Asylum Applicants: Mental Health and Wellbeing

Gareth Johnson Excerpts

Tuesday 27th June 2023 Westminster Hall

[Gareth Bacon]

I have a lot of sympathy with that point. It is critical that we process asylum claims much more quickly because while those claims are in abeyance, the asylum seekers are living in stasis. It might be that people who come to claim asylum are not asylum seekers, but economic migrants. That does not make them bad people, but it does mean that they are illegal immigrants, and they should be returned. What should not happen, as in the case of my constituent, is that they live in a state of limbo for years. That should not be acceptable in any way, shape or form.

I became aware of Mr A’s case on 14 March 2022, when a constituent made contact to request that I engage with the Home Office. Back then, my constituent had already noted Mr A’s deteriorating mental health. However, despite my office’s regular efforts to obtain updates, it was not until August 2022—five months later—that the Home Office responded, and only to say that Mr A would have to wait a further six months for an update.

I am sure the House can imagine the effect that that message had on Mr A. Indeed, only a few days after receiving that news, he climbed up Tower Bridge with the intention of attempting to kill himself. Fortunately, he was talked down. He was taken to hospital and later returned to the accommodation with which he had been provided in Biggin Hill. Given the elevated risk of harm displayed by Mr A, my office contacted the Home Office to alert it, in the hope that a sense of urgency would be felt by those in charge of processing the case. However, several more months went by without a resolution of any kind.

In January, therefore, I met with Mr A and another of my constituents, who had been helping him. During our meeting, Mr A presented me with evidence for his asylum claim. That included X-ray images of his body. Disturbingly, the images showed a large amount of metal shrapnel lodged in his torso and limbs as a result of being shot at by the Syrian regime. The evidence also included photographs of him after he had been beaten with an iron bar. Faced with this disturbing evidence and having no success at all in persuading Home Office officials to progress Mr A’s case, my office informed officials that if no progress had been made in two weeks—that is, by 3 February—I would seek a meeting with the Home Secretary to personally brief her on the situation, place the entire file in her hands and ask her to intervene. I hoped that that might lift the all-pervading sense of disinterest and inertia.

No such luck: on 31 January, I received an email from Home Office officials that gave no additional information and no indication as to when a decision would be made, and that claimed to have sent a response to Mr A on 16 January. Neither Mr A nor my other constituent who attended the meeting with me on 20 January—four days after the Home Office letter was allegedly sent—had mentioned that letter. On 1 February, my office called the Home Office hotline to request a copy of it. The response we received was that the Home Office was unable to locate the letter, and the officials stated that it had not been uploaded to the system. When they asked my staff member if he would like to request that they find the letter and send it to him, and he said he would indeed like them to do that, he was told that that would be treated as a new query and it would be sent to my office within 20 working days. You could not make this stuff up.

Later that day, I informed my hon. Friend the Member for West Bromwich West (Shaun Bailey), who is a Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Home Office, of my intention to seek a meeting with the Home Secretary. He chased my request diligently, and three weeks later, on the morning of 22 February, he informed me that he had made progress on securing the meeting and asked me for Mr A’s date of birth and case reference number, which I passed to him a short while later. At 6 pm, he informed me that he had secured a meeting with the Home Secretary in her office in the House, scheduled for 6.45 pm that evening.

When I turned up for the meeting, I was brusquely turned away by a Home Office special adviser called Jake Ryan, who refused to allow me in. When my hon. Friend told him that that was unacceptable, the special adviser swore in his face. The high-handed arrogance of this unelected political appointee was staggering. I gather that my hon. Friend escalated the situation to higher authorities because at last there was movement on Mr A’s case. When I finally attended a meeting with the Home Secretary on 1 March, she informed me that officials had determined Mr A’s case. He would be granted 30 months to remain in the country and his application for asylum was refused on account of him being a Chilean national. The House will recall that I had been informed that, while Mr A had a Chilean grandmother, he is not a Chilean national, has no living Chilean relatives and, indeed, has never visited Chile.

Giving Mr A limited leave to remain means that he cannot regularise his life here or bring his family. Furthermore, giving him limited leave to remain, after which he will presumably be returned to Syria or sent to Chile, which apparently has a returns arrangement with Syria, is terrible news for Mr A because it significantly increases the likelihood of him being returned to a country where there is a direct threat to his life. The fact that the special adviser refused to allow me to see the Home Secretary on 1 March is extraordinarily frustrating, because had he not done so, I would have been able to alert her to those facts and it is possible that a different outcome to Mr A’s case would have been achieved.

In the meeting on 1 March, I asked the Home Secretary for the case to be looked at again by officials, and she assured me that it would be. Two weeks later, on 15 March, I received formal notification from the Home Office of the decision it had taken. The relevant sections of the letter read:

“On 3rd November 2020, Mr A submitted a claim for asylum; I apologise for the delay in progressing this case and any distress this may have caused.”

For the avoidance of doubt, that letter was written in March 2023. The delay referred to amounted to two years and four months. The letter continued:

“Mr A had a series of significant safeguarding issues (suicide attempts); We take the mental health and wellbeing of asylum seekers very seriously. We discussed Mr A’s case with officials and there were a number of delays due to the sensitivities and complexities of the case.”

The claim that Home Office officials take these issues seriously is one that I treat with a great deal of scepticism, certainly in the context of this particular case. Again, for the avoidance of doubt, it was the disinterest and protracted institutional inertia of Home Office officials that caused the safeguarding issues that they referred to.

The letter then stated:

“Mr A’s application was fully considered and the asylum and Humanitarian Protection aspect of the claim has been refused as Mr A does not have any individual protection needs in Chile.

However, we will be granting Mr A a period of leave of 30 months on the basis of his private life as, given his vulnerabilities, there would be insurmountable obstacles to him establishing himself in Chile.”

So on the one hand the Home Office accepts that Mr A would be unable to establish himself in Chile, but on the other it is refusing him asylum here, thereby condemning him to suffer another two and a half years of the purgatory.

[Gareth Johnson (Dartford) (Con)]

I pay tribute to my hon. Friend for the enormous amount of hard work and dedication that he has put in for what is now my constituent; it is absolutely right that he continues to deal with this case.

I am deeply concerned about the information that my hon. Friend has set out to the House. We have an excellent Minister here; I hope that she is listening carefully to what he is informing the House about, that she will go back to the Department later today, and that firm and immediate action will be taken on this matter for my constituent.

[Gareth Bacon]

I agree with my hon. Friend.

For Mr A, two and a half more years of loneliness, worry and fears for his family, as well as fear of deportation back to a country where his life is under threat, has inevitably had further detrimental impacts on his mental health. On 13 April this year, I received a further email from the constituent who attended the advice surgery with Mr A in January. She wrote:

“All of the above matters are causing Mr A great frustration and his mental health has seriously deteriorated. We have an appointment with the mental health team at the hospital in May but I personally am extremely concerned that he may harm himself if these matters are not resolved soon. Anything that you can do would be greatly appreciated. I personally cannot understand why our immigration system seems to be so complicated.”

Since I met the Home Secretary on 1 March, my office has been chasing Home Office officials, and my hon. Friend the Member for West Bromwich West has been asking for updates on my behalf, but absolutely nothing has been forthcoming. We seem to be back in the cycle of disinterest and total inertia. In the meantime, Mr A continues to spiral downwards.

Dame Maria, I realise that I have talked at length about a single case, but that is precisely to highlight the wider implications of the approach of officials to processing asylum applications—an approach that is simply not delivering acceptable outcomes. The consequence is deeply damaging to people such as Mr A. I realise that Ministers cannot fix the system overnight, and I have absolutely no doubt that they are straining every sinew to improve the situation. However, they can make a significant difference in cases such as this. Small steps can lead to long strides.

I know my hon. Friend the Minister to be a woman of high integrity and compassion, so I thank her for listening to me and call on her to do the right thing in cases such as this one. Please take them back to the Home Office and fix them.