Last week’s court judgment on the Bell Hotel in Epping has understandably sent local authorities and the Home Office scurrying. Councils of all political complexions sought to close the so-called “asylum hotels” on their patches, while Yvette Cooper’s team considered where to rehouse the 30,000-plus asylum seekers currently staying in them, should the judgment be upheld and applied elsewhere.
With an acute shortage of homes “in the community” – the preferred option of this and previous governments – attention has turned once again to an option that has been fleetingly broached and dismissed before: migrant camps. Under this category, I would include both temporary canvas and prefab accommodation, as well as empty military barracks. Indeed, I have never quite understood why this prospect has been so controversial.
Among the reasons seems to be that local people don’t like them any more than hotels. There’s also the time it would take to set up purpose-built camps, or reception centres on, say, the German model, and possible legal challenges to the use of the site or the standard of accommodation. Remember all the objections to the Bibby Stockholm barge, whose days soon proved numbered.
Some of the objections to reception centres and/or camps are sound. But it seems to me they reflect a lack of will on the part of the government, and, more particularly, any sense of the urgency required to address a situation where the UK has hundreds of undocumented individuals arriving in small boats practically every week, who are at once housed and maintained at public expense. Nor, more to the point, is the camp solution as unfeasible as often suggested. We have done it before.
In the years after the end of the Vietnam war, hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese left their country by boat, with a favoured destination being Hong Kong, then under British jurisdiction. After enormous initial resistance to allowing those who became known as the Vietnamese “boat people” to enter the territory – Margaret Thatcher was then prime minister – Hong Kong designated itself a port of first asylum for Vietnamese, meaning that no one would be turned away, and space was either found or repurposed to accommodate them. This mostly took the form of redundant detention facilities, industrial buildings, and, yes, new migrant camps.
At the height of the crisis, in the early 1980s, more than 60,000 Vietnamese were being put up in this far from capacious territory. This was no easy feat, given the tropical climate and the density of Hong Kong’s permanent population. What it took was a concerted and combined effort by the authorities, international aid organisations – far fewer and further between then than today – and local volunteers, all operating on an emergency footing.
The conditions in many of these establishments left much to be desired, especially early on. Then, of course, the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) was nowhere on the scene, although the Geneva Conventions applied. But while some could be quite rough, with fights not unheard of, an effort was made at the outset to separate likely refugees from economic migrants and to identify those with a criminal past.
Many of the camps were indeed more like detention centres, with those housed there having no right to leave. Then again, how safe is it for the UK authorities not to be detaining those whose identities are unproven? But things settled down, and the camps that I saw in the mid- to late-1980s were notably clean, orderly and quiet, and a source of some satisfaction to the authorities and those Hong Kong residents helping out. Privacy was basic – groups of bunk beds curtained off for families, washing and laundry facilities were communal – but conditions seemed genuinely humane, and a vast improvement for most people on the conditions they had left behind and endured en route. Something similar, I suggest, would apply to many small boat arrivals, if similar accommodation were the norm in the UK.
Nearly 200,000 Vietnamese passed through Hong Kong between the late-1970s and the mid-1990s, by which time most had been dispersed to neighbouring countries, the UK, and to the US and Canada. Only a minority were permitted to stay in Hong Kong. So far as I am aware, the colony had had no contingency plans for such a crisis – the arrival of the first boats came as an unwelcome surprise. But what fast escalated into a full-scale emergency, and was seen in some quarters as an existential threat to Hong Kong, spurred measures to match, in requisitioning space, deploying and training staff, and mobilising volunteers.
There is surely something that can be learned here. As there can be from the lightning-fast construction of the (mostly unused) Nightingale hospitals during the pandemic, and perhaps from the clear lines of responsibility characteristic of a colonial administration. Tens of thousands of people can be accommodated in a basic, but civilised, way – if you really want to and needs must, (but not, perhaps, when at least half the government and its civil servants are on holiday at the same time, as was so evident during the Kabul airport emergency four years ago.)
If the government has to choose between seeking out thousands more rooms in shared housing or rushing through some form of emergency camps, then they should choose the latter, as surely would local residents. In the past, they might have protested about an empty army camp being adapted or a temporary structure being built to house undocumented arrivals. But if the choice is between that and a hotel, then in terms of the cost to taxpayers, but above all, the perception of social justice, then there should be no contest.
