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Home Office leaves asylum seekers from Manston
stranded in central London
Exclusive: People who had been held at Kent centre
left ‘stressed and disoriented’ at Victoria station for hours, some in
flip-flops
A group of migrants were taken from Manston
immigration centre in Kent and left in London.
Amelia
Gentleman
@ameliagentleman
Wed 2 Nov
2022 18.27 GMT
The Home
Office left asylum seekers from the Manston immigration centre in central
London without accommodation or warm clothing, as officials attempted to reduce
acute overcrowding, the Guardian can reveal.
A group of
11 asylum seekers from Manston were left at Victoria railway station on Tuesday
evening with nowhere to stay, without winter coats, many of them in flip-flops,
according to volunteers with the Under One Sky homelessness charity, who
provided them with emergency supplies of food and clothes.
“They were
stressed, disturbed and completely disoriented,” said Danial Abbas, a volunteer
with the charity. The group, from Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq, some of them
wrapped in blankets to keep warm, were confused about what they were meant to
do, he said. “They were also very hungry.”
About 50
asylum seekers from Kent were also deposited from a bus by Victoria coach
station at around 11pm on Saturday, according to a witness. “They were still on
the street at midnight, trying to work out what to do, where to go. They had no
money, and hadn’t even been told where they were,” said the witness, an Afghan
asylum seeker, who asked not to be named. He has been housed in a nearby hostel
for the past 14 months, and watched them arrive. “I was shocked. I tried to
help; I showed them where to get free wifi, where to sit and get warm in the
station.”
Hundreds of
asylum seekers have been rapidly moved out of the Manston camp in the past two
days amid heavy criticism of overcrowded conditions at the immigration centre,
where this weekend about 4,000 people were being held at a site designed for
1,600.
The
immigration minister, Robert Jenrick, said the number of people at Manston had
fallen substantially on Tuesday, but on Wednesday evening he admitted that
there were still about 3,500 at the centre. Appearing on ITV, he told Robert
Peston: “We gripped this immediately when we appreciated the scale of the
challenge at the weekend, it’s now falling very rapidly and I expect that we’ll
get down to an acceptable level within about seven days.”
The 11 men
left without accommodation on Tuesday told charity volunteers they had been
driven from Kent to London earlier on Tuesday afternoon as part of a larger
group of about 40 asylum seekers. Other members of their group had family members
or friends they were able to contact and stay with, but 11 were left by the
station without anywhere to spend the night.
One of the
men, a 29-year-old economics student from Iraq, said he had been held at
Manston for 21 days after arriving in the UK by boat. “There were so many
people there. They gave food, but only a little,” he said. He said he was told
on Tuesday afternoon that he was being taken to London. “We were told we should
go to our families or friends. I don’t have any family in the UK,” he said.
When they
arrived in London he told the driver that he had nowhere to go, but he was
asked to get off the bus. He had no money of his own and had not been given any
funds by the Home Office. “I asked what should I do for the night, it’s cold.
He said: you need to go.”
Volunteers
from the charity, which distributes food to homeless people on the streets in
London, took the asylum seekers to Primark and spent more than £450 buying them
gloves, thermal jackets, shoes and socks. The volunteers telephoned the Home
Office, which said there had been an “operational error”. At 1am on Wednesday,
eight hours after they had been dropped in the street by the station, two taxis
were sent to Victoria to collect the 11 men and they were driven to Norwich,
where they were placed in a hotel.
A British
Transport Police spokesperson said staff responded to reports of a group of
asylum seekers looking for assistance at Victoria station at 10.33pm on
Tuesday. “Officers engaged and liaised with charity partners, rail staff, and government
colleagues to help them find accommodation for the evening,” they said.
Abbas, from
Under One Sky, said the offloading of people at the station may not have been a
one-off incident. “A British Transport Police officer at Victoria told me that
that has been going on since Saturday – coaches of refugees are just being
dumped here,” Abbas said.
.
The witness
who saw the bus-load of asylum seekers being dropped at Victoria station on
Saturday night said no Home Office staff were on hand to assist.
He said
most of the asylum seekers appeared to be from Afghanistan, and they told him
they had spent the past 10 days in a Home Office camp near Dover. “Each of them
had a blue plastic bag full of their belongings, and a paper tag around their
wrists. They were freezing and hungry. I went to the shop on the corner and
bought them some cakes. I felt sorry for them – they were asking me where they
should go,” he said.
Some had
relatives in Birmingham and Manchester, he said, but no money to travel there.
Others were able to call friends in London, and left the station area to find
them. By about 1am all of them had disappeared. “They said they had been told
there was no space for them in any hotel or hostel accommodation. I don’t know
where they all went,” the witness said.
Clare
Moseley, of the refugee charity Care4Calais, said the Home Office had a duty to
house asylum seekers who did not have the means to support themselves. “They
should not be leaving people on the street. We have had heard of another case
of someone being driven from Manston to Southhampton, where there was no hotel
room for them. It is absolutely chaotic and horrific.”
On
Wednesday the prime minister, Rishi Sunak, said the government faced a “serious
and escalating problem”, adding: “We will make sure that we control our borders
and we will always do it fairly and compassionately, because that is the right
thing.”
But Enver
Solomon, the chief executive of the Refugee Council, said: “People are not
being supported with dignity, humanity and compassion.”
The Home
Office has been contacted for comment.
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