‘Theresa May’s hostile environment has meant a lack of basic rights for human beings in precarious situations.’

We wrote for Politics.co.uk about the government’s “right to rent” policy causing homelessness, discrimination and exploitation.

The standard operating procedure of the May government is to outsource immigration enforcement to the public, embedding borders in all sorts of different aspects of our day-to-day life. One of the chief ways it does this is through the ‘right-to-rent’ scheme, which is a far more dangerous development than it sounds. Now we finally have an independent assessment of the operation, via David Bolt, the independent chief inspector of borders and immigration.

The right-to-rent scheme places a legal requirement on landlords and their agents to carry out immigration checks on all adults who will occupy a property before they enter into a tenancy agreement. The punishment for those who fail to do this are very severe. They face a civil penalty of up to £3,000 and a possible prison sentence of up to five years.

Bolt’s inspection report, carried out throughout 2017, paints a stark picture of a scheme that is causing real harm to migrants – both documented and undocumented – people from ethnic minority backgrounds, and society at large. It appears to be being implemented with no meaningful oversight or monitoring whatsoever and is not even achieving its stated aim of reducing or controlling immigration.

You can read the full article here.