Torture charity slams housing conditions

The Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture has reported that problems include broken heating, homes infested with bugs and yards strewn with rubbish.

The charity based its claims on feedback from staff and clients at its four national centres. It said housing conditions often did not meet the UK Border Agency’s guidelines, issued to the private companies detailed with providing accommodation to asylum seekers.

A foundation spokesperson said that substandard housing conditions were a problem ‘for a significant number of our clients, who present at counselling sessions with housing issues as their main preoccupation’.|

London-based Ilana Bakal, a case worker and counsellor for the charity, said: ‘Most of the clients complain about very poor conditions. One client had tuberculosis and was stuck in a freezing house with broken heating. He was coughing his guts up.

‘Other places are infested with mice and bedbugs and have rubbish everywhere with rats around. I have clients who suffer nightmares. [It] means all the work we do goes down the drain.’

She added: ‘We take it up with landlords, but they all say they are dealing with subcontractors. Everyone blames someone else.’

Norma McKinnon, manager of the charity’s Glasgow centre, said housing officers were insensitive to the visible stress of torture survivors.
She questioned ‘what monitoring procedures the government had in place to monitor a service for which they are ultimately accountable’.

A spokesperson from UKBA said it regularly undertook audits of compliance, including physical property inspections.

‘Accommodation providers are committed to providing such standards and if failures occur a number of measures are taken, including financial penalties in the form of service credits and ultimately termination of contracts where there is evidence of persistent failures,’ he said.

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