The 2019 dystopian BBC drama Years and Years featured a populist right-wing prime minister whose solution to the ‘problem’ of asylum seekers arriving in small boats from Europe was to hold them in crowded, insanitary army camps, where they easily fell prey to the ‘monkey-flu’ pandemic sweeping the world. Years and Years is set in an imagined 2029, but it only took one year from the drama being aired for fiction to become harsh reality for the asylum seekers herded into Napier and Penally barracks. Their determined efforts to highlight this situation have now resulted in the closure of Penally, and vastly reduced numbers at Napier.
In September 2020 the Home Office began using the former army barracks in Kent and Pembrokeshire to house adult male asylum seekers in dormitory accommodation. Given the impossibility of social distancing, it was no surprise that Covid ravaged these camps. In February 2021 the immigration and prisons inspectorates visited both barracks; their findings were damning and include how the Home Office wilfully ignored the advice of both Public Health England and Wales ‘about the COVID-safety of the accommodation’ and ‘that opening multi-occupancy dormitory-style accommodation at Napier was not supported by current guidance’.
Other key findings included: ‘serious safeguarding concerns… inadequate support for people who had self-harmed…a decrepit “isolation block” which [was] unfit for habitation’. The environment ‘was impoverished, run-down and unsuitable for long-term accommodation’ with ‘cleanliness… variable at best and.. some areas… filthy.’
Getting out of the camps is only the first step. As Adam Yasir, who runs the Rosa Parked asylum solidarity project told FRFI: ‘Companies such as Clearsprings Ready Homes are renting cheap, uninhabitable houses in some of the most isolated part of inner cities or towns and placing vulnerable asylum seekers in them. There is no consideration of the mental health or human rights of the people placed in these “unready homes”. Clearsprings is transforming some suburban parts of London into favela-like living conditions.’
Leaked internal documents confirm that the government is deliberately providing asylum seekers with sub-standard housing in a bid to maintain ‘public confidence’ in a situation where hundreds of thousands of British-born working class people also face homelessness and years in decrepit, ‘temporary accommodation’. We must resist all attempts at divide and rule and fight for decent housing for all.
Nicki Jameson
