A grim Yes Minister plot made real

Making failed asylum seekers homeless before they can be deported is inhumane and counter-productive

It sounds like something out of the 1980s comedy TV show Yes, Minister. If only it wasn’t so serious, with appalling consequences for vulnerable people, it would be ridiculously funny.

This sorry saga begins with the arrival of people in the UK seeking asylum, a refuge from violence and war in their home countries.

But, after considering their cases, the British authorities decided they were not genuine refugees and therefore would not be able to stay in this country.

So far, so simple. Whether each individual decision was right or wrong, there has to be some kind of system to determine whether asylum seekers are or are not in need of shelter.

However, before these people can be deported – or, to put it another way, ‘evicted from the UK’ – they are instead to be evicted from their current homes.

The reason is that the Home Office has decided that as these people no longer have leave to remain in the UK, it is not going to pay their rent.

And Serco, the private company that provides housing for asylum seekers on behalf of the UK government, doesn’t want to do so for free. So they are going to change the locks. One would have thought the Home Office might be trying to do better on the issue of deportation after the Windrush scandal, in which children of immigrants from the Caribbean who arrived in the 1940s and 1950s, including some who were born in the UK, were deported or threatened with deportation because they couldn’t prove their right to live in the UK. Even though one reason they couldn’t prove it was that the UK government had recently decided to burn the proof, thinking the documents were no longer needed.

Removing men, women and children, who may not speak English, from their homes and throwing them onto the streets is inhumane, but also stupidly counter-productive.

One would have thought that after deciding to deport someone, they would be required to stay at a particular address to facilitate their removal. And that anyone leaving that address might be regarded as being on the run, unlawfully at large.

Instead, the Home Office and Serco have combined to force them to fend for themselves on the streets or in the countryside. What are they to do? Live off the land or the kindness of strangers?