Written evidence submitted by Baobab Centre for Young Survivors in Exile (AAC0041)
The Baobab Centre for Young Survivors in Exile is a non-residential community located in North London that has a holistic, integrated and multidisciplinary approach and offers several levels of therapeutic intervention and support to young and unaccompanied asylum seekers and refugees who arrived in the UK before the age of eighteen. All have experienced child-specific human rights abuses, including violence in various contexts in their home countries (such as organized community violence, imprisonment as a consequence of the actions of their parents, forced recruitment or trafficking for labour, sexual exploitation or crime). All have arrived in the UK suffering significant mental health and developmental difficulties. As our therapeutic model is non time-limited we work with them over long periods of their development. On average, half of our young people engage in our community for around five years, with about half continuing beyond five years.
During their period of therapeutic engagement (and sometimes beyond), we offer casework provision to support our young people’s efforts at rehabilitation. 20% of casework interventions deal with supporting young people with housing issues, representing the single largest category of where our casework support is expended. A large share of this work deals with accommodation provided through the Home Office while young people wait for a decision on their asylum application.
The issues related to Home Office provided accommodation that we highlight below need to be understood in the context of very long waiting times to receive a positive protection decision. On average, our young people wait 20 months for a first decision on their asylum application and more than 43 months for a positive protection decision. While all our young people apply as minors, these very long waiting times mean that most will turn 18 and fall within the care of the Home Office in terms of their accommodation needs. It also means that the poor quality of accommodation will have significant disruptive impacts upon their young lives.
Our evidence submitted here reflects our unique, 16-year expertise working at the intersection of clinical therapeutic intervention and the UK and social care systems for young people. It focuses on the experiences of young people in the 18-25 age range who represent 70% of the young people we work with.
In our experience, there are simply too many subcontractors in the system as set up and managed by the Home Office. Home Office contracted providers themselves will subcontract to external providers and/or individual landlords, making the system impossible to properly monitor, leading to considerable loss of information about the young people along the chain, and to relocation decisions being made with no thought to the best interests of the young people, their networks of support, their friendships, their education, or their mental wellbeing. When young people are moved far away from their friends they have no funds to sustain contact with essential relationships, essential when they are unaccompanied and have therefore no family members in the UK.
The most common experience of our young people of their Home Office accommodation is that of being moved around multiple times across different accommodations, accommodation providers, neighbourhoods, cities, and even regions of the UK, during their time being supported in Home Office accommodation. This constant moving takes no account of existing networks of support, education history, or mental health needs, and does not seem to be monitored appropriately. It leads to fragmentation of young people’s lives when they have already experienced multiple traumatic experiences and are struggling to rebuild coherent lives in the UK.
determined, from Bristol (where his connections and friends were), to Ilford, then London (Elephant and Castle, then Hackney) -- and then other locations that he did not know and cannot remember. He thus spent an average of 8 months in each location, making rebuilding networks and connections impossible. Additionally, making his experience further disturbing, he was transferred from different types of accommodation, such as going from shared accommodation to hotels. A. has now been recognized as a victim of trafficking and has been finally accommodated in a safe house, which he needed all this time.
R. - has so far been moved nine times in five years while waiting for asylum – an average of less than 6 months per location. Some of the accommodation providers he experienced were private individual landlords subcontracted by the Home Office-contracted providers. He was expelled from such accommodations multiple times with very little notice and no protection or safeguarding as landlords would decide they had better financial incentive in renting privately. There has been no continuity in the Home Office providing accommodation to him – every single move must be accompanied by our caseworkers providing the same evidence regarding R.’s mental health needs and history. R. is at high risk of suicidal ideation – a key element in his file that, along with clear letters from us about his growing sense of feeling hopeless, fails to be passed on to accommodation providers at every move. He needs to be accommodated close to our Centre where he engages several times a week for psychotherapeutic work and support, but instead he keeps on being offered accommodation more than 2 hours away, even though the Home Office agrees that he needs to be placed within easy access to our centre.
G. - was moved 10 times to different hotels while in Home Office provided accommodation, spending an average of 9 months per location. The hotels would be in very different locations, with the only constant being that they would be far from our Centre, where G. comes several times a week to engage in therapeutic work. G.’s journey to the UK took him through Libya where he suffered multiple human rights abuses.
Q. -spent a considerable amount of time being accommodated in a hotel as a young person where residents were made to use a different entrance to other occupants of the hotel (like tourists), and experienced this as a humiliation on a daily basis. He recently submitted a fresh claim, is currently under S.95 support – and for the first time in our experience he recently received a letter from the Home Office confirming his right to be accommodated close to our Centre – a sign that taking into account young people’s particular experiences and needs can be done.
The use of contractors by the Home Office and of subcontractors has created an accommodation system that is fragmented and that creates major obstacles for young people’s rehabilitation. There is no coherent thinking about their safeguarding, and data management, because of the complex subcontracting chains, is poor. Record-keeping across contractors is uneven. Key information about the experiences of young people, their vulnerabilities, their physical and mental health and their safeguarding needs, is lost.
Overall, the use of contractors by the Home Office has created a system that does not act systematically in the best interests of young people.
One last point refers to the inspection regime that the Home Office has in place in the management of its accommodation contracts. As verbally confirmed to us during our regular engagement with Home Office directors, current inspections of accommodation relate to buildings and facilities only. It is our understanding that there is currently no provision in these inspections for the well-being of residents. Ofsted last year started conducting visits of supported accommodation for social services, in line with the social care common inspection framework. Ofsted’s model of inspection includes sending a questionnaire before inspection to all residents (young people under 18), then engaging in discussions with resident young people during the inspection visit. Additionally, Ofsted inspectors will look at individual files on all residents so as to understand if needs are being met by accommodation providers. This provides a clear and existing template for how to conduct inspections that the Home Office should follow and implement.
In our experience too often providers contracted by the Home Office for accommodation get away with substandard and inappropriate accommodation, both in the quality and in the appropriateness of the accommodation offered – with insufficient sharing of information between services about the young people’s experiences and needs. Given the prevalence of the mental health issues we see in our population, with complex PTSD highly prevalent, high levels of anxiety and depression, difficulties in the regulation of affect, difficulties in self care and in building relationships with others, this raises a question about the quality or frequency of inspections conducted by the Home Office of their contracted providers, as explained above.
Our caseworkers report that when they visit young people in their accommodation it is not rare that the place visited would “look like a crack den” -- with visible problems like rubbish everywhere, blood, urine and faecal materials in the bathrooms, bed bugs, mice or no heating. Often kitchens are filthy and cannot be cleaned. Getting accommodation providers to address such glaring issues is often near impossible, with limited contact information available and no accountability in place.
Additionally, we have seen no evidence that the traumatic experiences of our young people are being taken into account when providing accommodation, even when these experiences have been documented by us and relevant information has been passed on to the Home Office. A key example is the provision of shared accommodation with older men when a young person has a documented history of having previously suffered abuse at the hands of older men in their home countries or in their journeys. The provision of accommodation on a no-choice basis can quickly aggravates this situation and lead to young people feeling trapped in accommodation that they experience as dangerous and violent. They soon come to feel helpless, hopeless and suicidal.
The provision of accommodation in hotels is particularly inappropriate. The lack of cooking facilities, with very few hotels even having microwaves, has an impact on young people’s nutrition (see safeguarding risks below). In particular for young people who have been held in captivity in prisons where many individuals are crowded together as is routinely the case in Libya, the noisy hotels remind young people of overwhelming prison experiences and especially they feel trapped as they cannot find peace and quiet.
Lastly, we have experience of many young people being placed in emergency accommodation for longer than 5 days on a routine basis.
The scrutiny of these subcontractors is not adequate for ensuring the careful management of all Home Office accommodation. For the young people with whom we work it often seems that no thought has been given to the mixture of older and younger males in houses; to the cultural differences of the residents or to potential or actual safeguarding issues in relation to vulnerable young adults who often are functioning in a way that is several years younger developmentally than their chronological age, as a consequence of their traumatic experiences.
Engagement with stakeholders such as ourselves, although essential in the young people’s networks and to support their mental health, is limited to non-existent. As young people keep being moved continually information about them does not seem to be shared.
Complaints made by stakeholders to the providers very rarely result in change or even answers to acknowledge communications and complaints. There is no transparency and rare acknowledgement among providers as to how the complaint has been received.
Providers are generally not trained in understanding vulnerabilities, mental health, refugee journeys -- they act more like estate agents than people who want to engage in the welfare of young people. Responsibilities get passed on or are avoided. In the case of one of our young persons placed in a hotel, when we tried to reach that hotel to discuss his safeguarding, the staff on reception did not know the young person or could not communicate with that young person as “they were just the reception”. So we had no one at the provider that we could contact.
We have seen no evidence that providers signpost young people to the community -- for example if a young person is ill there is no service to help young people reach a GP.
Our main concern is that current providers are not ensuring the safeguarding or the welfare of young adults. We would like to flag this as an area in need of urgent improvement.
The routine experience of our young people being moved multiple times from one accommodation to another constitutes a clear welfare risk. Our young people have described the experience as being “plucked out” and given no warning or agency in being moved to different cities. They describe this as a terrifying experience. The risk for our young people is in being retraumatised as they are made to re-live feelings of lack of agency that they would have experienced when being trafficked in their journeys into exile. For instance, one of our young people was told on the day that he was being moved and the taxi driver refused to tell him where he was going. For our population the risk of re-traumatisation in such practices is very high.
The experience is also a safeguarding risk as young people end up being uprooted from their support networks – and then being uprooted again. Young people lose the friendships they have made in their accommodation or local area, no longer have access to their local GP services with medical professionals they have come to trust. In effect, being frequently moved leads to increased marginalization and social experiences of being in limbo. Added to the very long waiting times to receive asylum, this waiting and repeated uprooting has devastating effects on their mental health as people are no longer able to project themselves in the future. We highlight this as an area in urgent need of improvement.
The inappropriateness of providers’ accommodation described above is another risk to both the physical and mental welfare of asylum seekers. When young people in hotels lack cooking facilities or even microwaves, they become unable to feed themselves healthily and both their physical and mental wellbeing is at risk. Many of our young people have reported surviving off pot noodles and bread to keep themselves full for longer periods of time. Doors without lock risk young people with traumatic experiences feeling unsafe and re-traumatized. Being accommodated far from their support, in particular the therapeutic support that we provide, is a safeguarding concern. One young person lived next door to another young man who sadly committed suicide – but there was no conversation or support offered from the providers. It is this lack of attention to important details that needs urgent improvement across providers.
In general we find provisions for welfare officers to be lacking. The Home Office maintains that welfare officers are present on accommodation sites, but our caseworkers have never encountered one. And from young people’s descriptions it is clear that they are never met at a new accommodation by a Welfare officer who takes time to help with neighbourhood integration (shops, GP, places to worship, etc.).
For our caseworkers, communication with the Home Office is very slow and disjointed. Our experience is not just that there will be long waiting times for people to get back to us, but that clear points of contact in the Home Office are lacking forcing caseworkers to interact with multiple teams that do not share the same information. As a result situations need to be re-explained at every encounter, prolonging times to receive an answer. There also seems to be issue in how effectively the Home Office shares information and necessary documents to housing providers. There is clear need for more effective communication between the Home Office and all local partners.
It is our experience at the Baobab Centre that the transition leaving asylum accommodation is abrupt and challenging. For instance, one of our young people did not receive the letter from the Home Office explaining that he was to leave asylum accommodation as it was sent to the wrong address. This was a consequence of the fact he was moved countless times between different accommodations and there was little communication between the different subcontractors. The delay in receiving this letter was problematic because he did not have enough time to make the appropriate arrangements to transition out of asylum accommodation and into safe housing.
Young people should be given support in their transition out of asylum accommodation to help them navigate the systems necessary to acquire identification documents, open a bank account, accessing safe housing, finding a job... It is our experience that young people are thrown out of accommodation once they have received their status with little support and they risk becoming destitute and helpless. We would like to see young people being accompanied through this transitional period, ideally by the advocate or wellbeing officers they have come to trust.
- Currently, young people are left to their own resources with little understanding of their new environment and little care being invested in their safeguarding and wellbeing. Young adults should receive a more personalised induction when arriving in any accommodation: We would like to see an advocate show young people around their accommodation and their local area. This would ensure the young people are aware of the location of their closest GP practise, dental surgery, supermarket... Upon leaving, this advocate should help prepare for the moving-on period.
- We would like all Home Office accommodation to be staffed with advocates or wellbeing/welfare officers who regularly check-in with young people to ensure their safeguarding and their wellbeing. These professionals should be appropriately trained in the needs of vulnerable young people.
- We would like to see young adults being placed in specific accommodation where all residents are between 18-25 years old, as is the practice by local authorities and social services. The young people’s past experiences and mental health vulnerabilities need to be taken into consideration when assigning them accommodation.
- The Home Office’s inspection and monitoring processes of accommodation providers need to be improved and cover not just material provisions (functioning appliances, heating, clean environment...) but also the well-being of residents. The model for such inspections can be found in Ofsted social care inspections. Ofsted might be approached to carry out such inspections for the Home Office.
Feb 2025