Abstract
In 2010, the UK government passed contracts for the provision of dispersal accommodation and reception services for asylum seekers to three private providers. This article explores the causes and consequences of this process, arguing that dispersal has been reshaped through a confluence of ‘austerity urbanism’ and privatization. The article draws on fieldwork in four cities (Birmingham, Cardiff, Glasgow and Sunderland), including interviews with local authority representatives, politicians, and asylum and refugee support services. The article highlights the production of instability within asylum dispersal as an effect of austerity and privatization. As a result, we witness a narrative of political neglect, shrinking accountability and the slow recession of support services and expertise. Whilst instability has often been a common facet of asylum policy in the UK, austerity and privatization have meant that a limited concern with the social needs of asylum seekers has been replaced with an increasingly revanchist agenda.
Highlights
In January 2016, the issue of asylum seeker accommodation made national headlines in the UK, following revelations that houses used to accommodate asylum seekers in the city of Middlesbrough were identifiable by their red front doors
Discussions of dispersal within the United Kingdom have examined the liminality experienced by asylum seekers through the imposition of mobility and fixity that this policy implies (Hynes 2009; Squire 2009; Darling 2011), and have considered the local politics of dispersal as a policy that places asylum seekers in areas of existing social deprivation and often poorquality housing stock (Phillips 2006)
Both of these effects are being reshaped in a landscape of fiscal austerity and widespread reductions in support for asylum services and third-sector organizations, and it is to this changing landscape that I turn in this article, to consider how dispersal changes as it comes to be practised in an increasingly austere context
Summary
Citation for published item: Darling, Jonathan (2016) 'Asylum in austere times : instability, privatization and experimentation within the UK asylum dispersal system.', Journal of refugee studies., 29 (4). pp. 483-505. Citation for published item: Darling, Jonathan (2016) 'Asylum in austere times : instability, privatization and experimentation within the UK asylum dispersal system.', Journal of refugee studies., 29 (4). Whilst instability has often been a common facet of asylum policy in the UK, austerity and privatization have meant that a limited concern with the social needs of asylum seekers has been replaced with an increasingly revanchist agenda
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