Asylum seekers and the poorest parts of the UK are being let down | Letters

“Most refugees sent to the poorest parts of the UK” (Front page headline, 10 April). Here are suggested headlines for the remainder of the week: “Lowest life expectancy in the poorest parts of the UK”; “Proportionately highest levels of indirect taxation…”; “Worst maintained private and public housing…”; “Highest levels of prescription drugs…”; “Highest attendance at A&E departments…”; “Least investment in schools…”; “Highest number incarcerated…”; and more.

Condescending notions such as “responsibilisation” are used to deflect the political, economic, structural dynamics and suffering of poverty. Zero-hours contracts are recast as “flexible and adaptive working”; low-waged health support workers are declined travel time; part-time contracts without holiday pay or security underpin; essential services are cut to the bone. The list is endless.

On estates of poverty-induced resentment, the comparatively few refugees and asylum seekers entering Britain are warehoused and managed by private, profit-driven companies with, at best, questionable track records – G4S and Serco to name but two. The lack of coherent, integrated, humanitarian policies and interventions is the outworking of inadequately funded public authorities, reflecting a cynical and divisive betrayal by central government of those most in need, whether citizens, refugees or asylum seekers.
Professor Phil Scraton
School of Law, Queen’s University, Belfast

• I was saddened but not surprised by your front page. An asylum seeker living with me has told me how he was initially sent to a hostel in Manchester after his arrival in Kent, but when he put in his asylum application, he was transferred to a house in a remote suburb of Liverpool. Unable to afford public transport, he had to walk for an hour or more to shops or to meet people: “it was like being in prison,” he says.

The charities I have been in contact with tell me there are enough potential hosts to house all the asylum seekers they are dealing with, but they lack the resources to assess their suitability. Why can’t the government work with these charities to enable more asylum seekers to be housed with people who are keen to help them learn English and find out more about life in the UK?
Cary Bazalgette
London

• Yvette Cooper and the home affairs select committee are absolutely right to criticise the government’s policy on asylum seekers, and in particular its reliance on private sector providers of accommodation. In Newcastle some years ago, one such provider housed Iranian and Iraqi refugees in the same premises. More recently, the change from the provision of accommodation and support by Your Homes Newcastle (a public sector body leading management of the issue in the north-east) to G4S and its subcontractor Jomast, coupled with a reduction in funding, has effectively led to the disappearance of support services.

Treating the issue as a matter of housing alone is unsatisfactory, both for the asylum seekers and refugees and for the other residents of what tend to be the most disadvantaged areas of towns and cities in the least prosperous parts of the country.
Jeremy Beecham
Labour, House of Lords

• Your front page says the home affairs select committee is calling for changes to the “appalling” system of sending these hapless people to the poorest parts of the country. Since government policy for their dispersal has been framed around the inability and unwillingness of local councils to provide education, health and other services for them, the outcome of location in impoverished ghettoes is inevitable. These same blanket policies mean that private hospitality, widely and generously offered, is effectively prevented from being taken up. Thus a Kindertransport scheme was made impossible.

Keith Vaz, as its previous chairman, presided over a select committee on the Shaw report, which highlighted many of the shortcomings in government policy but was kicked into the long grass.

The Home Office claims the UK has a proud history of granting asylum to those who need our protection. We now seem to be at the end of history.
Tommy Gee
Wingfield, Suffolk

• Zoe Stewart (Passport checks for patients is an abandonment of NHS principles, theguardian.com, 7 April) is right to say that health tourism costs the NHS a relatively small amount (0.3% of a £130bn annual budget or some £330m). That is still the cost of a new hospital, so not insignificant, but she misses the bigger issue entirely.

The NHS, social housing and all of our public infrastructure were built by previous generations, out of their taxes, with an expectation that not only they but their descendants would benefit. The reason that “health tourism” sticks in the craw is that it breaks the implicit promise of “social goods” being passed on from generation to generation. People do have a sense of ownership over great public enterprises, and with that there is resentment of newcomers who are perceived as not having contributed to the development of the “common weal”, and who are then perceived as taking their jobs, houses and healthcare.

Proclaiming the “universality” of rights or benefits, while attractive as a principle, only really works in stable, homogenous societies. Immigration, of any variety, can dent that sense of communal solidarity, and hence “cracking down on health tourism”, an important though relatively minor financial amelioration, has a wider and justifiable significance.
Simon Diggins
Rickmansworth, Hertfordshire

• Join the debate – email guardian.letters@theguardian.com

• Read more Guardian letters – click here to visit gu.com/letters

Asylum seekers and the poorest parts of the UK are being let down | Letters

How the brain makes body parts move | Daniel Glaser

In a recent groundbreaking operation, a man paralysed from the neck down is now, after eight years, able to eat and drink without assistance – all thanks to the power of thought.

The story has captured everyone’s imagination because it seems miraculous that paralysis can be reversed simply by our thoughts. But neuroscientists have always known the information is there, it’s just a question of how you read it out.

In this instance scientists did not tap into the spinal cord. Instead, they used an implant in the patient’s head to read out his intentions from the motor cortex. In this part of the brain, which plans and controls movements, the various parts of the body are laid out like a map. This means that the intended actions can be read out by a sensor, like a message on a mobile. The scientists can then ‘spy’ on the signals and work out the neural trace of his movements. They are then relayed directly to the muscles, allowing the patient to move his arm.

It turns out that in neuroscience as in life, it’s often worth cutting out the middle man and tracing a story directly to its source.

Dr Daniel Glaser is director of Science Gallery at King’s College London

How the brain makes body parts move | Daniel Glaser

Guy helps make surgical history after possessing his shattered encounter rebuilt using 3D printed parts

Consultant maxillofacial surgeon Adrian Sugar stated: “We were capable to do a pretty excellent work with all his facial injuries, with the exception of his left cheek and eye socket.

“We fixed his facial fractures quite well but he had damaged his left eye and the ophthalmologists did not want us to do anything at all that might injury his sight further.

“That was a great move due to the fact his eyesight has primarily recovered. But as a end result we did not get his left cheekbone in the appropriate place and we did not even consider to reconstruct the extremely thin bones around his eye socket.

“So the end result was that his cheekbone was also far out and his eye was sunk in and dropped.”

Final 12 months, surgeons commenced organizing the surgical treatment to restore the symmetry to Mr Power’s encounter.

The undertaking was the function of the Centre for Applied Reconstructive Technologies in Surgical treatment, a partnership between Morriston Hospital’s Maxillofacial Unit and the National Centre for Solution Layout and Growth Research (PDR) at Cardiff Metropolitan University.

The crew employed scanned 3D photographs of Mr Power’s encounter to design and style guides to reduce and place the bones, as nicely as plates to hold the bones in place. All the designs – along with the finished guides and health care-grade titanium implants – were developed by 3D printing.

Mr Sugar explained: “Stephen had a very complex injury and correcting it involved bones getting to be re-minimize into numerous fragments.

“Being ready to do that and to place them back in the right position was a complex three dimensional exercising. It produced sense to program it in 3 dimensions and that is why 3D printing came in – and successive 3D printing, as at every different stage we had a model.

^{An x-ray of Stephen Power’s skull}

Mr Power, from Cardiff, nonetheless has a lengthy way to go with his overall bodily recovery. But the good results of his facial reconstruction has enormous implications for other people.

Looking at the final results of the surgical treatment, Mr Power says he feels transformed – with his face now considerably closer in shape to how it was before the accident.

“It is daily life altering,” he explained.

“I could see the distinction straight away the day I woke up from the surgical treatment.”

Possessing utilised a hat and glasses to mask his injuries just before the operation, Mr Power has stated he presently feels more assured.

“I am hoping I won’t have to disguise myself – I will not have to hide away,” he explained.

^{(Lt-Rt) A 3D mould of Stephen’s encounter was made prior to the titanium imaplants were designed}

“I’ll be ready to do day-to-day things, go and see people, walk in the street, even go to any public locations.”

Mr Sugar described it as an evolution of 3D technological innovation, taking what had been carried out prior to not just one stage but two or 3 methods even more.

“Previous efforts elsewhere to consider it to this phase have failed and so we have had to learn from these experiences.

“This is genuinely the 1st time we’ve taken it to this stage, where everything to the quite last screws becoming inserted has been planned and modelled in advance – and worked sweetly.”

Mr Sugar said the same methods would be utilised to support a lot of other individuals in future.

Design engineer Sean Peel stated the most recent advance should motivate better use of 3D printing inside of the NHS.

“It tends to be utilized for personal genuinely challenging instances as it stands – in quite a convoluted, lengthy-winded design and style approach,” he mentioned.

“The following victory will be to get this method and technique utilised far more broadly as the costs fall and as the style tools boost.”

Mr Power’s operation is at present becoming featured in an exhibition at the Science Museum in London, named 3D Printing: The Potential.

Guy helps make surgical history after possessing his shattered encounter rebuilt using 3D printed parts