According to local homeless charities and experts, a sharp increase in refugee homelessness is projected to literally hit the streets of the UK right at the coldest time of the year. Much of this is in response to the Home Office’s latest devastating policy reversal, which removes previous eviction protections for refugees. With a surge in seven-day evictions on the horizon alongside freezing temperatures, this could lead to yet another avalanche of evictions, creating a storm of homelessness.
“The Big Issue did a freedom of information request recently, and they found that due to the refugee move-on period, the number of refugees becoming homeless has tripled from August to October,” Tory MP Simon Fell explained in an interview with The Big Issue’s reporting team.
The Leading Cause of Global Homelessness Continues Changing with the Climate
For decades, displacement resulting from violent conflict was the leading cause of global homelessness, an issue that was only recently overshadowed by climate change. Now, as England hunkers down for a blustery winter, experts say the number of refugees facing homelessness has reached crisis levels, leaving room for yet another unsettling shift.
It’s important to point out that the people being forced onto the streets as a result of this decision are primarily refugees and survivors of human trafficking. In other words, these are people whose lives have been turned upside down due to devastating circumstances beyond their control. Now, the next thing that awaits them is the cold, hard state of unsheltered homelessness.
Chilling: Tentless Encampments and Crippling Poverty Are the So-Called Sanctuary for UK Refugees
The future fate of the UK’s most vulnerable population can be described much like winter – as brutally cold.
After receiving their final judgments from the courts, many refugees and trafficking victims are being forced to relocate, either abroad if they were denied citizenship or locally if they were granted citizenship, in a matter of days. This snap decision could give way to a winter where thousands of already traumatized individuals are forced to sleep outside on the streets.
Volunteers say many of them are refusing tents because they don’t want to become targets of anti-homeless hate crimes, which are also up all across the country. In fact, crime victimization is classified as a leading cause of death in the UK’s homeless population.
Local advocates told the Guardian that many refugees are being encouraged to go sofa surfing in other people’s living rooms or huddle up in hotels as winter rages on. However, these adjustments only shuffle them into other seemingly less extreme types of homelessness, effectively hiding a problem without offering any permanent solution.
It’s also important to note that refugees might be sofa surfing in living rooms with people they have only recently met, which puts them in a difficult position.
Without any permanent solutions on the table, the homeless refugee issue is likely to persist. It could even worsen as we head into summer, when the cold season will only be replaced with the exasperating, record-breaking heat caused by climate change.
“I’ve been sleeping in a sleeping bag and wearing a lot of clothes. It has been very cold, and I haven’t been healthy. The cold has made me vomit. I’m scared of sleeping outside,” one homeless refugee told The Guardian’s reporters.
With one in three homeless people dying from treatable ailments nationwide already, the UK cannot afford to force more people out onto the streets in such inclement weather conditions. The problem is that no alternative solution is being presented.
Often, we welcome people into our country with promises of a brighter future only to string them through the system, exploit them in the name of cheap labor, and then spit them back out on the streets to fend for themselves in an unfamiliar and hostile environment.
Asylum Does Not Mean Safety in the UK. Urge Your Representatives to Change That.
According to the BBC, asylum acceptance in the UK has reached a 20-year high. Citizens from war-torn countries all across the globe have come here by the tens of thousands under the false pretense that they’re entering a safe space.
All of the available data shows there is nothing safe about homelessness, especially unsheltered homelessness, which is known to shave roughly three and a half decades off a person’s life. Please urge your local representatives to create a warm winter environment for everyone in the nation by drafting laws that make housing a human right.
