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There has been a lot happening since our last post. It has been a year since we hosted our first guest and thanks to our volunteers we have been able to provide secure accommodation for over thirteen destitute asylum seekers in Nottingham. However there is still a significant number of people in Nottingham who have neither the right to earn a living, nor any entitlement to welfare benefits, not even a roof over their heads. The recent Homelessness and Hope Commission report by Citizen UK revealed the real scale of destitution within Nottingham. With the Nottingham and Nott'm Refugee Forum regularly supports around seventy destitute people per month, at HOST we're looking for volunteers to generously open their homes to help alleviate the number of destitute asylum seekers in Nottingham. 

In the news at a national level this week, UK Feminista lead a coalition of women and organisations to lobby parliament on Wednesday 24th October, calling for gender equality. Women seeking asylum was one of the four issues in focus on Wednesday, demanding a fairer hearing for female asylum seekers.  (1).  On Tuesday, the Liberal Democrats were shown to have backtracked on their promise to end child detention by the coalitions government's figures. The HM Inspectorate of Prisons report described the detention unit at Gatwick, the Cedars, as an "exceptional facility" but it also highlighted a number of issues. Mainly the worrying fact that the number of children being detained has risen from 91 children in 2011 to 107 children in the first six months of this year, and even then a significant percentage of these children were not detained in "family friendly" detention centres(2).     

Finally, exciting news, Host will be joining the 21st century and is in the process of creating a website so watch this space... 

(1) http://ukfeminista.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Justice-and-Rights-for-Women.pdf 
(2) Taylor (2012) Britain's still locking up children

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