An exercise in futility

The latest detention statistics show that detentions at Dungavel are above pre-pandemic levels. SDV director, Kate Alexander, takes a closer look at the figures.

It’s that time again. The release of the quarterly immigration statistics today allows us to look at trends in detention and compare the overall picture with the picture in Dungavel.

In recent months, the UK Government has reversed its commitment to reducing the use of detention. It has abandoned its alternatives to detention pilots, has opened a new detention centre for women in Derwentside and announced that Campsfield House in Oxfordshire, closed in 2018, will reopen next year. In addition, next month a new residential short term holding facility will open at Swinderby, Lincolnshire, on the site of the former Morton Hall detention centre. This new facility will be able to detain 37 men for up to a week.

Given this reversal, it is not surprising that the numbers of people detained in the year to the end of June 2022 reached pre-pandemic levels - 24,002 people – just 2 per cent fewer than in 2019. As was the case last quarter, the official commentary on the statistics notes that the profile of people in detention has changed markedly, with many people entering detention for short periods after arriving in small boats from the channel, and then released.

A closer look at the figures shows that the proportion of people leaving detention after being detained for 28 days or fewer actually dropped slightly between quarter 1 and quarter 2 of 2022 (from 68 per cent to 67 per cent) and long term detention still remains very much part of the system.

At the end of June 2022, 2,038 people were in detention a 29 per cent increase on the previous quarter (1,440) and 24 per cent more than pre pandemic in December 2019 (1,637). Of those, 1,161 people (57 per cent) had been detained for more than 28 days. 167 people (8 per cent) had been detained for six months or more, and 26 people had been detained for a year or more.

One man had been detained for 1,482 days. That’s more than four years in detention. And at the end of June 2022, he still did not know when he’d be released.

The numbers detained in Dungavel rose very sharply between the first and second quarter this year. At the end of March just 18 people were detained there, but by the end of June, that number had risen to 94. This is similar to the total detained at the end of September 2021 (96) but the profile is very different.

At the end of September, three quarters of those detained had been there for three days or fewer, having been bussed up to Dungavel after arriving in the UK from the channel. At the end of June, 40 per cent had been there for more than 28 days, and three had been there for more than six months.

We understand from our visits to Dungavel that the number of people detained there rose further after the end of June and reached capacity (125). It has since fallen again, and on recent visits has been steady at around 50. These figures are all higher than the pre-pandemic total of 42 in December 2019.

As visitors to Dungavel, we had become accustomed to a downward trend in detentions at the centre, made concrete by the quiet halving of the centre’s capacity at the end of 2019. It is clear that trend has been reversed, and we are recruiting more visitors to enable us to provide support to more people.

All of this leads to the question of the purpose of these detentions. We are told that detention necessary to remove people from the country. But for many years, detention has failed to do that and today’s figures shows it continues to do so. 86 per cent of the 23,529 people who left detention in the year to the end of June 2022 were released into the community.

This week, I visited someone in Dungavel who had been there for more than four months. He was pleased that one of his friends had just been released but disappointed that his own application for bail had been refused, for reasons he found hard to understand. He and his lawyer were working on the next application and when he was not gathering the paperwork his lawyer had asked for, he spent his days watching DVDs, going to the gym, sleeping and entering competitions organised by staff. He was in reasonable spirits this time, but sometimes, the pointlessness of it gets to him.

It costs the tax payer more than £200 a day to keep him there. He’s not the only person who thinks this is pointless.