Asylum seekers under Home Office accommodation and care are dying at alarming rates while the British government, rather than providing a safer environment and preventing such tragedies, downplays their death toll, Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor warned in a statement today.
Since April 2016, 95 people have died in asylum accommodation in UK, almost double the number recently provided by the government, raising doubts the Home Office has deliberately downplayed the toll of these deaths.
Rise in the number of deaths in asylum accommodation
In the past two years, there has been a steep rise in the number of deaths in asylum accommodation.
This came alongside the Covid pandemic and the decision to push asylum seekers in hotels and military barracks.
Deaths leapt from four in 2019 to 36 in 2020 with further 33 people since the start of 2021. Since the start of 2020 up to August 2021, 69 people have died under the Home Office care.
Already at the beginning of 2020, it was found by the Home Office’s own inspectors that 83% of Home Office properties to accommodate asylum seekers had defects and 40% of the defects were so serious that they made the properties uninhabitable.
Far from offering a “safe environment” during Covid-19, these forms of temporary accommodation are unsafe, overcrowded and often detention-like, such as Napier Barracks in Kent and Penally Barracks in Pembrokeshire, recently ruled “inadequate and unsafe” by the UK High Court itself.
Nonetheless, the number of asylum seekers living in hotel-type accommodation has continued to increase, from 1,200 people in March 2020 to approximately 8,700 at the end of February 2021, spread in over 90 hotels across the UK.
Such mistreatment of asylum seekers’ right to an adequate standard of living was already in the public eye in UK but recently it has sparked new concerns.
Following distinct requests made by the Scottish Refugee Council (SRC) and Liberty Investigates on the death toll of people within its asylum accommodation, the Home Office provided two different answers.
