Response to Northeye protest
In response to the protest at the Northeye site in Little Common, Bexhill, about the proposal to use it as a camp to house people seeking refuge, we have written the following letter to Huw Merriman, MP.
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Dear Mr Merriman
We write regarding the proposal by the Home Office to use the Northeye Residential and Training Establishment.
The Refugee Buddy Project works across Hastings, Rother and Wealden and has been working in Bexhill since 2018 matching residents with newly arrived people seeking refuge on a voluntary basis to help them acclimatize to and thrive in their new lives in the town. We have worked with around 100 volunteers in this time and supported over 50 individuals who have arrived on a variety of routes, including the Vulnerable Persons Resettlement Programme and more recently Homes for Ukraine. We also work closely with statutory and cultural organisations such as the De La Warr Pavilion and Rother District Council to both support those seeking refuge and improve public awareness of the issues they face.
The success of these two schemes has been in large part down to the way in which people seeking refuge have been embraced by their local community, especially by being housed in and by the community.
We are very concerned, therefore, about the proposal to use the Northeye site to house around 1200 individuals seeking refuge.
We have been campaigning for months about the poor treatment of people kept in hotels both in Hastings and across East Sussex, and have seen first hand the substandard provision provided by the Home Office and its contractors in these accommodation centres. From poor quality and culturally inappropriate food and lack of access to fresh drinking water to lack of cleaning facilities for clothing and irregular cleaning of bedrooms and bathrooms, the treatment of vulnerable people seeking refuge is horrendous. This plan to use poor quality mass accommodation sites will only exacerbate the issues we see already in hotels across the County.
Hotels across the country have also become flashpoints for protests and violence as seen in places like Knowsley and Skegness. The Northeye site will undoubtedly become a target for such protests putting the people living in and around the site in danger.
People seeking refuge deserve to be treated with dignity and respect, and to be housed in community accommodation where they can live alongside their neighbours. Isolating and segregating people in this type of camp amounts to the internment of large numbers of innocent people. The UK is better than this. Bexhill is better than this.
We are asking you, as the local MP for this area, to call on the Home Office to:
Immediately scrap its plans for accommodation centres in Northeye and across of the UK.
Redouble its efforts to increase the availability of safe asylum accommodation in flats and houses within local communities.
Work collaboratively with communities and local authorities and provide adequate funding to enable them to welcome people seeking safety.
We would welcome a meeting with you to discuss this matter further.
Yours sincerely
Rossana Leal
CEO
The Refugee Buddy Project: Hastings Rother and Wealden