Another shambles as G4S is entrusted with running asylum seeker housing

(See the original article here, at Open Democracy/Our Kingdom )

While the world’s biggest security firm has suffered international humiliation over its mishandling of the London Olympics, another more modest piece of business has been unravelling in its hands. 

Back in June, when G4S was looking forward to making a big impression as lead security contractor to the London Olympics, the company signed off a less glamorous but more profitable piece of business – managing housing for thousands of asylum seekers in the north of England. The seven-year £211m contract with the UK Border Agency’s commercial arm COMPASS was especially welcome to G4S, which had lost a deportation escort contract with the UK Border Agency, after the death of Jimmy Mubenga in October 2010.

But the contract has not been plain sailing for the security giant, who have been harried by campaigners across Yorkshire working with asylum rights groups, outraged that a prison guard and immigration detention centre company can privatise the housing of around 1000 asylum seekers presently housed and supported by local councils.

Two groups — South Yorkshire Migration and Asylum Action Group (SYMAAG) and Why Refugee Women? — in May and June criticised  the chosen partner of G4S, private housing company UPM (United Property Management), for forcibly moving a mother and sick baby a hundred miles from Bradford to Doncaster. The UPM flat in Doncaster was condemned by the UKBA itself, but the mother and baby had to endure six weeks there before being rescued by the local children’s services department in Doncaster. UPM was dropped from the G4S contract.

On June 18 a rather rattled G4S announced through the UKBA that it was finally able to take on the asylum housing contract and would have four totally new housing companies as its partners: Cascade, Live Management, Mantel, and a charitable housing association, Target HA, based in Sheffield. Cascade did have some form in asylum housing, but apparently only briefly subcontracting for UPM and Kirklees council. Live Management, registered as a private company only since January 2012, had no form at all. Mantel, part of a commercial property company, was to play no part in the first stages of the contract. Only Target HA emerged as a housing provider with a history of local authority contracts for housing vulnerable people – in its case ex-offenders.

Target Housing as a fig leaf for G4S

For more than fifty years Yorkshire councils had provided housing for refugees. Now that was being handed over to the world’s biggest surveillance and detention company, with a well regarded local charity acting as front man and figleaf. Just as children’s charity Barnado’s rents its reputation to G4S and the Border Agency at the Cedars family detention centre, providing cover for the continued detention of children, Target Housing was to give a credible face to G4S, as it moved from its profitable asylum markets into the expanding markets for private capital in social housing.

It was a good choice; the CEO of Target was a Chilean refugee, Gino Toro, with personal experience of working for refugee housing associations. In early summer 2011 G4S had organised a competitive bidding process for voluntary sector housing providers. Target, like most voluntary organisations, and many specialist housing associations, had been badly hit by cuts in public expenditure, and a resulting drying up of contracts. In 2011 they had a bad year, they told the Charity Commission:

‘Given the economic climate and funding cuts one of our objectives was to avoid any compulsary (sic) staff redundancies’ (1)

Gino Toro says he won a sub contract from G4S in 2011 to house around 250 asylum seekers, in family groups in Sheffield, Hull and Derby. Target, according to Moro, underbid its rivals to win the contract estimated at £2.5 million. Their present total annual turnover is about £2 million, so the contract was important for Target’s survival.

So Target are now players in a game where privatisation means cutting staff costs and reducing service to ensure profits for lead organisation G4S. Target’s unqualified ‘Team Leader’ for their new asylum contract, will be paid the equivalent of £8 per hour gross, roughly what G4S casual employees recruited as guards for the Olympics were paid. Slimmed down staffing will mean vulnerable asylum seeker families will not get the support the councils have offered them.

The G4S assumption that buying a ‘social housing’ provider would scale down opposition in Sheffield totally backfired. Gino Moro was well known in the Chilean refugee community in Sheffield – a community still based on memories of the politics of the Allende years in Chile, and still active in asylum rights campaigning. The Chilean community website invited comments on the Target contract and started a campaign, with SYMAAG, to get Target to withdraw from the G4S contract here.

G4S sanitises its reputation and wins over the charities

The Target experience demonstrates the way in which G4S can be sanitised, losing its reputation in the ‘tainted trade’ of private security, and accepted as a credible ‘partner’ in providing housing for vulnerable tenants like asylum seekers, and perhaps become a major player in the social housing market (2). 

Gino Toro defended working with G4S because he said other well known associations with refugee housing experience ‘like Metropolitan’ (Housing Partnership) were also involved in releasing refugee housing for the G4S contract. Metropolitan, with 80,000 tenants and clients, is the largest UK regeneration and ‘social business’ housing association. Its origins lie in the Metropolitan Coloured Peoples Housing Association of 1957 which housed Jamaican and West Indian immigrants. Metropolitan has in recent years taken over Safe Haven, previously involved in asylum housing in Yorkshire, and the Refugee Housing Association, and still runs the Sheffield Station Foyer for refugees that was founded in 2005. The chair of Metropolitan is Barbara Roche a former Labour immigration minister.

In their efforts to extend their ‘asylum markets’ and ‘detention estates’ into asylum housing, all the private security companies involved in the £620 million contracts — G4S, Serco and Reliance — set out to encourage voluntary organisations, and charitable housing associations with experience in refugee and asylum housing and services, into partnerships as subcontractors. None of the security companies favoured by the Home Office had any previous experience in the field of housing – they needed to absorb and build in this experience, and credibility, to the contract bids. Reliance, the smallest of the security companies, privately owned by Brian Kingham, a Tory party donor since 2001, simply formed a joint venture, Clearel Ltd, with private company Clearsprings who had held asylum housing contracts with the Home Office since 2000. Clearel have the contract for London, the South West and Wales (3).

G4S set about its lobbying and PR project by recruiting Rebecca Woodhouseas Senior Bid Manager for G4S Security Services in February 2011. Between 2006 and 2010 Woodhouse had been Business Initiatives Officer for the Metropolitan Support Trust. Previously she had been a support manager for the Refugee Housing Association (Metropolitan Housing Trust) from 2004 to 2006.

In Yorkshire and the North East, G4S brought in housing consultant, Andrew Gray, a former president of the Chartered Institute of Housing, to set up its asylum housing sub contractors. Gray was well known in the field of social housing, and added housing expertise, and mainstream respectability, to the G4S contract bid. As the £120 million contract unfolded, G4S then recruited Duncan Wells as its Social Cohesion manager. Wells was the chief executive of RETAS, a Leeds based refugee organisation with an established reputation and strong links into the voluntary and charitable asylum support networks. Tiffy Allen, the national convenor of the extensive City of Sanctuary (CoS) movement, is a former colleague of Wells at RETAS, and, according to campaigners, is currently trying to get City of Sanctuary groups to support Wells to set up G4S consultation forums for asylum support groups.

It is perhaps worth noting that Sheffield City of Sanctuary, which started the national City of Sanctuary movement in 2007, was the organisation which actually instigated the campaign in January 2012 against G4S taking over asylum housing in South Yorkshire, by calling on SYMAAG (South Yorkshire Migration and Asylum Action Group) to lead a coalition of charities into a campaign and a protest demonstration.

This careful public relations and recruitment strategy by G4S, and its tireless efforts to network and appear as a mainstream private corporation simply pursuing contracts for outsourcing asylum housing and services, gradually neutralised any active opposition. A Report sponsored by the Joseph Rowntree Trust and Metropolitan, in conjunction with the Chartered Institute of Housing entitled ‘Housing and Migration: UK Guide to issues and solutions’, published in 2012, in the middle of the contract furore on G4S, is totally uncritical of SERCO, G4S and Reliance. The Report, written by John Perry, simply states:

“In 2012 a new challenge is to forge partnerships between the private companies that will provide asylum accommodation, local services, and migrant support organisations . . . it is going to be vital to encourage the companies to take a strategic view, recognise the ‘civic’ role they need to fulfil and contribute to successful integration.’ (p.14)

The Yorkshire G4S contract unravels

The campaign success in removing UPM from the G4S contract brought chaos and indecision to G4S and the UKBA in Yorkshire – not unlike the ‘shambles’ of the G4S Olympics contract. UKBA announced that G4S had removed Gray from contract supervision; as they euphemistically put it he was given a ‘different role’.

Despite all their undertakings to keep asylum seekers and families in the same areas where councils have housed them, G4S and the UKBA are now simply tearing up agreements. On June 13 an official UKBA statement was issued saying

“There is no intention during transition to re-house individuals currently residing in Yorkshire & Humberside to the North East.”

On 24 June a family was forcibly moved from Sheffield to Stockton, a hundred miles away, and other single asylum seekers have been moved, or threatened with moves, to Stockton or Middlesborough. Barnsley asylum seeker families have been threatened with moves 120 miles away to Newcastle.

G4S desperation and ‘reverse privatisation’

G4S is becoming so desperate that it is, remarkably, trying a form of ‘reverse privatisation’ by paying local authorities, and housing associations, like InCommunities in Bradford, to allow them to take over and manage asylum accommodation with sitting asylum seeker tenants from previous local council contracts. This is because G4S and their private contractors cannot find any local private rented sector accommodation to put the families in, when they have to leave local authority housing. Campaigners in Kirklees (Huddersfield) say the council there has turned down at least two offers from G4S.

Target Housing, the only social housing provider willing, so far, to openly partner G4S in Yorkshire, is now reeling from exposure in the national housing press, and the local media in South Yorkshire. Demand for them to withdraw from the contract is gathering momentum. The trustees are now being lobbied, leaflets are being prepared and actions scheduled.

With the G4S shambles in the Olympics being reflected in chaos in the asylum housing contracts, the G4S hold on the Yorkshire and North East contract is uncertain. Campaigners are calling for a rapid return to contracts held directly with the local councils throughout Yorkshire, with no G4S involvement; contracts grounded in public service values, welcoming asylum seekers, instead of the profit-oriented values of an international security company exploiting its ‘asylum markets’ with the tacit support of the social and refugee housing establishment.

G4S News Update // 31st July - 1st August

G4S booted out of Old Trafford after failing to provide sufficient security, Manchester Evening News, 31st July: After a further string of problems, G4S are no longer providing security for Olympic football matches at Old Trafford this summer. Exacerbated by rumours that G4S' subcontractors walked out on the contract due to non-payment from the company, a smaller security company have taken over the responsibilities at the legendary football ground. 

G4S ban high level executives from corporate events during the Olympics, The Argus, 1st August: With the global shit-storm gathering around G4S Olympic fiasco, G4S management has barred top bosses and senior executives from attending corporate hospitality events in order to avoid further embarrassment. Nick Buckles, despite reaping the benefits of G4S' status as an official sponsor of the Olympic Games in order to bulk-buy tickets to Olympic events, will no longer be attending.

G4S contracted to provide security at Tory Party conference in October, The Sun, 1st August: The Tory Party's next conference, held in Birmingham in October, will be guarded by G4S providing the "same service as they do every year." Both Labour and the Tories will use G4S for their conference security in 2012. 

G4S: The Millwall of the Olympics, The Guardian, 1st August: Another dispatch from the Guardian's 'Secret Security Guard.'

Target Housing criticised after co-opting with G4S, 24-dash, 2nd August: Target Housing Association, a charitable housing provider in Sheffield has been criticised after taking up a "£2.5 million' asylum housing contract with G4S. Featuring statements from SYMAAG!

50% of Olympic Security made up by military personnel, The Independent, 2nd August: Despite the fact that the total number of G4S staff is quadruple that of the army, half of Olympic security is now being managed by military personnel. 

[Daily Mail ridiculous headline WARNING] 82 Year-old nun arrested after breaking in to high level US nuclear facility guarded by G4S, The Daily Mail, 3rd August: The 82-year-old nun joined two other environmental activists and managed to dodge the 'high level security' provided by G4S to engage in some direct action against a huge nuclear facility in the US.

G4S take over Wakefield's Angel Lodge, Wakefield Express, 4th August: As we all eventually learnt to expect, G4S have finally managed to get their hands on the notorious Angel Lodge in Wakefield. 

G4S: Olympic Chaos, Asylum Housing Chaos: A SYMAAG Statement

Private security army G4S have been in the news a lot recently. And not just because they are being paid £135 million of public money to house asylum seekers in Yorkshire, despite their record of abuse and racism towards them (for example, see here or here or here or here).

Most spectacularly, the world’s biggest security army have, of course, failed to provide security at the Olympic games (this time they were paid £284 million of public money). In response, G4S are now trying to recruit a new public relations manager.

An emergency bulletin from SYMAAG notog4s

As most of you will know we in the notog4s campaign have tended to assume that the UKBA /G4S undertakings and official statements have meant that evictions and movements of single people and families would, for the majority, mean movements, at worst, within the broad region of Yorkshire and the Humber.

The latest official UKBA Transition bulletin makes it abundantly clear that the claims we made early on in the campaign that in South and West Yorkshire in particular there simply was not a market in ‘decent’ PRS (Public Rented Sector) housing for G4S to exploit was absolutely correct.

Target Housing off target

One family of two adults and a one year old were moved on Tuesday 24^th July 100 miles from Sheffield to Stockton onTees. The UKBA Transition Bulletin openly threatens more families with such a move.

This case is even more significant because it was from an existing private landlord property, although the new G4S contractor in Sheffield, Target Housing claim to have accommodation available for families – so why have the family been sent 100 miles away from contacts and support?

In Barnsley asylum seeker families have been warned by the outgoing asylum team of moves possibly to Hull and Newcastle. One family interviewed this week ,of grandparents, parents and school age children,  were given this warning and told they would probably have to move their household possessions in two bags each.

Live Management, the G4S contractor in Barnsley is, we understand, considering acquiring unsuitable properties which they propose to use on a ‘temporary’ basis until they can find contract compliant ones.

The Return of Angel Lodge

The dreaded Angel Lodge inWakefield, purchased from Angel Housing, has emerged as the new Yorkshire IA centre from September. SYMAAG executive members have horrific memories of actually staying in this dreadful accommodation, oppositeWakefieldhigh security prison. We are campaigning against this decision.

This chaos in UKBA and G4S also indicates that our campaigning (removing UPM and now mobilising against Target) has deepened the crisis for the UKBA and G4S. The ‘soft’ approach of Andrew Gray has now been replaced by the asylum market business approach of Jules Bickers, already deeply unpopular with voluntary sector asylum organisations in the regions he has worked in.

This is yet another indication that we were right to claim that g4s had no experience of asylum housing and that their failures under the contract would constantly punish asylum seeker single people and families who are simply housed awaiting the outcome of asylum claims.

Moreover our fears about the contract fundamentally challenging the basic human rights of families, children and vulnerable asylum seekers seem also to be proving unfortunately to be correct

We have to challenge the UKBA now to cancel the contract with UKBA and extend the target contracts with local authorities and transfer housing associations inYorkshire.

Chaos on the Olympics contract now chaos on the asylum housing contract

G4s are demonstrating exactly the same failings exposed in the Olympics contracts, as one MP put it: ‘their aspirations run far ahead of their abilities’

Their chaotic and incompetent management structures are even more exposed in the asylum housing field – after all in the Olympics contract they were in their key business of events security.

Their incompetence in a field they know nothing about -  housing – is much more serious – here they are embarking on a contract which they know will threaten the rights and well being of up to a thousand vulnerable asylum seekers in Yorkshire, whom we should be welcoming to our region, not punishing and threatening them, using tax payers money – our money.

The Disassociation Game: UPM sacked by G4S?

(originally published on SYMAAG's website) 

United Property Management (UPM) will no longer be sub-contracted by G4S to provide asylum housing in Yorkshire and Humberside. On June 18th the phrase “G4S has selected United Property Management (UPM) as its primary housing partner” disappeared from the G4S COMPASS website. Simultaneously, UPM’s website stopped referring to G4S as “partners”.

UPM has provided sub-standard housing to asylum seekers in our region for years, while UKBA sub-contracted to them, despite frequent complaints from asylum seeking tenants and asylum rights campaigners. Their recent evictions of tenants in Bradford were the focus of a campaign led by Why Refugee Women and SYMAAG. In one case, a woman and her 3 month old baby were moved 40 miles, from Bradford to Doncaster, to a bare flat with no cooker, chairs and only a tiny sink next to the toilet for all their washing needs.

In what could be a remarkable coincidence UKBA announced on the same day (in a letter entitled Corporate Partners – Transition Announcement Letter (2) that “the Transition phase of the COMPASS project has now begun in the North East Yorkshire and the Humber region”. That is, UKBA no longer have to sub-contract to a company who are regarded as unacceptable, even by the standards of G4S!

The next few weeks will see G4S in a frantic search for other sub-contractors paid for by £135 million of public money in Yorkshire and Humberside. We will be subjecting them to the same scrutiny as we put UPM under. No doubt there are also issues of legality relating to the COMPASS contract which was signed with UPM as the named primary sub-contractor (not their replacement organisations).

Whichever sub-contractors G4S select we maintain our view that G4S are prison guards not landlords. Their record is one of abuse towards asylum seekers in this country and elsewhere. We should not be paying them public money to operate this contract.

Keeping an Eye on G4S

CorpWatch, a non-profit investigative journalism and research group, have recently published a brilliant overview of the privatisation of asylum housing in the UK. Reinforcing our concerns about G4S' capability of providing dignified, safe and secure housing for asylum seekers in the UK, CorpWatch's article (written by a London School of Economics masters student, Lily Smith) hammers the point home:


"Saving money means moving people to the cheapest housing and the cheapest housing is not going to be the best housing by any means,” says Stuart Crossthwaite, from South Yorkshire Migration and Asylum Action Group. “When people come here they deserve protection and that's why this country signed the refugee convention and its why Sheffield is a city of sanctuary." 

Unfortunately, the UK government and G4S seem to disagree.

Mobilising Outrage

In another excellent article from John Grayson on Open Democracy, the processes of our no to G4S campaign are put in context:

How does a company with G4S’s reputation clean up on so many public privatising contracts now worth well over £1 billion a year in the UK alone? 

Firstly, it simply coopts, employs or buys former senior politicians, civil servants and diplomats to ‘advise’ and lobby for its contracts. The best known is former Home Secretary John (now Lord) Reid, a G4S board member. In recent months G4S has appointed to the new post of Director of Probation and Community Services David Griffiths, recently Deputy Director (justice policy) at the Ministry of Justice. 

In January Richard Northern joined G4S Risk Management as an adviser. He is “the former British Ambassador to Libya during the period leading up to and throughout the 2011 uprising”. According to G4S, he will be “pivotal in identifying, introducing and developing relationships with prospective clients and key Libyan decision-makers”.

(First published in Open Democracy on the 12th April, 2012)

Our response to G4S' new asylum contracts // SYMAAG

Our group, the South Yorkshire Migration and Asylum Action Group (SYMAAG) was appalled that G4S has been awarded the contract to house people seeking asylum in Yorkshire and Humberside. They have no experience of providing housing (unless you count detention centres...) and their experience of dealing with asylum seekers is to detain, deport and abuse them. You'll know that 3 G4S employees are on bail facing manslaughter charges relating to the death of Jimmy Mubenga in 2010. The company as a whole is also waiting to see if it will face corporate manslaughter charges. As one local Zimbabwean asylum seeker put it "I don't want a prison guard as my landlord". Many asylum seekers regard G4S winnig the contract as tantamount to house arrest. One company now houses them, transports them and detains them. With G4S providing security at Baghdad Airport, they could even meet them at the other end...Changing the name from "G4S" to "G4S Care and Justice Services" doesn't change these facts.

Although the contract was signed 3 weeks late and only by the Acting Regional UK Borders Agency Director, we were not surprised they have been awarded £millions of public money. There appeared to us to be a high level of collusion between G4S and Yorkshire and Humberside regional UKBA long before the contract was signed. For example the COMPASS/UKBA Transition Team were in close contact with G4S before even the "due diligence" procedure had finished, whereas the COMPASS transition Team were - by definition - tasked with overseeing the transition from existing to G4S-run accomodation. On first-name terms at meetings. More than once, in meetings with G4S managers, they used the past tense to describe them winning the contract. Apart from possible legal challenges to way the contract has been awarded - what risk assessments were done? are children's rights to be safeguarded? - the widespread campaign against privatising asylum housing will now focus its energies on monitoring the standard of housing provided by a company which has stated "Our primary concern is to ensure a return for our shareholders" (Steven Small, Regional Borders and Immigration G4S director in a meeting with SYMAAG and UKBA on 24/2/12). We would like to see asylum seeker tenants federations - linked to established ones - which can ensure that those people who complain about housing standards are taken seriously and not victimised.

We regard the COMPASS Corporate Partner FAQ document (attached) as completely inadequate (and extremely defensive). Despite COMPASS "aiming", "desiring", "looking to" ensure that:

• G4S-provided housing will be more than substandard
• That disruption to children's education will be minimised
• that the sole criteria of re-housing will not be low cost

It is clear that they have no power to enforce any of these stated aims. In fact, 800 human beings face being uprooted in our region, disrupting lives, education, health provision and community integration. The FAQ document talks about complaints mechanisms but in a meeting with COMPASS and G4S management, both agencies made it clear that they regarded anonymised complaints as akin to anecdotes. The fact that they cannot understand why an asylum seeker might want to anonymise their complaint speaks volumes about their utter lack of understanding of the people they aim to house.

Finally, part of the reason that our campaign against G4S in Yorkshire has gained so much momentum is that many people realise their bid to manage asylum housing is a stepping stone to the more lucrative social housing market. Privatisation isn't popular in Yorkshire but solidarity with the underdog is. Evicting and dealing with asylum tenants (who have no tenants rights) is a useful trial run for managing tenants in social housing in future. Like we've always said: "first they come for the asylum seeker..."

March 1st Demonstration Success

Protesting outside Vulcan House, regional HQ of the UK Borders Agency on February 15th

On March 1st, spring sun warmed the 80 protestors gathered outside Sheffield Town Hall to say "No to G4S managing asylum housing". We were a mixed bunch: asylum seekers and refugees from all over the world; asylum rights campaigners from all over Yorkshire and the Midlands; trade unionists opposed to the privatisation of public services; campaigners for migrant women's rights, activists from Palestine (already familiar with G4S for their role in backing the Israeli security forces).

This was the second regional demonstration held in Sheffield against G4S prison guards being given public money to manage the housing of asylum seekers.

Passers-by were mostly keen to take leaflets: there's a lot of understanding in Sheffield about who asylum seekers are and why they come here; there's even more understanding that the privatisation of public services benefits nobody except big corporations like G4S. Some people stopped to listen to the speakers and share their own stories of reduced wages and impossible jobs due to privatisation. A statement was read out from Mafungasei Maikokera, a Zimbabwean refugee who had been charged with assault on G4S! Of course, the charges were dropped and the actual violence came from G4S: "when G4S are at it, it is like a boxing match" she told us.

Apart from a couple of police (one of whom quietly voiced his concerns that G4S were trying to privatise the police force) we stewarded ourselves and marched to the UK Borders Agency where we held another rally in full view - and earshot - of the workers there (some of them supporters of our campaign).

Everybody who wanted to speak got a chance: from a few words of support from people who had travelled from other towns and cities to rousing stuff from SYMAAG's John Grayson, ending with "brothers and sisters, we can beat them!" 6 days after the contract between UKBA and G4S was due to be signed, it is still blank. Every enquiry to UKBA about why this is the case receives a different answer. But the fact remains, G4S and UKBA were mistaken to think that nobody cares about asylum seekers' housing or privatisation.