Has asylum seekers' gamekeeper turned poacher?

By Jon Silverman
Home affairs analyst

Charities such as the Refugee Council have been among the fiercest critics of the UK's asylum policy. Now they themselves are becoming targets.

It is impossible to imagine what it is like to be an asylum seeker newly arrived in Britain. The sense of dislocation after a journey of thousands of miles. The bewilderment at encountering a language and a culture which are alien.

The fear that, even if the claim to be allowed to stay is accepted as legitimate, the future will be a series of daily nightmares to be negotiated.

But there should at least be one reassurance. At last, a place of safety has been reached. Not so, according to some asylum seekers and campaigners and, revealingly, their attack is aimed, not at the government, but at the very organisations which are supposed to be looking after them.

Here are the voices of some recent asylum seekers.

Rape allegation

"When I was ill, they [the Refugee Council] wouldn't even call an ambulance for me."

It is nonsense to say we are in bed with the state Refugee Council's Jean Candler

"They won't give you enough food and drink - even for the children."

"I was raped in a hostel run by the Refugee Council but they refused to believe me and called me a liar."

This last claim was made by a woman from the Ivory Coast who has been housed in the Eurotower, in south London, where the Refugee Council looks after more than 400 asylum seekers.

The Refugee Council said this rape allegation, like all criminal allegations, was immediately referred to the police who are investigating the matter fully. The woman has since been moved to alternative accommodation.

A spokeswoman for the council said we ensure all our clients access emergency health care as required and that a healthcare worker visits the site regularly at Eurotower, provided by the local primary healthcare trust.

Spokeswoman Jean Candler pointed out that all the Refugee Council's accommodation was either full-board or self-catering, with money provided for food and subsistence. The Refugee Council also provides hot lunches four days a week at its centre in Brixton. The Refugee Council has an official complaints procedure, she said, and all complaints are investigated thoroughly.

Cash from Whitehall

The Refugee Council gets around £60m a year from the government to administer asylum support services, five-sixths of which goes on emergency accommodation.

Other groups like Migrant Helpline, Refugee Action and the Refugee Arrivals Project are also funded by the government's National Asylum Support Service (NASS).

Before the 1999 Immigration and Asylum Act, responsibility for providing accommodation was borne by social services, which often fell so far short of what was needed that the unlucky ones had to find floor space in churches and mosques. But not everyone is happy at non-governmental organisations (NGOs) taking over the role of dispensing asylum support.

"Contracting this work out to NGOs is the same kind of privatisation as we have seen in other areas of public life, like transport," says Niki Adams, of Legal Action for Women, which campaigns on behalf of asylum seekers.

"And it is just as damaging. The NGOs are increasingly embedded with the Home Office and some of their treatment of vulnerable people is brutal, racist and inhumane."

Flexing muscles

She and some other campaigners want the NGOs to refuse to administer the present system. "Without them, it would quickly crumble," she predicts.

Not surprisingly, those views are rejected by the Refugee Council, the leading provider. Spokeswoman Jean Candler points out that it is the Home Office which allocates the resources and says the Refugee Council has robustly criticised a system which it sees as "draconian and harsh."

"And it is nonsense to say we are in bed with the state. All sorts of charities get government funding to dispense services but that doesn't mean they are not independent. "

When the asylum NGOs collectively flex their muscles, they can have quite an impact. Their consistent opposition helped scupper the government's much-reviled voucher system for asylum claimants.

But it would be naïve to expect the NGOs to walk away from running services at a time when NASS is undergoing a major reorganisation designed to make it more responsive to local needs.

Indeed, the Refugee Council is now seeking to sub-contract some services. Legal Action for Women calls this "extending privatisation". Others would say it is evidence of a more flexible approach to one of the most pressing social issues of our time.