The Home Office, plumbing ever lower depths

[davidgillon]

Home Office criticised for giving wheelchair user accommodation with steps

The further you read into this, the worse it gets. The Home Office sent someone released from Immigration Detention to accomodation in London (and reading between the lines, in the middle of the night). The entrance was up steps, and no one answered the door. He's a wheelchair user. Worse, he's officially considered to be an adult at risk and lack mental capacity. They had been trying to find him accomodation for six weeks, since a judicial review by his solicitors secured his release (so that's potentially six weeks of illegal deprivation of liberty). There was a court case due the next morning, so you can't help wondering if the Home Office did nothing for six weeks and then panicked. And then you read that the Home Office appear to have accepted that he was an adult at risk ever since they detained him last July (hard to argue it when serious disability counts as at risk), so that's potentially nine months of deprivation of liberty counter to their own guidelines.

And just to make it doubly ironic, it's almost certain the solicitors acting for him against the Home Office are the government's own Official Solicitors, who have a guardianship role in cases like this.

Comments

[vass]

JFC.

[sovay]

The entrance was up steps, and no one answered the door. He's a wheelchair user.

That would be bad enough. Everything else, no.

[liv]

Honestly, that headline is far too generous to the Home Office. They didn't "give" the man any accommodation (however unsuitable), they left him stranded in the street in the middle of the night. And I know that wheelchair user is correct style, but this person is multiply mentally, cognitively and physically disabled. Not that any of this would be ok if he merely couldn't walk, but I think the sub-editor could have been a lot more emphatic without any danger of exaggeration.

[davidgillon]

I totally agree with you. Wheelchair user was the very least of the disability-related issues. OTOH it looks good in a headline, without needing any actual thought.

[nanila]

I am speechless.

And, depressingly, not at all surprised.