G4S again

Last week [Wednesday 13-Jan-2016] G4S were in the news because of abuse at the Medway secure unit:-

caldariborderzone.blogspot.co.uk/2016/01/g4s-should-be-closed.html

It was just another item in a list of catastrophe's cause soley by this company.

Now they are at it again and this time it is connected with asylum seekers in Middlesborough.

For more than fifty years Yorkshire councils had provided housing for refugees. Now that was being handed over to the world’s biggest surveillance and detention company, with a well regarded local charity acting as front man and figleaf. Just as children’s charity Barnado’s rents its reputation to G4S and the Border Agency at the Cedars family detention centre, providing cover for the continued detention of children, Target Housing was to give a credible face to G4S, as it moved from its profitable asylum markets into the expanding markets for private capital in social housing.

Despite all their undertakings to keep asylum seekers and families in the same areas where councils have housed them, G4S and the UKBA are now simply tearing up agreements.

G4S is becoming so desperate that it is, remarkably, trying a form of ‘reverse privatisation’ by paying local authorities, and housing associations, like InCommunities in Bradford, to allow them to take over and manage asylum accommodation with sitting asylum seeker tenants from previous local council contracts. This is because G4S and their private contractors cannot find any local private rented sector accommodation to put the families in, when they have to leave local authority housing. Campaigners in Kirklees, Huddersfield say the council there has turned down at least two offers from G4S.

When will this stop?