Scabies, sexual harassment & racism: inside the UK’s asylum hotels
Asylum hotel providers receive billions in government contracts while residents report harassment and abuse
People living in the UK’s “asylum hotels” endured sexist and racist harassment and scabies outbreaks as accommodation providers raked in millions in profits, openDemocracy can reveal.
As of June 2024, just under 30,000 asylum-seeking people – many of them incredibly vulnerable – were living in hotels run by the government or its contractors. While much of the coverage of the hotels has thus far focused on the associated costs of the accommodation, our investigation has provided a rare glimpse into their daily reality, revealing the extent of the poor living conditions and disrespectful treatment they suffer – often for months at a time.
The Home Office recorded 1,500 complaints about the state of these asylum hotels last year, according to data obtained by openDemocracy via Freedom of Information laws. The majority (901) were linked to Clearsprings Ready Homes, a firm awarded a £996m government contract to deliver asylum accommodation and support over eight years in 2021.
These officially recorded complaints likely under-report the scale of the problem as asylum-seekers told openDemocracy they were hesitant to file complaints for fear of reprisals from hotel staff.
Clearsprings recorded pre-tax profits of £62.5m in 2022 – its most recent accounts available – a 121% increase from £28m the previous year.
Yet in complaints seen by openDemocracy, residents of Clearsprings-contracted hotels told the Home Office that they were the victims of alleged racist abuse and sexual harassment from hotel staff.
One woman said she was sexually harassed by a security guard at a hotel in London, another at a different hotel complained of “sexual harassment, discrimination, and victimisation”, and a third described being “humiliated” by staff.
Mary, who has been living in Clearsprings-run hotel accommodation since June 2023, described how on one occasion, hotel staff entered her room without knocking when she was asleep in bed.
“I was sleeping so I was not properly dressed,” she told openDemocracy. “I asked them, how come you are in my room? Rather than leave to let me get dressed, they just turned their heads away. There is no privacy.”
The staff, she said, “do not treat us with respect. They don’t treat us like human beings.”
“If you challenge the staff, they say you are arguing, you are fighting,” Mary said. “You have to go along with them or they say they will remove you from the hotel, and then where will you go?” For this reason, as well as a lack of faith in the system, she did not file a complaint.
The isolation and loneliness of living in the hotel, along with the lack of privacy, triggered Mary’s post-traumatic stress disorder. “It has impacted my mental health,” she said. “There’s no security for us, and the people who are supposed to protect us are the people who are showing us that harm can happen to us anytime, showing us that we mean nothing.”
Asylum-seeking people housed in hotels were provided with a £9.58 weekly allowance in 2023, reduced to £8.86 in January this year, meaning they are almost entirely dependent on hotels to provide essentials such as period pads and shampoo. But, Mary told us, women are sometimes forced to buy their own period products. “And that is more of the £8 gone,” she said.
Clearsprings’ most recent annual report – published before the July election that brought in a Labour government – states that its “strategic agenda will be influenced” by the Tories’ New Plan for Immigration, which was intended to reduce ‘irregular’ migration, such as people arriving in small boats or lorries, into the UK.
The plan, which was introduced by former home secretary Priti Patel in 2021, informed the subsequent Nationality and Borders Act, the Illegal Migration Act and the now-cancelled plan to remove people to Rwanda.
Yet despite these policies designed to deter people from coming to the UK, Clearsprings used its latest report to predict that the annual number of arrivals would “continue at a high level” – meaning it would continue to keep raking in the profits.
Sian Norris
Malnourished and hungry
Many of the complaints received by the Home Office related to the food served in hotels, which asylum seekers told openDemocracy often lacks nutrition or is culturally insensitive.
One woman, Madiha, told of how her toddler son lost weight while living in a windowless hotel room in the south-east of England, provided by Clearsprings.
“I remember I had to wash pasta in the sink, it was so spicy and he was so little, he couldn’t eat [the sauce] but I needed to give him something,” she said. “It made me feel like a bad mother.” Madiha has since moved out of the hotel.
Food was also an issue for Jane, who is visually impaired. She arrived in the UK in 2022 and lived in a Clearsprings-contracted hotel for over a year.
“I got no help with my disability,” Jane told openDemocracy, describing how she was forced to rely on her daughter to help her navigate the hotel. When her daughter was out, Jane missed meal times, as she could not safely go to the dining room or be able to select the food. “I would sit all alone in my room, and I would go hungry,” she said.
When Jane did make it to the restaurant, the food often lacked nutrients, with limited fruit and vegetables. “The same every day, so much carbohydrates, so much fat,” she described. Without access to a balanced diet, Jane started suffering from high blood pressure.
A report by the Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration, published in 2022, found that hotel residents were presenting with health issues such as type 2 diabetes related to poor nutrition, while children and babies were failing to thrive and “missing developmental milestones because of problems with nutrition”.
Mary, Madiha and Jane have all been supported by Women for Refugee Women. The charity’s deputy director Andrea Vukovic told openDemocracy that the new Labour government must “mitigate the harms of hotel accommodation, including ensuring proper oversight of the private providers who are running hotels to ensure women in hotel accommodation are treated fairly and with dignity and respect”.
“Ultimately, the use of hotels to accommodate people seeking safety needs to end now,” Vukovic said.
Big business
Our analysis reveals there were also 490 complaints made about hotels run by Serco, another provider that was awarded £1.9bn in 2019 to deliver asylum accommodation over 10 years.
These complaints included allegations of sexual harassment, intimidation and racial abuse by staff and outbreaks of scabies, an itchy and highly infectious rash caused by mites.
One outbreak of scabies in a Serco-run asylum hotel in 2022 was widely reported by the media. But our investigation revealed that there were three further complaints about scabies in Serco hotels made in January and February last year. The company made a global operating profit of £47.7m in 2023, according to its most recent annual report.
A spokesperson told openDemocracy that these outbreaks “did not constitute a complaint”, adding: “Such events are a recognised possibility when accommodating several thousand asylum seekers. Serco works with the health authorities and has a comprehensive Communicable Disease Management Plan to manage such issues.”
openDemocracy can confirm that complaints were made about the three scabies outbreaks in Serco accommodation, as well as two alleged outbreaks in Clearsprings accommodation in March 2023, and one in accommodation managed by Mears in May 2023.
In response, a Mears spokesperson said the company had supported “thousands of people in asylum accommodation and feedback is generally positive about the quality of our provision. Where there are any issues, complaints or concerns raised either with Migrant Help or directly with our team, we do our best to support our service users and resolve them.”
A separate complaint from May 2023 alleged that staff in a Serco-contracted hotel had failed to pass on letters to a resident, something Mary also experienced in her Clearsprings-run hotel.
Asylum seekers living in the hotels are reliant on hotel staff to pass on any letters they receive from the Home Office. Missing a letter can put an individual in an extremely precarious situation, as it may result in them missing an appointment with the Home Office relating to their asylum application. Non-attendance, even in error, can lead to asylum claims being withdrawn and an individual facing eviction from a hotel.
“We have had situations where clients have received letters from Clearsprings Ready Homes informing them that their accommodation is to be terminated within 10 days, and this is often the first they will have heard that their asylum claim has been refused or withdrawn,” an immigration adviser at the charity Praxis, who wished to remain anonymous, told openDemocracy.
“Even if the situation has been resolved by the time of the eviction date, hotel staff, who are further subcontractors of Clearsprings, can’t change the decision to evict unless they receive the green light from a specific team, or sometimes even a specific person, within the Home Office,” they said. “When there are delays in this process, residents are made homeless despite the fact that they are fully entitled to ongoing support.”
Outsourcing further complicates an already complicated system. “Everyone seems to be waiting for one part of a decision to be made by someone else,” they said. “What’s needed is a system that puts people at its heart, rather than treating them as an afterthought.”
“Serco acknowledges that there have been complaints raised by asylum seekers, which is inevitable when we are providing hotel accommodation for several thousand people,” a spokesperson said.
“Each and every [complaint] has been appropriately addressed and investigated in accordance with our policies and procedures outlined in our contract from the Home Office.”
Clearsprings and the Home Office did not respond to a request for comment.
openDemocracy is investigating how a growing number of businesses and sectors have profited from successive governments’ anti-migrant policies. Got a tip or a story? Email sian.norris@opendemocracy.net.
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