UK refguees marked by red doors on their homes

Asylum seekers in the northern English town of Middlesbrough believe they are easy targets for racist abuse because they have been housed in properties that almost all have red front doors, a local support group manager said on Wednesday.

The houses there are owned by a subcontractor of G4S, an outsourcing giant that has been embroiled in a series of scandals over alleged incompetence and abuses.

After a report about the red doors appeared on the front page of Wednesday's Times newspaper in Britain, a spokesman for G4S said the subcontractor, Jomast, would repaint the doors. Jomast said it was "ludicrous" to suggest it practiced discrimination.

Asylum seekers described having eggs and stones thrown at their windows, dog excrement smeared on their doors and racist jibes shouted at them, The Times reported.

Britain has not seen migrants in the same huge numbers that arrived in other European countries last year, but public concerns over immigration are running high, and tensions have risen in some communities with large numbers of migrants.

"Many of our asylum seekers feel the red doors make them a target," said Pete Widlinski, the manager of Justice First, a local group that offers support to asylum seekers. He said that he and others raised the issue with G4S and Jomast several times but that the asylum seekers' concerns were ignored until now.

Immigration Minister James Brokenshire said he ordered an urgent audit of housing for asylum seekers in northeastern England — which is provided by G4S under a government contract.

"Anything which identifies asylum seeker accommodation to those who may wish to harm those accommodated in the properties must be avoided," he told Parliament, urging anyone who suffered racist abuse to contact the police.

The Times quoted Ahmad Zubair from Afghanistan as saying that he repainted his front door white to stop the abuse but that a Jomast worker repainted it red, citing company policy.

"Asylum houses have red doors. Everyone knows that," Zubair was quoted as saying. "People were shouting outside the house, calling us hate words, throwing things at our windows."

The Times said it identified 168 houses owned by Jomast, 155 of which had red doors. Reporters spoke to people living at 66 of the properties with red doors and found that 62 of them housed asylum seekers of 22 nationalities.

Stuart Monk, the owner and managing director of Jomast, said paint was bought in bulk for use at all its properties — a common practice among landlords.

The G4S spokesman said Jomast confirmed that the majority of houses where asylum seekers lived have red doors and agreed to repaint them so there would be no dominant color.

The Times said Middlesbrough has one asylum seeker for every 173 residents — the highest concentration anywhere in Britain.

Widlinski said that a far-right group organized a rally in the town on Saturday to call for refugees not to be let into the country and that only 30 people turned up, some of them from other towns.

The controversy over the red doors is the latest in a string of public relations disasters for G4S, one of the largest private employers in the world, with about 611,000 employees.

G4S has been involved in a string of scandals. It got into trouble over its handling of a deadly riot at an immigration detention center in Australia in 2014, and earlier this month it fired four workers over alleged use of unnecessary force against young offenders in the U.K.

Wire services