| Topic: | Re:Re:Re:Re:Re:Re:Re:Suella | |
| Posted by: | Sara Nathan | |
| Date/Time: | 06/11/22 19:01:00 |
| Asylum-seekers in hostel or housing get £40 a week to cover everything except rent. Those is hostel get £8 a week as they are deemed to be fed. That £8 has to cover clothes, phone, any transport, toiletries and everything else. Which is OK for a few weeks but very hard for months and years - as is increasingly how long people are in there. Manston of course is a detention centre where people are only supposed to stay 24 hours. Although some have been kept there for 32 days. There are no beds. People sleep on concrete or chairs. There is no space for families. There are few showers or laundry facilities, hence the spreading disease. The cost of the centre and of hotels is all negotiated by the Home Office contractors: round here it is Clearsprings, elsewhere Serco or Mears. Mitie, which runs Manston, is controlled by Mitie, a subset of Mears. These contractors make millions and millions from the contracts and cut all the welfare corners: so the food is often poor and the accommodation overcrowded. But the profits are huge! I think what annoys me most is that this whole "crisis" is a construct of the Home Office; of Patel and Braverman. 1. People only cross by little boat because other routes are closed to them. It used to be by lorry, but that wasnt so visible. 2.Numbers are not at an historic high... they were considerably higher around 2002. Just more visible. 3. As people from Ukraine and Hong Kong can claim asylum effectively online and while still in their home country, it would be possible for others to do so too. Its the same bombs falling on Syrians in Aleppo, similar pressures on Afghans in Kabul. But they are forced into little boats to claim asylum. You NEVER see a Ukrainian doing tha`tf. Who would if there is a safe option? 4. There is only a need for a camp or hotels at all because the Home Office hardly makes any asylum decisions. Each case-worker make just over one decision a week! Look at todays Observer for details of how they are employed, trained and deployed. The back-log is over 100,000 cases. This is a political/policy decision to give Brits someone to hate. Prior to about 20165, there was hardly a backlog at all. It now takes at least TWO YEARS for an asylum-seeker to get a substantive interview. the decision may take anything from 4 months to 4 years after that. Yet over 70% do get refugee status on first application and half of those appealing then win. Only 4% of those arriving by little boat in 2021 have had a decision. 5. It is also a political decision to ban asylum-seekers from working while they wait interminably. They are thus forced into destitution and dependency. It's a profoundly un-Tory policy: making people parasitic as a public policy... and for years and years.... If all this makes you as cross as it makes me, you could help by supporting either West London Welcome or its Chiswick or Acton drop-ins. https://localgiving.org/charity/westlondonwelcome/ Or volunteer, or host through Refugees at Home. Or counter online hate... actually there are a myriad range of things anyone who cares can do. |