‘It’s like I’m blind’: waiting for asylum in a British hotel

Every morning, Mohammed Al Muhandes wakes up in a hotel in Leeds, England, wondering how to spend the day.

Together with dozens of other asylum seekers, he eats the same breakfast every morning, after which he returns to his room or takes a walk in a nearby park. The £9.58 (€11.90) he gets every week is barely enough for a round-trip bus ride to the city center (€4.50) and a cup of coffee. Asylum seekers in Britain are not allowed to work.

Mr Al Muhandes, 53, who has a master’s degree in mechanical engineering, tries to keep busy by taking free classes and spending time at a local nature reserve, but he has waited almost five months for a decision in his case. Although he is extremely grateful to have escaped the conflict in his home country Yemen, the uncertainty is heavy.

“It’s like I’m waiting for something, and I don’t know when it will come,” Mr Al Muhandes said. “It’s like I’m blind.”

For some, this limbo could take years – a wait made worse by deep-seated problems in the UK immigration system.

On Wednesday, the Conservative government’s flagship policy of sending asylum seekers to Rwanda was thrown into disarray when the country’s highest court declared it unlawful. Even as Prime Minister Rishi Sunak promised to find a way to override the court, critics said the policy was a distraction from the most pressing issue: a huge backlog of unresolved asylum cases that has grown under the Conservatives, from around 22,000 this year to 140,000. in March 2018.

About 50,000 people are housed in hotels rented by the government – sometimes as many as 350 – at a cost of £8 million a day. In total, the asylum system cost taxpayers almost £3.97 billion, or about $4.8 billion, last year – almost double what it was the year before, according to official data.

Migration experts warn that costs will only rise the longer fundamental flaws in the system remain unresolved.

“The Rwanda policy, even if smoothly implemented, would only be a partial answer to the wider asylum demand,” said Rhys Clyne. an expert in the field of migration at the Institute for Government, a British think tank. “There are much broader questions that the government needs to address.”

Britain is not alone in struggling with increasing migration caused by factors such as conflict and climate change. But the Conservatives, who have been in power for 13 years, have framed the debate around an increase in the number of small boats crossing the English Channel. Mr Sunak has repeatedly promised to ‘stop the boats’, with his former home secretary, Suella Braverman, calling them ‘an invasion’.

Arrivals by boat were taken into account less than half of asylum applications last year. The rise in arrivals “is only part of the story,” said Peter Walsh, a senior researcher at Oxford’s Migration Observatory. “I think the biggest part is probably that the decision-making hasn’t kept pace with the applications.”

To begin with, decision officers have processed far fewer asylum applications than before. From 2015 to 2016, each decision maker made approximately 100 decisions per year. From 2021 to 2022, this dropped to 24 decisions per year. Mr Walsh said the decline was due to high staff turnover – leaving inexperienced decision-makers at the helm – low morale and policy changes.

The government recently hired more than a thousand new practitioners in an attempt to reduce the backlog announced its success in reducing the so-called legacy backlog – defined as applications submitted before June 2022. Then new, stricter migration laws came into force which said anyone who arrived in Britain ‘illegally’ would never hear their asylum claim. Now these new cases are piling up.

“The Government now has a greater number of asylum decision-makers at its disposal,” Mr Walsh said, “and if it invests in additional streamlining and additional training, then it is entirely plausible that the backlog could begin to narrow.”

Amid criticism over rising costs, the government said the latest month that 50 hotels would stop taking in asylum seekers. Robert Jenrick, the UK immigration secretary, said this was possible because “our work to stop illegal migration is having a real impact – the number of small boat crossings has fallen by more than 20 percent so far this year.”

Data obtained in a freedom of information request by the BBC suggested hundreds may still remain hotels in use. For months, the government has vowed to move people to former military barracks and ships, such as the Bibby Stockholm, but the number of residents living there is still small.

Meanwhile, every number in the total backlog – which reached 136,944 in August and includes people living in the community or with family – is a person waiting for an answer.

Leeds, where Mr Al Muhandes lives, is in a northern region of Britain with one of the highest numbers of asylum seekers. according to the Refugee Council. He arrived not by small boat, but on a flight that landed in London at Heathrow Airport in July.

“I lived in a hotspot during the civil war in Yemen,” he said, referring to the conflict that began in 2014. He worked in a high government position for more than a decade, but while abroad for training, a friend warned him not to return due to threats against his life. He flew to Britain and immediately applied for asylum. He is constantly worried about his wife and children, who are still in Yemen.

Ali, from Sudan, lives in the same hotel as Mr Al Muhandes, and the two became friends. Both say the inability to work and the sense of isolation have been difficult.

After fleeing his home in Khartoum for Egypt with his wife and children last spring when the civil war broke out, Ali, 52, flew to Britain and applied for asylum, hoping to eventually be reunited with his family.

“Sometimes I can’t sleep at night because my thoughts are with my country and my family,” said Ali, who asked that only his first name be used because he feared it would tarnish his cause.

The hotel’s residents were recently told they would all be assigned a roommate in the coming weeks, one of the ways the government is cutting back on hotel use. Charities in Leeds such as the Refugee Education Training Advice Service (RETAS), which provide practical support to asylum seekers, say it is difficult to keep up with policy changes.

“A lot of things have changed – not for the better, to be honest,” says Yasir Mohamed, volunteer manager at RETAS. “It’s getting worse, and we see that.”

The majority of staff and volunteers, including Mr Mohamed, who came to Britain from Eritrea five years ago, have lived through the system and themselves been granted asylum in Britain. The charity provides education, employment support and other programs to support integration.

On a recent morning, asylum seekers from Iraq, Eritrea and Iran sat in a classroom in the RETAS office, listening to Alison Suckley, their teacher.

“I live in Leeds,” Mrs. Suckley said, pronouncing each word slowly, and the class echoed her. As she had the students do a series of exercises to describe their likes and dislikes, one woman said, “I love bread.” The people around her nodded in agreement, and the room erupted into laughter.