On a Sunday morning in March 2010, the bodies of a family were found at the bottom of a 31-storey tower block in Glasgow. This family were asylum seekers who had just received a negative decision from the UKBA and were, at the time, accommodated by the YMCA in this tower block pending the outcome of their RSD process. Robina Qureshi's statement relating to these deaths confronted the daily realities of asylum seekers moving through this process and her press release detailed how it had become normal to find people in her office talking about ending their lives rather than face destitution or administrative removal.

Whatever the facts of this case will ultimately reveal, this fear of destitution, detention or administrative removal is real. The many layers of social exclusion experienced while waiting for a refugee status decision mean that lives are lived in limbo. Asylum seekers are mistrusted as a group and asylum policies are devised under an overarching framework of deterrence and mistrust. As Robina Qureshi argues, the way in which the asylum system operates is not perceived as fair, either by asylum seekers or by those ordinarily resident in the UK. Much has been written on the quality of the RSD process in the UK as well as the quality of country of origin information (eg NAO, 2004). Asylum seekers doubt the integrity of this process, often as a result of the disbelief they have encountered from the Home Office throughout their asylum process. As has been shown in earlier chapters, in many cases this feeling of being disbelieved is replicated during the dispersal process from NASS staff and agencies involved. The three members of the family in Glasgow were not believed and took their lives rather than be returned to their country of origin.

This book has investigated the contemporary compulsory dispersal and social exclusion of asylum seekers.