The UK Home Office has accreditation for the treatment of asylum seekers. As gleaned from a table accessed from the Guardian, there has been a significant increase in deaths of asylum seekers with such accreditation this year as compared to the previous year. Advocacy organisations have referred to this trend as ‘deeply concerning’.
As it will be recalled, some of the people who lost their lives died of sickness or old age, while others are believed to have taken their own lives. Charities are growingly worried about the effect of Britain’s asylum policies on dispensing health to an already vulnerable population of people who have fled torture, rape or trafficking to seek refuge in Britain.
It only involves statistics up to June 2024, which recorded 28 deaths of asylum seekers, including two children of Pakistan and Afghanistan origin and a boy of 15 years of Iraq’. In the same reference period, 13 deaths were reported in 2023, according to data collected by the NGO The Civil Fleet.
The organisations described the deaths as ‘tragic’, and the Refugee Council chief executive Enver Solomon said, “The fact that there has been a sharp rise in the deaths of people in asylum accommodation is deeply troubling.
There are very few planned death instances of asylum seekers in the Home Office’s care mentioned in the annual report, and the Home Office is not very forthcoming with details about the deaths of asylum seekers even when such information can be requested under the Freedom of Information Act. The total of such deaths in 2024 does not specify the causes, stating that some may be inaccurate. However, we see from the data of 2023 that some people perished in rather an unpleasant manner. There is one person who was fatally hit by a car in the course of a hit-and-run incident. There is another person who was compelled to commit suicide by jumping from the window as the room he occupied burnt down because of a lithium battery explosion on the e-bike he owned.
Analytics in this case based on a more extended data history also show that mortality rates have risen considerably among asylum seekers placed in Home Office facilities since the beginning of 2020, and the number of suicides has more than doubled.
There were 217 fatalities between April 2016 and June 2024, but only 28 between April 2016 and December 2019. On the other hand, 189 deaths were recorded between January 2020 and June 2024, contributing to 87% of the total deaths within the whole-year periods calculated as indicated below.
These recently increased deaths follow the Home Office’s change of policy from housing all but a small number of asylum seekers in shared housing and putting tens of thousands into long-term hotel accommodation at the start of the COVID-19 crisis. Some of the individuals were paid to accept ‘no-choice accommodation’ including the former military barracks in Wethersfield, Essex or the contentious Bibby Stockholm floating barge in Portland, Dorset, where it was reported that Albanian asylum seeker Leonard Farruku committed suicide in December 2023.
Solomon made his argument concerning the adverse conditions possibly happening to those who stay longer in the poor quality accommodation centres and with a meagre amount of financial assistance provided for the asylum seekers. They are people who have escaped war – horrors of any nature – in Afghanistan, Syria, Sudan and other nations and seek refuge and a better life in the UK,” he said. ‘It is the legal mandate of the government to make sure that they feed them well; hence, there would be no more needless dying. ’
Providers of services of the British Red Cross, the largest refugee services provider in the UK, have also shared this view, saying that asylum seekers are slipping through the cracks in the health systems. This has led the organisation to develop a new framework to address difficulties in supplying care to asylum seekers; often, charities, local health care providers, and local authorities will need to make a joint effort to offer adequate care that refugees and asylum seekers have a right to be granted.
Since being contacted regarding the increasing death toll of asylum seekers, the Home Office has been relatively unresponsive to this trend but pointed out that the deaths are from the previous government. In response to the allegations, the department said it thoroughly investigates any matter touching on the deaths of asylum seekers, and its officers always provide support as required.
