Why the Home Office plan to confine asylum seekers to military barracks is especially cruel

Every week in my therapy room, I sit with people who carry the physical and psychological scars of torture. They are men, women and children who fled unimaginable horrors in places like Afghanistan and Sudan. Many were tortured simply for standing up for the basic rights most of us take for granted – like going to school, to church or to the ballot box.  

Almost all live with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and other complex mental and physical health issues. The government’s plan to house them in disused military barracks risks undoing the fragile process of recovery.  

My first task as a clinician is to help survivors feel safe and stable. Only then can the vital trauma therapy really begin. Yet the conditions they are forced to live in (hotels, large military sites, even detention centres) makes the hard work of recovery almost impossible. Overcrowding, lack of privacy and unhygienic conditions worsen anxiety, panic and hopelessness.

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The idea of confining people seeking sanctuary to former military barracks is especially cruel. These are not soldiers living temporarily among colleagues while they engage in professional activities surrounded by support and normality, free to come and go as they please.  

They are survivors of torture, and they tell us that living in places like this can feel unbearable because such settings echo the very places where they were detained and tortured. Sights, sounds and even smells can trigger acute associations to past traumatic events. Security controlled gates, locked doors and uniformed staff can provoke intrusive memories, flashbacks and nightmares so vivid that survivors feel transported back into their worst moments.  

This policy is not just shameful, it is dangerous. Survivors would be isolated, cut off from community support and specialist trauma services. People would be left to languish in fear. Large scale sites are also profoundly unsafe because their visibility makes residents more exposed to the types of far-right violence we have seen again this summer.   

The issue of housing refugees has become a flashpoint for hatred and intimidation. And every day we’re seeing the human consequences of this. Survivors who came to the UK for protection are once again living in fear – many are too frightened to come to vital therapy appointments, too scared to take their children out or even go to the supermarket.  

Instead of prolonging and exacerbating the suffering of some of society’s most vulnerable people, the government should be ending the use of large-scale sites and hotels. And there is a better way. Refugees can and should be housed in our neighbourhoods, with dignity, not warehoused in unsafe and unsuitable institutions.   

If Shabana Mahmood is serious about delivering an asylum system that works, she should reject the cruelty of barracks and focus on real solutions: ensure her department can make fast and fair asylum decisions. The reality right now for many of the survivors I support is that they are living in limbo while they wait for a decision. They can’t work, they can’t support their families, they can’t move on with their lives. 

The government must hold firm to its commitment to improve the speed and quality of asylum decisions so that people trying to recover from torture and persecution have the legal certainty that will enable them to stand on their own two feet. If we can do this and put behind us the spectacle of housing survivors in conditions of cruelty, the survivors can recover and rebuild their lives as active and essential members of our communities.  

Caring people across the UK are outraged by the race to the bottom from British politicians seeking to outdo each other in cruelty towards refugees. This only ends one way: attacks on people seeking sanctuary only takes us closer to the far-right, putting at risk the rights that protect us all. The new Home Secretary must act in the long-term interest of this country and resist any temptation to play politics with the lives of people who’ve already suffered so much.   

Ann Salter is the head of clinical services at Freedom from Torture North West, where she has worked for 13 years. She is a UKCP accredited psychotherapist and has worked with survivors of torture for the past 20 years.  

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