G4S officials and local contractors have admitted to MPs that more than half the houses accommodating asylum seekers in Middlesbrough and Stockton were painted red – but insisted it had not been done deliberately.
The Home Office last week launched an investigation after asylum seekers claimed their distinctive accommodation was making them targets for abuse from racists and vandals. The doors of the houses are now starting to be repainted.
James Momoh, 40, from Liberia, told the Guardian workers had come to paint his door grey in Middlesbrough on Monday, along with all the other red doors in the area. He complained last week that his door made him a target, claiming that eggs had been thrown at it and that a man tried to force his way in with a knife.
Peter Neden and John Whitwam of G4S – the company contracted by the Home Office to accommodate asylum seekers – and Stuart Monk, of the local subcontractor Jomast, appeared before the Commons home affairs committee on Tuesday to discuss the controversy.
Whitwam told MPs that of the 298 homes in Middlesbrough accommodating asylum seekers, 175 – or 59% – had red doors, as did 53% of homes for asylum seekers in Stockton, which he conceded “was too high”.
But the G4S bosses repeatedly denied they were aware of any complaints from asylum seekers prior to the story that gained much media coverage last week.
Keith Vaz, the chair of the home affairs select committee, told G4S and Jomast representatives about the case of Ahmad Zubair, a former tenant and asylum seeker.
“He was suffering abuse because the door of his house was red and the door of other asylum seekers was also red,” said Vaz. “He then went with a pot of paint and he painted his door white because he was fed up of having people abusing him because they identified the property as being the property of an asylum seeker.”
“Your officers then went round and repainted the front door red. That’s not acceptable behaviour, is it?” Vaz pressed the company leaders.
Neden, regional president at G4S, said repeatedly: “If we had known then what he had known now, we would have taken action sooner.”
Whitwam told the committee the issue of the doors had been looked into on two previous occasions, in 2012 when Suzanne Fletcher, a former local councillor, raised it and then again in 2014. “Twice we have looked to see whether or not there’s any indication that an asylum seeker has raised this as an issue and we found that they haven’t,” he said.
“We have yet to find any linkage between the colour of door or any other identifying feature of any of the properties and intimidation.”
He said the police had confirmed this also, but G4S has now decided to repaint the doors as a “precaution” so there was no one predominant colour.
When challenged about the ways available for asylum seekers to complain about the service, Whitwam said a freephone number was available, yet MPs had apparently been told the 0800 number had cost “£1 a time” before the communications regulator Ofcom intervened.
The door repainting would take a couple of weeks to complete, said Monk, the owner of Jomast. He said the issue of the red doors was “blown out of proportion”, adding: “I do think a lot has been made of it because we haven’t had any reported incidents at all.”
Monk told the committee the doors were painted red “probably 20 years ago”. “We’ve probably owned those properties over 20 years and before the advent of asylum accommodation in actual fact,” he said, insisting there was no deliberate decision to paint the properties of asylum seekers red.
He added: “We’ve had an exemplary record in terms of the provision of the services from the start of our contract.”
Monk rejected the assertion put to him by the panel that he was “profiting from deprivation and people’s need for refuge”. Neden told the panel of MPs there were not enough houses available to accommodate and said 322 asylum seekers had been put up in hotels, typically of two- or three-star standard.
He added that the number of asylum seekers the company was tasked to house had almost doubled in just three years from 9,000 to 17,000.
Vaz said at the end of the session he had found Monk’s evidence “unsatisfactory”. The senior Labour MP asked each boss whether their front doors were painted red, to which they all replied that this was not the case.
Speaking on the issue, Prof Thom Brooks, an immigration specialist at Durham University, said the solution in Middlesbrough was not merely painting doors, and the town needed extra funding to deal with having more than the official 1:200 guideline ratio of asylum seekers to residents.
He said: “I have seen nothing to say that there will be extra funding for the community to account for that.
“It’s not a case of saying those people they already have should be moved – they have already been through enough turmoil in their lives – but there should be extra money to manage the impact,” Brooks said.
