Policy Bites – Hostile Environments: The Intersections of Housing, Migration and Mental Health Policy in the UK and Beyond

Join the Sydney Policy Lab and Dr Nikita Simpson for a Policy Bites seminar and film screening.

Light lunch will be provided. Space is limited. Please register to secure your place.

Hostile Environments: The Intersections of Housing, Migration and Mental Health Policy in the UK and Beyond

The UK Government Home Office’s ‘hostile environment’ policy is a set of administrative and legislative measures aimed at making it difficult for migrants to stay in Britain. Over more than a decade, this approach has combined securitised practices of bordering and policing, with housing and mental health policies which have defunded and hollowed out provisioning at community level.

This seminar, which includes the premiere of a short film, draws attention to the materiality of this hostile environment as it is experienced in the mouldy and damp homes of Somali families who inhabit temporary or precarious accommodation in Birmingham. Drawing on interdisciplinary (clinical, geographic, psychological, and ethnographic) fieldwork, we reveal how Somali families experiencing ‘homelessness’ are placed, by local authorities, in overcrowded, private and temporary accommodations of varying states of disrepair. It explores the ways in which housing, migration, and mental health policy intersect to generate distress in the UK and in Australia. It puts forward the case for attention to property - access, tenure, quality and security - as a means of addressing mental health inequalities. 

About Dr Nikita Simpson

Dr Nikita Simpson is a Reader in Anthropology, and the Co-director of the Centre for Anthropology and Mental Health Research in Action (CAMHRA) at the University of London. She researches and provides policy advisory on mental health, care, and inequality. Her work is published in several co-authored reports and policy briefs that have been widely read across the UK and EU.

Nikita completed her doctoral studies at LSE. Her doctoral thesis (2021), funded through an LSE Doctoral Fellowship, focused on embodied forms of illness and mental distress amongst Gaddi tribal women in Himalayan North India. Nikita’s doctoral work has been awarded a number of prizes, including the Alfred Gell Prize, the Rosemary and Raymond Firth Prize, and the Firth Prize.

Prior to joining CAMHRA, Nikita was a Postdoctoral Research Officer in the Department of Anthropology at LSE.

As a visiting fellow of the Sydney Policy Lab, and funded by the IAA, she is investigating comparative forms of housing distress in settler-colonial Australia and advising on the Australia Cares project.

Format

Film screening followed by a conversation

Time and location

1:00 pm, Tuesday 16 September 2025.

Seminar Room 203, RD Watt Building (A04), Science Road, The University of Sydney, NSW 2050.

See more information about getting to the Lab.

Accessibility

We are committed to ensuring our spaces are safe, accessible and enjoyable for all. The RD Watt building is fully accessible for people who use wheelchairs or other mobility aids and service animals are welcome. Enter via the rear door of the RD Watt Building, near the entrance to the Social Sciences Building at the University of Sydney. Our meeting and events space is equipped with PA and assistive listening systems.

If you have any other access requirements, please do let us know when you register.

About Policy Bites

The Sydney Policy Lab’s lunchtime seminars – Policy Bites – are a forum for researchers and practitioners to present their exploratory and applied policy work in its early stages. Each public seminar gathers the Lab community in our collaborative space to hear and discuss new research as we exchange ideas across disciplines.

Policy Bites are organised by Dr Kate Harrison Brennan (Director, Sydney Policy Lab), Dr Assel Mussagulova (Lecturer in Public Policy and Public Administration, School of Social and Political Sciences) and Associate Professor Meru Sheel (Sydney School of Public Health).