TIME HAS just about run out for Lidya Ghebrehiwet. If it wasn't for a combination of charity and luck, the 26-year-old Eritrean would be sleeping rough on the streets of Glasgow tonight. Within days though, her luck will run out and she'll be homeless, destitute and barred from working in order to feed, clothe and shelter herself.

Ghebrehiwet is merely the latest refugee to be reduced to the status of a non-person by the UK government. Few know about the scandal, but cases like hers are far from uncommon. From Glasgow to London, Home Office policy has turned an estimated 5000 men, women and children - who say they are in peril of their lives in their home countries - into down-and-outs. In one month alone in Glasgow, the Scottish Refugee Council counted 154 refugees and their dependents living as beggars in the city.

A Pentecostal Christian, Lidya was persecuted and arrested by the Eritrean government. Eventually, she fled to the UK. On September 27, her attempt to gain refugee status in Britain ran out of steam. The Home Office wrote to her saying she now had to leave Britain - she was a failed asylum seeker. Ghebrehiwet was informed that on October 9 she would not receive one more penny from the British government. If she worked, she would be committing a criminal offence.

Ghebrehiwet now faces a choice thousands like her have faced before: go underground, hoping to scrape together a living on the black economy, sleep rough, or go back home and risk death.

Through a translator Ghebrehiwet, who is epileptic, says: "I am receiving no benefits and I am not allowed to work. I am hungry, scared, destitute and depressed." She desperately hopes she can stay in her flat, which is owned by a firm contracted by the Home Office to let accommodation to asylum seekers, until tomorrow. But they want her out now. She's begged and delayed her landlords, and even hidden from them to avoid eviction. The week before last, the Refugee Council gave her £40. Last week, Positive Action in Housing (PAIH) - the anti-racism charity - gave her £20. That's all she's had to live on. She's been surviving on sandwiches.

"I pray to God that he'll help me," says Lidya. "I'm scared of being homeless. I am not a man. I don't know what will happen to me on the streets. I know that if I go back to Eritrea I will be killed."

If her luck runs out and her landlords throw her onto the streets this weekend, PAIH will dip into its emergency funds to pay for a hostel bed for her for up to three nights. After that, it will ring round its dozen or so active volunteers to see if anyone will give her a bed. From then on, though, she's basically on her own. Charities don't have the funds to support "non-persons" like Lidya indefinitely.

Life could be worse, though.

Rachel is 54 and a failed asylum seeker from Zimbabwe. She was forced on to the streets of Glasgow and had to turn to prostitution after her asylum claim collapsed. She now depends on charity, and lives hand-to-mouth, sleeping on one person's floor after another. Before she fled to the UK - because of her opposition to Robert Mugabe's regime - she was a nurse and a counsellor combating male violence against women in Zimbabwe. The final straw came when she was abducted, beaten and left for dead by supporters of the Zanu-PF government.

After she claimed asylum in the UK, she discovered her husband had been killed and her house destroyed. Once her appeals to stay in Britain were exhausted, she applied for emergency financial aid but was turned down. Her daughter, Sarah, is also in the UK. She's HIV positive and was also forced into prostitution when she became destitute.

"I am nothing in this country," she says, "a cockroach is better than me. Even a dog in this country has shelter but I have nothing. I don't know when my suffering will stop ... How do they think I can survive? The people I stay with ask me for money. I don't have any. I am ashamed I have forced myself to sleep with men for money and food. That is what my daughter did too, and now she has HIV. It doesn't matter for me: I am old. What does it matter if I die?"

Recent figures show that up to 283,000 failed asylum seekers should have been removed from Britain, but nobody knows where they are. They choose not to go home for fear of torture and murder, or because a squalid existence in the UK is preferable to hunger and disease back home. Once their asylum application has failed, they have no choice but to go underground, seeking work in the black economy, facing exploitation and blackmail. If they can't get illegal work, they sleep on the streets, under railway arches and in shop doorways.

THE only way the government will pay benefits to failed asylum seekers is if they formally agree to quit Britain at the first available opportunity. They won't get any benefit, however, unless they provide a reasonable excuse why they can't leave immediately. Exceptions are few: if a woman is more than seven months' pregnant, for example, that counts as a reason for delay. Even then, benefit payments can take months to process, leaving the failed refugee destitute. The "payments" are not in cash, though. Refugees get vouchers worth £35 a week to buy food and other necessities.

Failed asylum seekers get no healthcare, either, except in an emergency. Even HIV/Aids sufferers cannot get free treatment. Parliament has condemned the policy, with the Commons' home affairs select committee saying that "where the removal of a failed asylum seeker is delayed through no fault of his own, it is morally unacceptable for him to be rendered destitute". The House of Lords' joint committee on human rights says the system "results in widespread destitution" and "the treatment of asylum seekers ... breaches the European Convention on Human Rights threshold of inhuman and degrading treatment". The committee said it was "persuaded that the government has indeed been practising a deliberate policy of destitution ... This is unacceptable ... The policy of enforced destitution must cease."

Amnesty International says that "the evidence ... suggests the very aim of the Home Office policy is to make rejected asylum seekers destitute to force them to go home". But Amnesty says that doesn't work, as the huge numbers of failed asylum seekers still in the UK proves.

Leaving Britain as a failed asylum seeker is not as simple as getting a plane ticket from the Home Office and heading home. As Amnesty points out: "Many countries of origin do no co-operate with the readmission of their nationals." Amnesty says the Home Office is not returning failed asylum seekers - and so keeping them trapped in destitution in the UK - "either because their is no viable route or because the embassy refuses to issue a travel document". Eritrea, Zimbabwe, Iran, Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo are all countries to which it is almost impossible to return failed refugees.

One firm of solicitors told of more than 100 rejected Eritrean refugees who could not be returned as their embassy would not issue travel documents. Despite this, the Home Office would not grant them leave to remain, and, by doing so, lift them out of destitution.

In London, Islington Council's No Recourse To Public Funds team helps look after 60 destitute refugees, including HIV patients, people with mental health problems and families with children.

Amnesty said refugees were living "on the margins of society" and in "abject poverty". Theirs was a "painful limbo existence", the human rights organisation added, and many suffer depression and other mental health problems.

"Living off the charity of others stripped them of their dignity: having nothing and having to ask for everything. Many appear to have given up hope of ever being able to live a normal life," said Amnesty, which also said that women and young girls had been forced into prostitution or providing sexual favours in return for a floor to sleep on.

David Reilly, head of policy with Positive Action in Housing, said: "Destitution is used as an instrument to force people to abandon their asylum claims - to literally starve them out of the country. It's also cheap. Dawn raids and detention are very expensive ways of getting someone out of Britain. People come to us as they are terrified about what is happening to them. Only a quarter of them have actually reached the very end of their appeal process when they are left destitute, the rest still have appeals to go through."

As he talks, a pregnant Chinese woman is leaving his office. She's destitute, and PAIH staff are trying to get her into a hostel. For the past few days, she's been sleeping on friends' floors. Reilly says China will not accept returned asylum seekers from the UK. A second Chinese woman, Quin Chen, is also pregnant - but not pregnant enough to qualify for support, which only kicks in at seven months. Chen is a Chinese Christian fleeing persecution from the Communist Party. She too is staying with volunteers across Scotland. Reilly said: "She is a prime example of someone who has fallen through the gap." He also recalls a pregnant woman from Congo who collapsed in his office. She was homeless and hadn't eaten for four days. She had been too ashamed to beg. Last year, PAIH saw 228 destitute refugees.

One of the most tragic cases Reilly dealt with involved an Iranian man who used the few pounds he got from charities to buy weekly tickets for Glasgow's night buses so he could sleep. One night while waiting for the bus in Maryhill he was attacked by a group of youths, stabbed seven times in the back and had his bus ticket - his only possession - stolen. After four days in hospital, he was discharged back to the streets. He was eventually arrested, spent a year in detention and finally sent back to Iran.

In another case, a mentally ill man from Eritrea, who was confined to a wheelchair by polio, slept rough in Glasgow for three months. While homeless, he would deliberately wheel himself into the path of oncoming traffic. Before being left destitute, he had been attending college. Despite the government forcing him into destitution, the Home Office later did a U-turn and gave him temporary leave to remain in Scotland. PAIH describes this as "the most extreme form of a Kafkaesque bureaucracy".

In August, a destitute failed asylum seeker from Iraq, 28-year-old Solyman Rashed, was returned to Baghdad. He had fled his homeland in 2001 because of persecution under Saddam's regime. On September 3, he was killed in a car bomb in Kirkuk. In Glasgow, just 10 people attended a vigil in his memory.

"There are more and more people coming to us who were made homeless, then later given indefinite leave to remain," says Reilly. "To me that is an admission by the government that these people need protection from the UK, yet they've been forced onto the streets."

The government has even created a new category of homelessness: "administrative destitution". This happens when there is a file mix-up and the wrong family is turned down for asylum and left with nowhere to go. Reilly has seen this lead to children sleeping rough.

"This is almost the last area of life in Britain where people can fall completely between the gaps - there's no safety net," says Reilly. "Not since Victorian times has there been a deliberate policy used to force people into destitution. Yet the policy doesn't work - once they're forced on to the streets the government loses track of them, and can't detain them or get rid of them. All it does it make people vulnerable to exploitation. We know of men and women being approached for sexual exploitation. We really fear what these people could be driven to.

"I don't think until something terrible happens to one of these people - like the cockle-pickers at Morecambe Bay - that the UK will realise what it is doing."