Why is the Home Office is making refugees homeless?

This week I’ve seen something happening in my city that I’ve never seen before.

I’ve supported refugees here in my home of Liverpool for years. I’ve begged, borrowed and robbed my friends and relatives for essential stuff. I’ve helped countless people who were in desperate need.

Over that time my fellow Care4Calais volunteers and I have gotten a good sense of what’s most needed here. And today, we’ve realised that for the first time, the thing we’re going to need most is tents for people to live in.

It is shocking. It is abhorrent. It’s the reality of life under this Government.

The Home Office’s abhorrent seven-day eviction policy for some of the most vulnerable among us is the cause of the problem. Suella Braverman’s Home Office is now telling people – people it has accepted deserve sanctuary here – to leave their housing knowing that they stand no chance of finding work, banking or a job in time, and therefore will be destitute.

We have already seen that for so many refugees in this position, the street is the only option, and a tent the one chance of keeping dry.

It’s now clear that this autumn, the Home Office is going to create camps like those in Calais and Dunkirk in your neighbourhood. It will be young men first but it will soon be families, women and children second, whole communities in tents pitched on city scrubland. In Britain, in 2023.

I believe the Government is creating these camps deliberately. They can do it because they simply won’t accept that all humans need personal safety and dignity, a roof and food. For them, those things are deserved only by a select few which includes, of course, themselves.

The affected people have come here to ask for help. The Government tells these frightened refugees it’ll help them – and then just kicks them out on the street. Just a few years ago it would have been unthinkable; now we dread how bad they’ll make it.

There is something we can do that may yet mean we don’t have to hand out tents on our streets, though.

Our volunteers are now working all hours to try to find accommodation, and get people off the street. It’s hard and we need more people, but it does save people. Please join us, donate and resist the Government policies that create this grotesque horrorshow: care4calais.org/get-involved/