A Home Office not fit for purpose

In this blog SDV director, Kate Alexander, takes a look at the latest detention statistics, published yesterday, covering the year to the end of September 2022

The first thing to note about these detention figures is that they offer only a partial picture of detention. They only include people detained in immigration removal centres, residential short term holding facilities and under immigration rules in prisons.

They do not include the very many people detained in non-residential short term holding facilities and in places like Manston, which has been the subject of recent intense scrutiny.

An inspection of Manston in July raised concerns that people were being held for far longer than 24 hours in non-residential accommodation, and we know from media reports that the situation there became considerably worse later in the summer and into autumn.

Yesterday’s figures are therefore likely to considerably underestimate the number of people who were detained in the year.

People entering and leaving detention

The number of people entering detention in the year to the end of September was very close to pre-pandemic levels at 23,226. The official commentary to the statistics notes, however, that because of people arriving from the channel in small boats, the profile of those entering detention has changed since the pandemic.

Rather than consisting largely of people detained to facilitate their removal, a higher proportion are detained on arrival in the country for short periods to establish their identity and make an asylum claim, after which the are released.

This narrative obscures two important issues.

First, the people who are released from detention after short periods are increasingly being placed in hotels and other institutional settings, which have been described as quasi-detention. We understand that people who have been brought to Dungavel from the channel on at least two occasions were sent to asylum hotels across Scotland.

This is not living in the community in any real sense. Along with our colleagues in Detention Forum, Avid and the wider migration advocacy community, we argue strongly that people seeking safety in this country should be settled in proper housing, where they can be welcomed into established communities and contribute to them.

Second, it glosses over detention’s continuing failure to achieve its stated policy aim of removing people from the country. The overall figures show that of the 22,643 people who left detention in the year to September 2022, 17 per cent were removed from the country.

But if we exclude people who were detained for seven days or fewer from the calculation, those most likely to have arrived on small boats according to the Home Office commentary, we find that the percentage removed from the country only rises to 22 per cent. Well over three quarters of people leaving detention are released back into the community.

So even amongst those who have not been detained after arriving on small boats, detention remains extremely ineffective at what the Home Office tells us it’s for.

People in detention

The figures show that at the end of September 2022 there were 2,077 people in detention in the UK, including 467 who were in held in prisons under immigration powers. This is a 47 per cent increase on the number detained at the same time last year.

In the last year, the Nationality and Borders Act has come into force and the UK Government has announced that it will reopen two detention centres, signalling that it intends to increase the use of detention event further.

Despite the focus in the official commentary on short detentions, long term detention continues to be a major part of the system. At the end of September this year, 46 per cent of people in detention had been detained for more than 28 days and eight per cent had been detained for six months or more. One man had been detained for more than four years.

None of these people knew how long their detention would continue.

Long term detention is also a feature of life in Dungavel. At the end of September, 27 (44 per cent) of the 61 people detained there had been detained for more than 28 days, and 11 (18 per cent) had been detained for four months or more.

Not fit for purpose

SDV often visits people who have been detained for many months and is currently in providing support to several people in that position. Some have been granted bail in principle but remain in detention because there is no suitable accommodation for them outside; others are waiting for the Home Office to arrange a flight; others are detained despite being from countries to which there is no prospect of them being returned.

We even meet people, especially those from Europe, who are content to return to their countries of origin but are detained for months, becoming increasingly despondent and frustrated, as the Home Office fails to arrange a flight. They rightly wonder why this is happening, at great personal cost to them and great financial cost to the tax payer.

And so they languish in detention, deprived of their liberty for months on end at the stroke of a civil servant’s pen. Along with the thousands of people who have been waiting years for a decision on their asylum claim, they are the victims of a Home Office that is not fit for purpose.