When the State Fails Twice: Detention, Disability, Housing Control, and the Systemic Endangerment of a Disabled Migrant
Introduction: From Scheduled Release to Prolonged Harm
According to the sentence imposed by the criminal court, Joseph was scheduled to be released from prison on 20 December 2018. That date should have marked the end of state custody and the beginning of reintegration. Instead, it marked the beginning of a second, more destructive phase of state control.
Approximately one month prior to his scheduled release, prison authorities misrepresented material facts to the Home Office. Despite having access to the underlying conviction record and extensive medical evidence, the Home Office ignored those facts and elected to authorise Joseph’s continued detention, not on any lawful sentencing basis, but solely because he was not born in the United Kingdom and was therefore administratively categorised as a “Foreign Offender” liable to deportation.
Deportation, however, could not lawfully proceed on the facts. Rather than correcting course, the Home Office’s decision effectively empowered prison authorities to continue detaining Joseph in circumstances that exposed him to grave and foreseeable harm. The consequences were catastrophic. During this period of unlawful continuation of detention, Joseph suffered life-threatening personal injury. By the time he was eventually released on 6 January 2020, he had been left permanently disabled and reliant on a motorised wheelchair for mobility.
The immigration liability, however, was not resolved. It remained suspended over him like a permanent instrument of control.
1. Property Loss, Insolvency, and Forced Dependency
While Joseph remained imprisoned, one of his remaining properties was drawn into insolvency proceedings due to non-payment of council tax—an inevitable outcome given his incarceration and incapacity. That case remains ongoing.
In the meantime, the property itself was vandalised and rendered derelict by third parties who exploited publicity surrounding his conviction as justification for destruction. Upon release, Joseph—now severely disabled—was physically incapable of undertaking remedial works or even basic maintenance. He could not climb ladders, perform repairs, or restore the property to habitable condition.
As a result, he was forced into state dependency, despite having previously been financially independent and a property owner.
2. Immigration Limbo and Housing Control
Because the Home Office maintained immigration liability against him, Joseph was excluded from ordinary local authority support and trapped within the immigration support system. He was placed in accommodation managed by Mears Housing, a contractor providing housing services to the Home Office.
Crucially, Joseph is not an asylum seeker. He is a humanitarian protection applicant. That distinction is not semantic. It determines both the scope of lawful control over him and the duties owed to him. Yet in practice, that distinction has been ignored.
Since 2020, Joseph has lived in Home Office accommodation under Mears’ management while simultaneously attempting to litigate multiple ongoing legal proceedings—criminal, civil, insolvency, and human rights claims—many of which arise directly from his treatment in prison detention.
3. Two Legal Actions Against Mears Housing
Joseph currently has two distinct but interrelated legal actions against Mears Housing. Both arise from Mears’ conduct as a housing management provider and both centre on procedural impropriety, targeted conduct, and interference with his home and legal materials.
- Personal Injury Claim: The first action concerns personal injury arising from discriminatory and prolonged targeted harassment by Mears staff. That conduct caused foreseeable psychiatric and neurological harm to a man already suffering from severe disability, autism, and trauma resulting from unlawful prison detention.
- Unlawful Entry and Interference with Legal Materials: The second action concerns attempts to forcibly enter his property, including an unsuccessful attempt to break down his door, followed by an alleged unlawful interference with properties. Subsequent conduct raised serious concerns regarding interference with personal effects and evidential court materials relating to his ongoing criminal appeal, with clear CCTV evidence.
Taken together, these actions disclose a pattern of targeted behaviour rather than isolated incidents.
4. Racial Dynamics and Proxy Management
The situation is further complicated by the racial dynamics evident in Mears’ handling of Joseph’s case. Managers assigned to him repeatedly displayed what appeared to be personal hostility and an intent to cause harm, including interference with materials central to his legal challenges.
At one point, a Black housing manager was assigned to his case. On the surface, this appeared to mitigate the racialised aspect of the treatment. In practice, however, it became evident that this manager exercised no real authority. Emails went unanswered, decisions were not made by them, and instructions were merely relayed from an unknown decision-maker operating in the background.
This proxy arrangement raises serious questions about transparency, accountability, and the deliberate obscuring of responsibility.
5. Heating Deprivation and Escalating Intrusions
Between November and December 2025, Mears left Joseph without heating and hot water for 50 days. When staff finally attended on 23 December 2025 to restore the boiler, they arrived in force and transformed the visit into an unscheduled housing inspection, photographing the property and surrounding areas.
This occurred despite the fact that a housing inspection had already taken place in November 2025, when the boiler was initially shut off. Mears staff then hinted that inspections would become monthly.
Joseph immediately challenged this. Monthly inspections are contrary to statutory housing law and represent an extraordinary intrusion into private life. At a minimum, statutory inspections occur every six months. Any deviation requires lawful justification. He made it clear that his door would remain shut under Article 8 ECHR, protecting the right to respect for home and private life.
6. The “Hoarding” Allegation: A Manufactured Record
On 30 December 2025, Joseph received a call from the local council informing him that Mears staff had reported his home as “hoarded.”
Hoarding is a defined condition involving excessive accumulation that renders living spaces unusable and creates serious safety and health risks. Joseph requested the photographic evidence supporting this allegation. The council confirmed that no photographic evidence existed. The report was based entirely on verbal assertion.
There had been:
- No prior allegation of hoarding.
- No correspondence.
- No warning letters.
- No engagement process.
- No time given to remedy any alleged issue.
Under housing law, a provider cannot escalate a hoarding concern to a local authority without months of documented engagement and evidence. None of this occurred.
Joseph’s flat is a two-bedroom property. The box room contains disability equipment—multiple wheelchairs, mobility aids, bathroom supports—as well as computer hardware used for his academic research and software development work. Everything is organised, accessible, and clean. Nothing obstructs living areas. Nothing renders the property unusable. No evidence were raised over his sitting room, bedroom, bathroom, and kitchen.
This is not hoarding. It is the functional reality of a disabled academic and technologist working from home.
7. Reasonable Apprehension of Escalation and Risk to Life
Given the pattern of conduct—false reporting, escalating intrusions, disregard for legal boundaries, prior serious harm while under state control—Joseph now faces a reasonable and well-founded fear for his safety.
The concern is not speculative fantasy but a projection grounded in precedent and structure:
- A manufactured “hoarding” label logged on official records.
- An intention to conduct unlawful “monthly inspections”.
- Anticipated refusal of entry protected by Article 8.
- Escalation framed as a “safety concern”.
- Attendance with police.
- Forced entry.
- Narrative control over subsequent events.
In a society where Black men with dreadlocks are routinely stereotyped as dangerous, violent, or unstable, the risk of fatal mischaracterisation is not abstract. It is structural and historically documented.
8. Narrative Control Over Subsequent Events: When Administrative Power Becomes Lethal
“Narrative control over subsequent events” refers to the capacity of institutions and their agents to define, record, and disseminate the official version of events before the affected individual is able to speak, challenge, or survive to contradict it. In Joseph’s case, this is not an abstract concern but a foreseeable mechanism through which irreversible harm—including death—could be normalised, justified, and rendered administratively unchallengeable.
The danger lies not merely in the physical acts anticipated—forced entry, police attendance, or emergency intervention—but in the pre-positioning of documentary and reputational markers that determine how those acts will later be interpreted.
First, the creation of a “hoarding” label without evidence functions as a preparatory narrative device. Once logged, it reframes Joseph not as a disabled tenant managing specialised equipment, but as a “high-risk individual” exhibiting unsafe or irrational behaviour. This label operates prospectively: it does not describe reality, but prepares the justification for future escalation. In any subsequent incident, that prior record would be invoked to explain away otherwise unlawful conduct as a necessary response to a known risk.
Second, repeated attempts to impose unlawful “monthly inspections” establish a paper trail of supposed non-cooperation. When Joseph lawfully refuses entry under Article 8 ECHR, that refusal can be recharacterised—not as an assertion of rights—but as evidence of concealment, deterioration, or dangerous non-compliance. In institutional narratives, silence or refusal becomes pathology. This reframing is critical, because it allows lawful resistance to be transformed into justification for coercion.
Third, the introduction of police presence under the guise of “safeguarding” or “welfare checks” is not neutral. Once police attend, the evidential hierarchy shifts decisively. Police accounts are afforded institutional credibility that automatically outweighs that of a disabled migrant with an immigration liability. If forced entry occurs, the narrative will already have been written: officers responding to a high-risk hoarder, refusing access, possibly unstable, possibly armed, possibly deteriorating. At that point, the event ceases to be examined as a rights violation and is instead framed as an emergency response.
Fourth, narrative control becomes lethal when it collapses causation. Any injury or death that occurs during or after such an intervention is likely to be recorded as self-inflicted, accidental, or an unavoidable consequence of the individual’s own behaviour, rather than the predictable outcome of institutional escalation. The distinction is decisive. Once causation is attributed to the victim, accountability disappears. Investigations narrow. Scrutiny dissipates. The death, if it occurs, becomes administratively closed.
Fifth, racialised assumptions amplify the danger. A Black man with dreadlocks, labelled as a hoarder, described as uncooperative, autistic, wheelchair-bound, and refusing entry, fits an existing institutional stereotype of unpredictability and threat. This stereotype does not need to be explicitly stated to operate; it is embedded in risk assessment frameworks and operational language. When harm occurs, that stereotype supplies the unspoken explanation: this was inevitable. That is how deaths are rendered ordinary.
Finally, what makes this situation exceptional—and not merely another housing dispute—is anticipation and pre-planning. The sequence is visible in advance: false recording, escalation, refusal, police involvement, forced entry, narrative closure. When harm is foreseeable and the mechanisms that will later justify it are already being assembled, the risk is no longer hypothetical. It is structural.
Narrative control is the final safeguard for institutions, not individuals. It ensures that if the worst happens, it will be recorded as reasonable, regrettable, and unavoidable. For the person at the centre of that narrative—especially one who is disabled, racialised, and legally marginalised—there may be no opportunity to contest the story at all.
In that sense, narrative control is not ancillary to physical harm; it is what makes irreversible harm possible without consequence.
9. A Life Under Threat, Not Support
This is the same housing where Joseph alleges he was poisoned, where tap water remains unusable without causing physical symptoms, where he has been forced to litigate simply to survive, and where repeated attempts are being made to secure increasing physical access to him.
Joseph does not seek permanence in the West. Like many migrants, he accepts that his future ultimately lies in Africa. What he seeks is justice, restitution, and the means to live independently back in Africa after losing everything—including a portfolio of 66 properties—while unlawfully detained in prison.
The conclusion of his legal cases would allow him to relocate safely, without dependence, and without burdening another state with injuries it did not cause.
Conclusion: A System That Must Be Stopped Before It Kills
What emerges is not a collection of unfortunate coincidences but a continuum of state-enabled harm: unlawful detention, catastrophic injury, property loss, enforced dependency, housing control, racialised suspicion, and escalating intrusion.
Joseph’s position is stark. His life is in danger under the continued management of Mears Housing. That danger has been repeatedly raised, repeatedly ignored, and repeatedly minimised.
This is not merely a personal tragedy. It is a warning. When immigration control, housing management, and racialised assumptions intersect without accountability, the result is not administration—it is annihilation by process.
The question is no longer whether intervention is justified. The question is whether it will come before the harm becomes irreversible.
Back to 👇