19 May 2024: Boaz Trust and Greater Manchester Immigration Aid Unit: People in Greater Manchester are spending years, even decades, in destitution – New report on destitution in Greater Manchester
A new joint report by the Boaz Trust and Greater Manchester Immigration Aid Unit (GMIAU) has found that people in the city-region are forced into destitution for years, sometimes decades, as a result of their immigration status. One woman interviewed spent 16 years in immigration limbo.
The report, based on in-depth interviews with Greater Manchester residents, finds destitution is being used as a form of racialised violence, embedded within immigration law, which damages people’s physical and mental health, pushing some people towards self-harm and thoughts of suicide.
As well as making a series of recommendations to national government, the report also lays out what can be done to design destitution out of our city-region, building on positive regional developments in recent years.
Read more here: https://www.boaztrust.org.uk/pages/new-report-on-destitution-in-greater-manchester
17 May 2024: Guardian: British asylum housing tycoon breaks into Sunday Times rich list
Graham King, whose firm is paid £3.5m a day to accommodate arrivals in the UK, listed among country’s 350 richest people
An Essex businessman who won government contracts paying his company £3.5m a day for transporting and accommodating asylum seekers has been named among the 350 richest people in the UK.
Graham King, the founder and majority owner of a business empire that includes Clearsprings Ready Homes, which won a 10-year Home Office contract for housing thousands of asylum seekers, was on Friday named alongside King Charles III, the prime minister and Sir Paul McCartney on the Sunday Times rich list of the wealthiest people.
King, 56, is estimated to have amassed a £750m fortune from “holiday parks, inheritance and housing asylum seekers for the government”. Clearsprings Ready Homes made £62.5m in profits after tax for the year ending January 2023, more than double its profits of £28m the previous year.