The model of accommodation established with sites such as Napier Barracks has been defined as a ‘quasi-detention’ by the All-Party Parliamentary Group in Immigration Detention who following their visit to the site in February described it as “fundamentally unsuitable for use as asylum accommodation.
”The Bill will give power to the Secretary of State to indefinitely house people seeking asylum in these reception centres with the risk of creating a de-facto indefinite immigration detention system in the UK, with well documented impact on migrants psychological and physical wellbeing.
Under Priti Patel’s plans to reform the asylum system the Home Office will develop more large scale asylum accommodation in remote areas where evidence shows access to medical care is extremely limited.
Dr Durga Sivasathiaseelan, Senior Lead for Outreach Services at Doctors of the World said: “It was shocking to realise that access to healthcare was not a priority when creating accommodation models for asylum seekers. I witnessed how this led to huge unmet health needs.“The impossibility of receiving ongoing support for acute and chronic medical conditions or be unable to get prescriptions are just some of the many instances we saw on a day-to-day basis of people unable to access or receive adequate medical care. “Even more worrying was the realisation that people housed there did not have regular access to health information and were left to navigate the system on their own, lacking even up to dateCOVID-19 information in their community languages and having to rely on NGOs like DOTW who have to fight hard to navigate the system with them.”