We report today on the poor healthcare given to asylum seekers housed in hotels and temporary accommodation while the backlog of cases mounts. As Dr Jan Wise, chair of the British Medical Association’s ethics committee, says, this neglect is “to pile trauma on trauma” for many people who have sought refuge in the UK from persecution or terror.
Unfortunately, it is to be suspected that the government thinks it can get away with such appalling treatment of vulnerable people, because it knows that public opinion is unsympathetic to new arrivals, especially those coming in small boats across the Channel. Ministers are unlikely ever to be explicit about this, but it may be at the back of their minds that unpleasant conditions in migrant accommodation may help to deter others from seeking asylum here. That is the sort of thinking that gave us the “hostile environment” policy, which resulted in so many cases of terrible injustice. It will not work as a deterrent, and it is inhumane and wrong in any case.
Suella Braverman, the home secretary, ought in her own interest to focus on making the asylum system work better rather than more punitively. People might be deterred from making unfounded asylum claims if claims were assessed quickly and those whose claims were rejected were promptly removed from the country. But that would require more public money to be spent on processing claims, which is something for which no short-termist politician seems prepared to argue.
