I am the mother of a 16-month-old daughter. I was moved to a hotel near Gatwick in June 2023.
When I first arrived I was given a room with a toilet and basin. The food is provided by the hotel. This was terrible because the food was cold, bland, tasteless and not enough to feed us.
For breakfast we would get a boiled egg, plain bread and baked beans. For lunch we got rice and chicken and for dinner it was dried out pizza. For my daughter they gave me a baby food pouch for a child of seven months old. There were no fresh vegetables and only one piece of fruit.
That was all they provided and it wasn’t enough. No-one can survive on that food.
We were hungry all the time. In the end I stopped even going down to get food because I couldn’t eat it.
I tried to save up and buy cereal and noodles. That was the only thing I could buy because I only had a kettle in my room and I couldn’t cook.
With the help of Refuge from Rape and Destitution and Women Against Rape, I complained to the hotel and to Migrant Help, the charity that is supposed to help asylum seekers and allocates accommodation. My friend also complained and she was interviewed by a newspaper. As a result, she was moved to another place where she could cook her own food.
The hotel didn’t respond to my complaint and neither did Migrant Help. [Migrant Help gets £230m in funding from the Home Office to help asylum seekers and refugees and is responsible for allocating accommodation.] But they did nothing to help.
Then last week the staff at the hotel suddenly changed. They started asking us what kind of food we wanted. They introduced new meals like sausages and mashed potato with gravy. The food tastes much better, it is fresh and hot. They have also started moving single mothers out to better accommodation.
It isn’t great to be in a hotel where the food is provided because we are at their mercy but our protests worked and our lives are not so bad now.
refugefromrapeanddestitution.blog 