Our thoughts today are with the families and friends of everybody affected by the tragic incident in the Park Inn in summer 2020.
This report speaks to issues we knew were present all along in regards to a lack of preparation and communication around the move into hotels, and that hotel staff had to fulfil responsibilities they should never have been faced with. These circumstances must be confined to the past. Hotel staff should not have to be trained to support people with complex mental health needs. The fact is, hotel staff cannot be should not have been expected to act as specialist mental health practitioners here.
We are deeply worried that this report shows that the Home Office has not learned any real lessons from this tragedy. We are almost two years on and the Home Office’s Covid response measures are continuing to house asylum seekers in hotel accommodation across Scotland and the UK at a cost of £3.5m a day.
As this incident shows, being placed in hotel accommodation with very limited funds and no control over your life for long periods can have devastating consequences for the health and wellbeing of people who are only looking to rebuild their lives in safety. The UK Government’s Nationality & Borders Bill proposes to house people in institutional accommodation, so called ‘reception centres’. We’re deeply concerned that instead of consigning this style of asylum support to the past, the Home Office is looking to expand its use of institutional accommodation for people seeking protection.
Reports that Badreddin Abadlla Adam made over 70 calls for help while he was in hotel accommodation are extremely worrying. We need answers as to why these calls were not met with any support.
It is of the most profound concern that the report found that there was no mental health assessment in the ‘basic vulnerability assessment’ that Mears said they performed prior to the moves from self-contained housing (flats) to hotel accommodation. This move took place during the first three weeks of a strict lockdown.
We have seen no evidence that these very basic assessments were done. It’s simply unacceptable that after people were moved into hotels, the Home Office did not have a system in place to assess and re-evaluate the changing needs of people, including their mental health. This indicates negligence on the part of the Home Office.
The Home Office owes it to the people who were staying in the Park Inn at the time of this tragic incident, their families, people who were and still are housed in institutional accommodation and the wider refugee community to release this report in full.
