Reason One: Cockroaches & rotten floorboards: Housing G4S style

As promised, throughout the month of January, we'll be recounting the reasons for you to vote for G4S as the worst company of 2012, and we'll probably be finding more.

Today, we're looking at their multi-million COMPASS contracts with the UK government. 

The COMPASS contracts saw the provision of housing for asylum seekers in the UK completely privatised. The country was split into six multi-regional contract zones, and the provision of services was put up to tender. In March 2012, Serco, G4S and Clearel were revealed as new service providers, with G4S managing provision in Yorkshire, Humberside and the North-East and the Midlands.

Since taking over the management of asylum housing from local authorities, G4S and their chosen property providers have continued to provide sub-standard, unsafe housing for people seeking protection in the UK. For a small indicator of the level of service provided by this multi-million pound company, read John Grayson's account of a young mother's experience of G4S housing. 

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 // 16 - 22nd July

I hope you've all been enjoying the amount of press G4S have been getting over the last few weeks! Here's a little summary of the key stories from the last week:

G4S shares plummet after Olympic contract failures, Reuters, 16th July 2012: After G4S completely cock-up Olympic Security, damage is seen in the stock market. Shares in G4S fell to the lowest level in more than six months.

Nick Buckles' hero is Margaret Thatcher, The Guardian, 17th July 2012: The Guardian comments on the New Statesman's republication of an interview with G4S CEO Nick Buckles. His economic advice for the UK government goes as follows: "To continue to focus on traditional Tory values around encouraging a meritocracy and inspiring value creation." Lovely. 

G4S Olympic Fiasco: the people pipeline, Open Democracy, 17th July 2012: Another excellent piece from Clare Sambrook on the affect of G4S' failures with Olympic security on the army and the police. 

G4S look for new PR manager with 'personal credibility', Political Scrapbook, 18th July 2012: After the complete PR disaster around Olympic security, G4S post an advert on Linkedin for a new PR manager. Ideal candidates will have "personal credibility" and the capacity to work with crisis management…

Nick Buckles admits that Olympic failure was a "humiliating shambles", TIME, 18th July 2012: On the day of Nick Buckles and Ian Horseman Sewell's appearance in front of a Home Affairs Select Committee, news about G4S' security shortfall went global. Coverage was seen in TIME, the Wall Street Journal and even Fox News. 

Ed Miliband states that G4S failure is a "warning sign" for police privatisation, Politics.co.uk, 19th July 2012: Read Ed Miliband's speech in full here. 

Police take over Glasgow security from G4S, The Guardian, 21st July 2012: Strathclyde police said on Friday that they were taking over responsibility for security at Olympic venues in Glasgow due to serious concerns over G4S' capacity to provide sufficient security staff. 

Labour MP Keith Vaz promises to closely monitor the G4S deal with Lincolnshire Police, BBC News, 21st July 2012: This potentially lucrative deal for G4S is set to be closely monitored by the Home Affairs Select Committee. 

G4S planning to monopolise on new outsourcing deals with UK prisons, The Guardian, 22nd July 2012: Despite the Olympic catastrophe, G4S are still bidding for the contracts to manage 5 new prisons, in deals that could amount to more than £2bn. 

Additional News!

• The prolific John Grayson's latest article "Outsourcing Charity - the G4S way" 
• Clare Sambrook's latest on G4S at Open Democracy 
• Good Corporate Watch summary of the G4S/UPM-dumping events at Corporate Watch 
• A curious and interesting piece on the website of the Sheffield Chilean Community website: the CEO of Target Housing (UPM's replacement) has written an open letter to the Chilean community (he himself is a Chilean refugee) trying to justify Target taking the contract. It's at this website and comments are invited...

G4S News Update // 18 - 24th June

G4S News Update // 18th - 24th June 

Yorkshire Campaigners Claim Small Victory Over World's Biggest Security Company, Open Democracy, 20th June 2012: Campaigners across Yorkshire have forced G4S to sever their relationship with slum landlords, United Property Management. G4S quietly removed all reference to the company from their website. (See original posting on G4S blog for further information.) 

G4S Boss Predicts Mass Privatisation of UK Police Forces, The Guardian, The Telegraph, Info4Security (amongst others), 21st June 2012: The Guardian's interview with G4S boss David Taylor-Smith was picked up by much of the mainstream press and online commenters. Claiming that the general public 'don't really care' about police privatisation, Taylor-Smith reiterated G4S' interest in furthering contracts within Policing services. 

How G4S is Securing Your World, The Guardian, 21st June 2012: Matthew Taylor's feature comprehensively details G4S' rocketing growth over the past few years. 

G4S Security Staff Accused of Faking Sniffer Dog Searches at Olympic Site, The Sun, 22nd June 2012: Two members of G4S staff have been suspended after an internal review of G4S' security provision at the Olympic Site revealed that staff had been faking the searches of traffic entering the Olympic Park for 3 years. 

G4S Online Systems Hit by Hacktivist, Information Age, 23rd June 2012: An online hacker published a list of G4S personnel and their contact details online, as part of a protest against G4S' violations of human rights. G4S claimed that their security had not been breached. 

Coalition to end 'cosy' government supply contracts, The Telegraph, The Independent, 24th June 2012: Twenty-two private companies - including G4S - that hold the most contracts with the UK government have been called to a meeting at the Cabinet Office to be warned that the government will be "tough" and demand the "best value for money" from their private contractors. A government spokesperson stated that “suppliers with poor performance may therefore find it more difficult to secure new work for the Government.” Yet G4S' 'poor performance' hasn't seemed to have affected their capacity for renewed and further government contracts…

G4S News Update 28th May - 3rd June

G4S News Update 28th May - 3rd June

G4S refutes claims that the company are set to operate in Libya without formal approval, Libya Herald, May 28th 2012: In post-revolutionary Libya, G4S are supposedly planning to start operating their private security services on Libyan soil without government authorisation. G4S states that this claim is unfounded. 

Female asylum seeker and her 12 week old baby moved from Bradford home to slum flat in Doncaster, Open Democracy, May 30th 2012: As transition begins in Yorkshire, United Property Management (G4S' chosen subcontractors) have started to evict asylum seeking tenants from homes in the region. This young mother was given barely 1 weeks notice before she was moved to a flat in Doncaster with no cooker, sofa or chairs and with a only a tiny sink for washing. (Also covered in 24Dash w/photographs)

Full list of bidders for police contracts in the West Midlands and Surrey published, Birmingham Post, May 31st 2012: The full list of preferred bidders for the police privatisation contracts in the West Midlands and Surrey has recently been published. 

Cambridgeshire Police look to privatise support staff to plug funding shortfalls, Hunts Post, June 1st 2012: Following in the footsteps of Lincolnshire Police, Cambridgeshire Police are putting plans in motion to privatise back room 'support' staff in their regional police stations. 

London lawyer takes on G4S' involvement in Israeli security in occupied territories, The Electronic Intifada, June 1st 2012: A London lawyer, and active supporter of Jews for Justice for Palestine, has been interviewed by The Electronic Intifada about G4S Israel's involvement in detention and security in Palestinian territories. 

G4S whistleblower loses job after claiming overstretched G4S staff were cutting corners when recruiting staff for London's Olympics, The Northerner Echo, June 2nd 2012: A woman from Darlington was told not to return to G4S offices after talking to the media about her fears that G4S' systems were cracking under the pressure of thousand of applications for security jobs during the Olympics. (Subsequently covered in the Daily Mail on the 5th June).

OTHER UPDATES//NEWS

- New Corporate Watch update on G4S' interests in occupied territories in Palestine, social housing and international security launched on the 31st May. 

- Stop G4S! Protest at G4S Annual General Meeting

12:30pm, Thursday June 7
London Stock Exchange, Paternoster Square, London EC4M 7LS - see the following website for more info. 

Bradford Families Facing Eviction

Thanks to another excellent article from John Grayson, the true nature of G4S and United Property Management is getting much needed exposure. Despite many promises of not moving school-age children until the summer holidays and keeping to established standards of housing provision, G4S' subcontractor United Property Management have already attempted to move a young asylum seeker and her 12 week old baby to a shockingly substandard flat in Doncaster. Unfortunately, it is not as if we hadn't been expecting something exactly like this to happen.

Campaigning groups are all too aware of United Property Management's notoriously bad record at providing suitable accommodation for asylum seekers. According to support agencies in Bradford, 35 people have already been removed from the city, yet their destinations are unknown. Dispersed miles away from their established networks of support, asylum seekers can simply fall off the radar and lose the crucial help they need.

Thanks to a loud campaign from activists in Sheffield and Bradford, the UKBA were forced to visit the flat in Doncaster and consequently declared the flat "contractually non-compliant" and "not suitable in its present state for mothers and babies." Whilst they claim to have ordered UPM to relocate the family, they still remain in the flat - with no cooker, table or chair - and 40 miles from what they used to call home.

In the words of John Grayson, "This is the new world of asylum seeker housing controlled by G4S, the worlds biggest security company." Fundamentally, this is the new world of asylum seeker housing controlled solely by financial markets, not critical service provision for those fleeing persecution.

For the full text of John Grayson's article, see OpenDemocracy.

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)

G4S: the public face of private police

Companies like G4S are often described as the invisible authorities behind hundreds of our so called social services. The fact that a care home is run by A4E, a detention centre is managed by Serco or that your local police authority is a 'joint-venuture' with multi-national corporation G4S, is not advertised as such; it's only there when you go looking.

At least that's how it's been for years. Yet in the words of Claire Sambrook, writing brilliantly for Open Democracy, now 'Corporate Power stamps its brand on British Policing'; Lincolnshire police uniforms now find their epaulettes branded by the brazen red, white and black of the G4S logo. According to a BBC report, the uniforms are to be worn by 200 staff, including front counter staff at police stations. We're seeing a "strategic partnership" with G4S firmly in control.

On the first of April 2012, 540 civilian Lincolnshire police workers turned into employees of G4S, the largest security company in the UK. Alongside managing frontline counter service, G4S employees will run the crime management bureau, the central ticket office and collisions unit, the criminal justice unit, the resource management unit and firearms licensing. This is hardy the back-room presence that the government claimed private contractors would have within the police. Put succinctly by Sambrook:

As for the corporate statement, "There are no plans to introduce the dual logo elsewhere," it is a warning. It does not come from the government, or from a Minister speaking to Parliament. The sentence carries a huge, silent word at the end: "yet". 

Paul McKeever, chairman of the Police Federation, immdiately after acknowledging that changing the uniforms will have an adverse effect on the visual presence of warranted officers, made the following statement:

"G4S aren't doing anything wrong. They are doing what any private company would want to do, which is make profit and expand their organisation." 

I'm not sure whether I could ever agree with that.