On 21 March international service company Serco won a £175m contract from the UK Border Agency (UKBA) to accommodate asylum seekers in Scotland, Northern Ireland and the north west of England. The other contracts, worth £620m overall, were won by G4S (Care and Justice Services) and Clearel Ltd. The £883m a year Compass contract to provide support services for dispersed asylum seekers is the largest project run by the Home Office.
Asylum seekers and refugees are big business. Serco’s profits grew by a fifth in 2010 and by the end of 2011 they had an order book of £17.9bn and £4,646.4m revenue. With its motto of ‘Bringing Service to Life’, Serco runs everything from defence, military and nuclear weapons contracts, and prisons, to Welfare to Work programmes and the London Cycle Hire Scheme. 90% of their business comes from government ‘outsourcing’.
Over 150 asylum seekers are facing eviction from their homes in Glasgow, after Serco was contracted to manage their accommodation. Within a few days of announcing that it was going to be accommodating asylum seekers, people who had been refused asylum began getting evicted to face destitution and homelessness. Two years ago a Russian family of three died after jumping from the 15th floor of their home in Glasgow’s Red Road Flats, on the same day they were told their support was being stopped.
The UKBA has been forcing people into destitution for several years and the severity of this situation has been compounded by deep cuts in legal aid which have left many asylum seekers without proper legal support. Report after report has highlighted the depth of human suffering that destitution causes: from malnutrition and severe illness to life as an invisible undocumented worker faced with super-exploitation.
Serco and G4S are now involved in running the whole brutal control and deportation regime from when people first make their claim for asylum through to the end, when they are either successful or are deported. With this new contract their control over the lives of refugees and migrants is total. Serco runs two of the UK’s 12 Immigration Removal Centres (IRCs): Yarl’s Wood in Bedfordshire and Colnbrook, near Heathrow Airport. Both have been the subject of reports alleging abuse of prisoners such as physical assault by prison guards. Serco also runs asylum seeker prisons in Australia, where in 2009 it won a $370m contract to run seven detention centres. There have been repeated claims of the abuse of prisoners in Australian detention centres.
Capitalism will try and make a quick buck out of every aspect of our lives and even desperate refugees and migrants fleeing persecution, war, poverty and environmental disaster become simply something to make profit from. We are generally sick of the lie of efficiency and cost savings in the private sector, with these ‘private-public’ partnerships simply a way of transferring public money to private companies to generate more money for faceless shareholders. But it becomes even more sickening when the particular ‘efficiency’ the government is hoping Serco, G4S and others will deliver is a more efficient deportation machine and a more efficient implementation of its racist immigration laws.
Barnaby Mitchell
