News

Our regular panel comments on a topic in the news.

The government ran into a storm of controversy last week when it announced its plans for accommodating asylum seekers in various rural locations. There was a predictable outcry from local villagers and anger from the government's critics, who accuse it of barbarism. Gurbux Singh, who heads the Commission for Racial Equality, was chided by the government when he took issue with the initiative. Up to 3,000 asylum seekers are set to be accommodated in at least four of these centres scattered across Britain. In explaining the move, Home Office minister Lord Rooker gave much the same rationale as was given for the much-despised dispersal policy: dealing with asylum seekers is a national matter, the burden of which should not fall unduly on London and the South East. He denied that local people would object, although this appeared to be in stark contradiction to some of their initial reactions in the media. The government is applying for planning permission to build accommodation on surplus land in Oxfordshire, Nottinghamshire and Worcestershire.

Felicity Collier, chief executive, British Agencies for Adoption and Fostering
"The government simply has to be braver in confronting media and public ambivalence about asylum seekers. We must welcome and support highly vulnerable and disadvantaged people who come into our country. Applications for asylum should be assessed fairly and speedily. It is not good enough to place marginalised, unwanted people in isolated 'camps' in the middle of rural areas without access to the vital support of their own communities and cultural links. I do not know the answers but I know that the ones currently provided are not good enough."

Bill Badham, programme manager, Children's Society
"Seventy children took the government to 'court' on 18 May, bringing evidence of its abuses of children's rights under the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. Prosecutor Steven Allen, of the Young People's Rights Network, which put on the conference in which the simulated court hearing took place, took evidence from young refugees. Their feeling was that the government has isolated refugee children and that it has created a huge gap between them and children born here. Any guesses on the jury's verdict?"

Karen Warwick, senior practitioner, Barnardo's
"I don't envy the government its need to rapidly develop policy related to asylum seekers. With thousands of people pouring into the country, there is no simple solution in respect of providing these people with accommodation. Housing people in accommodation centres is a short-term solution, as in the long term it will only serve to enhance the far-right policies of segregation."

Bob Hudson, principal research fellow, Nuffield Institute for Health, University of Leeds
"The centres look frighteningly like 21st-century workhouses, especially with the rules banning nights away and requiring education on the premises. It looks like 'modernisation' for asylum seekers amounts to institutionalisation - the very incarnation of Victorian values. The premise is that asylum seeking is synonymous with crime, yet this is the very case that has been exploited so worryingly by Le Pen and others on the far right. There are some short-term logistical problems to be addressed, but more fundamentally the government needs to challenge the argument that immigration destroys a nation."

Julia Ross, social services director and primary care trust chief executive, London Borough of Barking and Dagenham
“The centres may be logistically a better way of organising the very chaotic and unhelpful way we receive asylum seekers at present, but the trouble is that they'll create all sorts of other problems. I worry about our children, who are perfectly happy to make friends across cultures, but the danger is that they now grow fearful of difference and diversity as asylum seekers are increasingly set apart."