A newspaper outlet revealed that the Home Office left asylum seekers from the Manston immigration centre in central London without accommodation or warm clothing, as officials tried to ease acute overcrowding.
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 supplied them with emergency supplies of food and clothing.
Danial Abbas, a volunteer with the charity said that they were worried, frightened and totally disorientated.
The group who were from Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq were covered in blankets to keep them warm, and they were confused about what they were meant to do, they were also extremely hungry.
According to a witness, approximately 50 asylum seekers from Kent were also deposited from a bus by Victoria coach station at about 11 pm on Saturday.
The eyewitness said they were still on the street at midnight, trying to work out what to do, or where to go. They had no cash, they hadn’t even been told where they were.
Hundreds of asylum seekers have been rapidly moved out of the Manston centre in the past two days amid heavy criticism of overcrowded conditions at the immigration centre, where this weekend around 4,000 people were being kept at a site designed for 1,600.
The immigration minister, Robert Jenrick, said the number of people at Manston had dropped substantially on Tuesday, but on Wednesday evening he admitted that there were still almost 3,500 at the centre.
Appearing on ITV, he told Robert Peston that they gripped this immediately when they appreciated the scale of the challenge at the weekend and that it was now falling extremely rapidly and he expected that they’d get down to an acceptable level within about seven days.
The 11 men left without accommodation on Tuesday told charity volunteers they’d been driven from Kent to London earlier on Tuesday afternoon as part of a larger group of approximately 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’d been held at Manston for 21 days after arriving in the United Kingdom by boat. He said there were so many people there, and that they were given food but very little, and then on Tuesday afternoon he was told that he was being taken to London, and they were told they should go to their families or friends. He said that he didn’t have any family or friends here in the United Kingdom.
Even migrants have a human right to express their concerns, but the Home Office has denied it’s to blame for asylum seekers being left stranded in London, yet Danial Abbas, a volunteer with Under One Sky, a homelessness charity that helped the asylum seekers, said that someone from the Home Office told him that a huge mistake had been made.
The Home Office didn’t provide a comment for the story, but then issued a statement, which said that 11 asylum seekers had been left stranded, but they said that originally those asylum seekers who were left stranded had originally told staff they had somewhere to stay in London and that it was, therefore, wrong to say the Home Office had made a mistake.
The Home Office said the individuals were transported to Victoria coach station, London because they said they had accommodation in that location which would not leave them destitute, and that they told them that they had accommodation with friends and family available to them.
However, if they had accommodation available to them in the first place, wouldn’t they have gone there rather than go to Manston, and wouldn’t they have been picked up by family or friends when they got off the boat?
The Home Office said any suggestion there was a mistake in transporting the individuals to Victoria was wrong, and that when they found out, the Home Office worked at a pace to find accommodation for the individuals when they were informed that 11 of them didn’t, in fact, have a place to stay.
The Home Office also said the group were only in London for a few hours before accommodation was found for them.
It’s unlikely to be the last word on the matter, and in other developments, Robert Jenrick, the immigration minister said that the government was facing legal action over the conditions in which people have been held at Manston and that four Commons select committee chairs (two Tories, one from Labour and one from the SNP) had written an open letter to Braverman demanding answers to a string of questions about the bad conditions at Manston.
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