More information is coming out about how the YMCA in Glasgow is poorly treating asylum seekers.
Last night, 14th June, about 40 people, mainly asylum seekers, crammed themselves into
the community rooms in Pollokshaws for an emergency meeting. In an at times heated and emotional meeting, at least 15 families pledged not to move to the YMCA in any circumstances. At the same time friends and neighbours of the families pledged to do what they could to support them.
This angry rebellion is due to recent changes to how asylum seekers are housed in Glasgow. For the last five years all asylum seeker families were housed in Glasgow Housing Association flats rented by Glasgow City Council who had the contract from the National Asylum Support Scheme to accommodate them. In January this year fifty per cent of the contract was supposed to be 'privatised’ and Glasgow YMCA and a company called Angel, won part of the NASS contract.
Under GCC families were housed in mainly old tower blocks in housing schemes around Glasgow, some of whom are due for demolition in the next two to five years.
A month ago in mid May, the larger asylum seeker families received letters telling them they would have to move to the YMCA. They could appeal this decision using the ‘pink form’ and families with children studying for exams, for example, would not be moved. Alarm was immediately raised, as it seemed that only Congolese families received letters but since then they’ve been sent to a wider range of families.
Shortly after, within weeks, YMCA staff began to visit people in their homes and telling them they were due to move into the YMCA hostel only one or two weeks later. People due to move were told that they couldn’t take any of the larger items of furniture they had managed to acquire, nor have washing machines in their new flats or telephone lines and that the YMCA would only help to move smaller items.
Many of the families, have struggled against quite unbelievable odds to make safe and secure homes for them and their children and have built up strong connections in the areas they were ‘dispersed’ to. They are, understandably, reluctant to take children out of schools where they had settled and move to new and unfamiliar areas where they did not know anybody and so on. As a result a full-scale rebellion against moving to the YMCA has been brewing over the last fortnight as one by one, families have refused to move from their existing flats.
At last night’s meeting more information came out about the depths the YMCA has sunk to in its efforts to get families to move to inappropriate accommodation in the tower block hostel on the edge of the Red Road housing scheme. As a result of the YMCA’s failure to persuade the families that they can provide appropriate accommodation for them, the YMCA has colluded with NASS resulting in the cutting off of all financial support for families refusing to move.
Several families reported that they had been unable to collect their weekly NASS benefits – a meagre 70 per cent of regular state benefits. This was despite the fact that all the families affected are still waiting to hear the results of their appeal about the decision to move to the YMCA using the ‘pink appeal form’.
In a mean-spirited manoeuvre that could possibly be illegal, NASS and the YMCA are collaborating to stop families getting their benefits. The NASS office informs the YMCA which family should be moved to their hostel. The YMCA then gives the family a date to move and inform NASS of that date. NASS then cancels benefits for the family at their old address and issues a new benefits letter for the family to take to the post-office in Springburn, which is then sent to the ‘new’ address at the YMCA hostel and completely out of reach of the family. As a result families refusing to move, at least until they have had a formal response to their appeal about the decision to move them, have had their benefits simply and immediately stopped leaving families of four, five or six people with nothing to live on.
In effect the YMCA are saying starve or move to the YMCA. And that choice has come out of the blue for most families, who have had less than a month to prepare for it.
Determined efforts by some families with help from the Scottish Refugee Council had managed to get NASS to reissue letters to the existing addresses that they refuse to leave but it is unsure how long the families can keep this up.
What is shocking is that the YMCA is a Christian charity – or rather claims to be. The ruthlessness in which they are behaving is the sort of thing you would expect from only the most ruthless of greedy, profiteering landlords. What is also alarming is that the families affected in this way could very well lose their current homes as well as a result of losing their NASS benefits. Not bad for a charity best known (apart from the disco song) for its work with vulnerable Homeless people!
It gets worse. The YMCA’s behaviour is in stark contrast to the way in which Angel, the other company that also got part of the NASS contract in Glasgow, is behaving.
“Don’t like the flat we’re offering you?’ Angel say” Well if you can find one yourself that costs less than £450 a month to rent, then we’ll pay that for you.”
Unity has heard of at least three families this has happened to. With Angel, families have been given two or three weeks to find their own flats on the private market as an alternative to the ones Angel are offering them.
Are Angel a charity like the YMCA, we hear you ask? No, we reply. Do they claim to have an explicitly ‘Christian’ approach to everything they do? No, we tell you. Angel is providing accommodation for asylum seekers purely to make profit. Angel is an out and out capitalist company and has the charitable conscience of a worm.
As a small organisation that relies on donations for its survival, we at Unity understand the pressures that exist within charities and non-governmental organisations to maximise returns on your activities where possible. But the extent to which the YMCA seem to prepared to go in order to force asylum seekers to move to the YMCA without an alternative so the YMCA can get their hands on the dosh has made even the most cynical and hard-bitten atheists amongst us choke.
If Angel can find it profitable to give families the choice of flats and the opportunity to find flats for themselves, why can’t the alleged caring, compassionate, ‘Christian’ YMCA?
To give them some credit the YMCA have attempted to improve conditions. They have sent out new letters explaining that they have now put the locks back on the doors of the flats the families are being “invited” to move into. And they also say that the oppressive regime requiring everyone to sign-in and out every time they go outside of their home has been suspended for these families.
But that isn’t good enough, the damage has been done.
The YMCA has got to prove that they can provide appropriate accommodation. That they are prepared to give families a choice. Why can’t families have washing machines in their flats? Surely that is an essential for large families, especially those with small children. Does the YMCA really believe token operated communal washing machines shared by hundreds of people is reasonable?
Why can’t families have telephone lines into their flats? At least two of the 15 or so families refusing to move to the YMCA have children studying at university who depend on having Internet access at home. (Imagine that – studying for a degree at university when English is not your first language, without being able to receive any financial support, and then being told you can only use the Internet in the computer room for half an hour at a time.)
These are asylum seekers for goodness sake! Does the YMCA not realise how important it is that these families should be able to keep in touch with friends and families in their home countries?
Maybe it is due to the attitudes of the staff at the YMCA. Ignoring the several complaints of racist and hostile behaviour by some members of staff at the YMCA that we have heard, Unity has been told, “These families are only here temporarily” and that “It’s not our fault, we’re only following
the NASS contract.”
Well, first of all, most of the families involved have lived in Glasgow for four or five years. Most are still fighting complex legal battles with the Home Office to get permission to stay in the UK. In the last three months, of the dozen or so families that we know have been detained for forced removal, nine have managed to get released and have returned to safety in Glasgow. Out of the 1,800 asylum seeker families living in Glasgow, only 72 people have taken the £3,000 bribe by the IOM –the International Organisation of Migration - to voluntarily return to their home country. [The YMCA is a partner with the IOM for this scheme, incidentally.]
And secondly if both Glasgow City Council were able to get concessions out of NASS under the original contract and Angel seem to be able to behave more humanely with the new NASS contract then why can’t the YMCA?
We estimate that the YMCA hopes to fill at least forty of their three-bedroom flats with the largest asylum seeker families. With the current poor success record that the Home Office have in removing asylum seeker families from Glasgow either by bribes or by dawn raids (a failure
that we hope will continue and get worse, incidentally) it is likely that many of the asylum seeker families the YMCA are dealing with could be in Glasgow for much longer than a year. Much, much longer.
Unless of course the YMCA knows something that we don’t. In which case every family refusing to move to the YMCA are quite right not to go anywhere near the place.
This situation requires urgent action by anyone appalled that a supposed Christian charity has made such a mess of things. We urge anyone who has any influence with the YMCA to use it to get them to radically change what they are doing. At the same time we need people to contact NASS and Glasgow City Council to alert them to the crisis that is developing.
It is not good enough that families, some with very young children, should face having their limited financial support being taken away and homelessness because a charity has failed to adequately consult their future tenants about what would be appropriate accommodation for them.
The Unity Centre
30 Ibrox Street
Glasgow
G51 1AQ
0141 427 7992
theunitycentre [at] btconnect.com
You can contact the Glasgow YMCA on 0141 557 2355
The YMCA movement throughout the world has a [supposed] commitment to social justice and citizenship expressed through the Kampala Principles adopted in 1973. These commit the YMCA:
1. to work for equal opportunity and justice for all.
2. to work for and maintain an environment in which relationships among people are characterised by love and understanding.
3. to work for and maintain conditions within the YMCA and in society, its organisations and institutions, which allow for honesty, depth and creativity.
4. to develop and maintain leadership and programme patterns which exemplify the varieties and depth of christian experience.
5. to work for the development of the whole person.
http://www.ymcaglasgow.org
