Your report (31 January) rightly highlights the private housing contracts for providing accommodation for those seeking asylum. A survey in Stockton-on-Tees, just conducted, shows that there are many other issues that affect them. Sharing houses and, worse, sharing rooms, with people with no common language, culture or faith creates tensions that few of us could cope with. Poor and inadequate equipment and very slow responses to essential repairs all make life more difficult. Unnecessary moves for school-aged children, and families living in second-floor accommodation can all be easily rectified with some thought and planning.
Many complaints are not made, as people are afraid of repercussions from housing providers or to their asylum case, and they are grateful for being housed, showing huge tolerance of conditions that put us to shame. They too want British people to have decent homes to live in; it is not either/or. But most of all what asylum seekers are asking for is to be treated with dignity and respect. Not a huge ask. It does not need a new contract or new laws; we just need to treat people properly.
Suzanne Fletcher
Stockton-on-Tees
• It is not only asylum seekers who currently live in “disgraceful” housing conditions bought about by “systematic neglect”. Forced into the private rented market by a shortage of social housing, many other vulnerable families and individuals live in housing of equally poor standard. Tenants cannot complain for fear of eviction, with the likelihood of children having to move schools, and moving away from family, as well as the threat of potential homelessness. Meanwhile, negligent landlords harvest high rents bolstered by housing benefit. I am proud to pay taxes, but not for it to be spent forcing vulnerable people to live in substandard housing.
Ruth Colgan
Kenilworth, Warwickshire
• Should we respect UK property law when it leads to people being made homeless in order to support wealthy offshore companies owning empty apartment blocks (We’ll find another empty home, say squatters as judge orders eviction, 1 February)? Would our political leaders reach a different view, were they having to sleep rough on the polluted streets, in the cold, in the rain, no lavatories, running the risk of attack, and with no address for claiming benefits? I bet that emergency legislation would allow local authorities immediately to take over empty apartment blocks. Surely some radical thinking such as this is required, instead of complacently mouthing mantras about how this is a civilised society with respect for the law.
Peter Cave
London
