities started sending asylum seekers to the Inn on the Park after it passed supposedly rigorous vetting procedures. Our investigations revealed conditions so dismal that Liverpool City Council protested to Kent County Council. The heating was so inadequate that residents said they spent the winter sleeping in their clothes. A 17-year-old Iraqi Kurd told us: “This place is disgusting. I am freezing all the time. I have illnesses that the doctor says are caused by the cold and damp. “But where can I go? The landlady has my identity papers and won’t give them back. It is like I am being kept prisoner.” Labour MP Louise Ellman told ministers the flats were the worst she had ever seen. Now improvements agreed between the National Asylum Support Service and the owners will include a new lift and wall heaters. The flats were bought in 1995 by Syrian-born Haysamm Sabbagh. Ferial Sabbagh, who said she was the landlady, claimed the flats were “nice places to live”. She threatened legal action over our expose, but after bombarding the newspaper with abusive phone calls fell silent. THE GUARDIAN: REFUGEES’ FLATS TO BE IMPROVED 07-Jun-2000 The owners of tower blocks where asylum seekers are living in an allegedly ‘appalling state’ were yesterday ordered to carry out improvements to the buildings. Home Office inspectors examined two buildings in Everton, Liverpool, after Louise Ellman, Labour MP for Liverpool Riverside, said the flats were the worst she had seen. A programme of improvements was agreed between officers from the National Asylum Support Service and the owners of the flats, to be implemented immediately. Ms Ellman claimed conditions in the tower blocks, named the Landmark and the Inn on the Park, left asylum seekers ‘vulnerable and afraid’. Hundreds were forced to live in damp, crowded and sometimes dangerous conditions, she said. Barbara Roche, the immigration minister, yesterday met Ms Ellman to discuss the arrangements. The Home Office said renovations would include a new lift, wall heaters and safety improvements. The tower blocks had been sold by Liverpool city council 10 years ago because no council tenants wanted to live in them. Press Association THE GUARDIAN: NATIONAL ROUNDUP: REFUGEES’ FLATS TO BE IMPROVED 07-Jun-2000 The owners of tower blocks where asylum seekers are living in an allegedly “appalling state” were yesterday ordered to carry out improvements to the buildings. Home Office inspectors examined two buildings in Everton, Liverpool, after Louise Ellman, Labour MP for Liverpool Riverside, said the flats were the worst she had seen. A programme of improvements was agreed between officers from the National Asylum Support Service and the owners of the flats, to be implemented immediately. Ms Ellman claimed conditions in the tower blocks, named the Landmark and the Inn on the Park, left asylum seekers “vulnerable and afraid”. Hundreds were forced to live in damp, crowded and sometimes dangerous conditions, she said. Barbara Roche, the immigration minister, yesterday met Ms Ellman to discuss the arrangements. The Home Office said renovations would include a new lift, wall heaters and safety improvements. The tower blocks had been sold by Liverpool city council 10 years ago because no council tenants wanted to live in them. THE OBSERVER: STRAW BACKS DOWN OVER ASYLUM SEEKERS 04-Jun-2000 HOME Secretary Jack Straw has been forced into a climbdown over his dispersal policy for asylum seekers after The Observer revealed that property barons stood to make fortunes from housing people in slum conditions. The Home Office’s head of procurement will tomorrow visit two crumbling Liverpool tower blocks where asylum seekers are living in flats sold off as unfit for council tenants. An Observer investigation last week revealed that residents had documents withheld and were refused visitors without the permission of the landlords. A spokesman for the department said the official would take immediate action if asylum seekers were being mistreated by the landlord, Landmark Liverpool. At the same time, strict controls are to be introduced to control the standards of the property being used in the scheme. This weekend the government department responsible for all civil service housing, the Property Advisor to the Civil Estate, was brought in to inspect the property being used under the dispersal scheme. On Friday all private contractors working under the dispersal scheme were called in to the Home Office and warned to adhere to the terms of their contracts, which include a commitment to ensuring that asylum seekers have access to basic education and health services. The news of the Home Office rethink comes on the eve of an Observer debate on asylum seekers between Straw and the Shadow Home Secretary, Ann Widdecombe. Responding to The Observer’s revelations, Widdecombe said: ‘We need to get the system back to what it is intended to do, which is to offer a safe and settled home to those in genuine fear of persecution. I look forward to this opportunity to debate openly with the Home Secretary as to what has gone wrong since Labour came to power.’ She said: ‘This was his answer to the problem and it clearly isn’t the right answer.’ A Home Office spokesman said: ‘With such a large undertaking you will have teething problems.’ An investigation into Clearsprings Management, which has a Home Office contract to disperse asylum-seekers to Leeds, Manchester and Nelson in Lancashire, has discovered that it is owned by an Essex gaming and leisure entrepreneur with no experience of housing vulnerable people. The company is set to make at least pounds 100 a week from each asylum seeker it houses and is thought to have secured a contract for several thousand people. Straw’s office has been inundated with letters from MPs and local authorities about asylum seekers being dumped in the north-west by private companies, something which Clearsprings denies. |