News, Manchester
Homeless refugees who face being forced to leave a camp of tents in a city centre have told of enduring freezing temperatures for months after escaping war-torn countries.
Many of the group of mainly young men have been staying in the tents in St Peter’s Square in Manchester after successfully applying for asylum in the UK.
The camp is set to be cleared by Manchester City Council after a legal challenge by campaigners failed.
Adel Youssef, 32, who also fled the civil war in Sudan, said his situation living in tents was “not good”.
The has talked to those living in the camp, many of whom struggled to speak English, and heard about the daily conditions they face.
Mamadi Camara, who arrived in the UK from the West African country of Equatorial Guinea, said he had been rough sleeping in the tents over the winter.
He said the past three months had been “very cold”.
Adam Abdullah, a 25-year-old refugee from Sudan, said despite the threat of being moved, he still planned to try and make a home in the city after spending months in the tents.
Mr Abdullah fled “lots of fighting” in the Darfur region of Sudan before he was successfully granted asylum.
He said he felt safe in Manchester but the freezing temperatures had been a struggle.
Mimicia Titianu, 55 from Romania, said he had been sleeping in the cold with no money for the tram, the bus, or food and lived off “one sandwich and one coffee a day”.
“This is my life, day-after-day,” he said.
The council has not said when it plans to remove the camp next to the city’s town hall, where people have lived for at least a year.
Many of the refugees moved to Manchester after being granted asylum in other parts of the UK in the belief the city was cheaper and they were more likely to get support.
But local authorities have said they are often low on the list for social housing and have arrived in a city where support for the homeless is already struggling to meet demand.
The council asked for a possession order to clear the site because the area was “not a safe or sanitary place” to access its support services, a spokesperson said.
At a hearing on Friday, a judge described the refugees as “trespassers in law” when he ruled their tents must be removed as the square was a public amenity “available to all.”
The Greater Manchester Law Centre had tried to fight the order and argued that the council had not complied with its statutory duties to care for those in the camp under homelessness law and instead referred people to support charity Mustard Tree.
The hearing heard the camp had become a “revolving door” where new refugees moved in after previous residents were housed by authorities.
Jade MacDonald of the Greater Manchester Tenants Union said the ruling to clear the site had “done nothing to fix the issue of homelessness” in the city.
“This just feeds into the council’s attempts to make the problem less visible. Manchester is in desperate need of more social housing,” he said.
