An asylum seeker from Splott has been given less than a week before she and her family are booted out by her landlord, the lambasted Home Office contractor Clearsprings.
Sara, 44, and her children have been settling into life in the Cardiff area and getting to know the community, but the three children now face having to change schools again.
No reason has been given for the eviction and local tenants union Acorn Cardiff, alongside Kurdish Solidarity activists, have been organising to fight back.
Image: Illustration, not actual property referred to.
An asylum seeker and her three children have been given less than a week to move out from their home in Splott, Cardiff, by notorious Penally Barracks operator Clearsprings.
Sara, who is 44 and a Kurdish national, is a mum to three young kids and is being forced to pull her children out of school to relocate them across the city in Grangetown, uprooting her life for reasons undisclosed to her.
voice.wales has seen a copy of the “relocation notification” given to her by Ready Homes, a subsidiary of Clearsprings, dated Friday 13th August and informing Sara that she will be kicked out this Thursday at 9am.
In a statement to voice.wales, Clearsprings Ready Homes declined to comment on individual cases but added that they take the welfare of asylum seekers in their accommodation “extremely seriously.”
Ann-Marie Davies, a volunteer with the Wales branch of the Kurdish Solidarity Movement and aiding the mum-of-three in her fight, told voice.wales: “She’s been there since May 2019 and was at a [Clearsprings] hostel before then.”
“There’s no way around it,” said Davies. “She hasn’t got a car. It’s already very problematic for her, for walking and mobility, because she’s not in the best of health. It was very hard to get the kids in the schools in the first place which had an asylum programme… we had to find them school uniforms, and a lot of amazing people helped with buying new shoes and blazers for them.”
No reason was given for her eviction and Ready Homes is only giving limited help to Sara to move her family’s belongings into the new property, offering only to transport “clothes and small items,” according to Davies, and giving no clear indication whether she will have to pay costly moving fees for the remainder of the items.
Friends had given Sara several expensive white goods when she first moved to Cardiff that will be disposed of by Ready Homes if they have to be left behind in the rush of moving home on short notice. “Unless volunteers help they can’t be transferred,” said Davies.
Sara has been organising with a local tenants union in the capital, Acorn, who have been helping her to resist the sudden eviction. One of the more troubling points of Sara’s case is that as an asylum seeker she doesn’t benefit from the same housing rights as British nationals.
Dan Edwards, Chair of Acorn Cardiff, said: “We have repeatedly called for a total ban on no-fault evictions as a union, but the fact that the current six month notice period does not apply to [Sara] due to her asylum seeker status is deeply unfair.”
The eviction notice will undoubtedly prove painful for Sara’s three children, aged between 5 and 13, who have already had to endure precarious housing since arriving on UK soil nearly three years ago.
Davies continued: “Obviously asylum seekers are a controversial topic, but now with the Afghan situation people realise that people have to leave dangerous situations. She’s a Kurd in Turkey where they’re persecuted and murdered, and the political opposition is criminalised and imprisoned.”
Sara has been in the UK since September 2018 and lived in London with her family until April the following year, when Sara and her children were sent to the Welsh capital to live due to housing shortages.
Sara has been asking the Home Office to allow her to go back to London ever since and she has been routinely denied return. Her application for asylum is still pending.
Clearsprings has a contract with the Home Office to house vulnerable asylum seekers whilst they bid for British citizenship, but has often been involved in scandal over their treatment of immigrants in their facilities.
The notorious Penally Barracks near Tenby was contracted to Clearsprings, the parent company of Ready Homes, and was exposed for the vile living conditions and far-right abuse asylum seekers were being subjected to even after they were forced to flee conflict.
This prompted the tenants of the Barracks to form a union to fight back against the neglect by the company, ultimately leading to the site being shut down and the men housed there relocated.
Clearsprings also has a long and shocking track record among asylum seekers in Cardiff, their most notable media appearance being when they forced their tenants to wear brightly coloured wristbands for their food allocation and made them the subject of abuse.
Clearsprings still operates a large asylum seeker housing facility in Kent, Napier Barracks, to this day. Their contract with Priti Patel’s Home Office is set to net them a massive £1 billion over the course of the 10-year agreement.
Sara has been working alongside Acorn members to fight for the eviction to be overturned by her landlord. The union has called a demonstration outside of the Home Office building in central Cardiff on Wednesday.
Acorn’s Dan Edwards’ continued: “The fact that any member of our community, let alone someone in a vulnerable position, could be asked to uproot their whole life in just six days is extremely concerning… The treatment of [Sara] by Clearsprings Ready Homes Ltd is nothing short of disgraceful.”
“Wales is supposed to be a Nation of Sanctuary, but the Welsh Labour government’s failure to take meaningful action has led to a member of our Cardiff community being put in a deeply unfair position by the UK Government. The Home Office is acting via a private company with a track record of plunging the most vulnerable into destitute conditions.
“Our communities must now band together as they have so many times throughout the pandemic and support [Sara] – we demand that Clearsprings Ready Homes reverse the decision to relocate S with immediate effect.”
Stephen Doughty MP, representing Cardiff South and Penarth, and Labour Splott councillor Jane Henshaw are also looking into Sara’s situation.
The case comes as the issue of asylum occupies the political agenda, with the catastrophic consequences of the Nato occupation of Afghanistan resulting in thousands of Afghans seeking to escape Taliban control.
Acorn are holding a demonstration outside the premises of the Home Office, 31-33 Newport Rd, Cardiff CF24 0AB at 1pm on Wednesday, August 18. Join the Kurdish Solidarity Wales group on Facebook here.
