Continuing the trend towards ‘business as usual’
SDV director, Kate Alexander, takes her regular look at the quarterly detention statistics
The latest detention figures are released today and provide our quarterly opportunity to look at trends in detention both across the UK and in Scotland.
The pandemic has altered the landscape of detention over the past two years but today’s figures show that the number of people entering detention in 2021, 24,497, is both 65% higher than in 2020 and similar to pre-pandemic levels.
In its commentary on the figures, the UK Government reports that the profile of those entering detention has changed and an increasing proportion is made up of people who have entered the country on small boats from the channel and have been detained “to confirm their identity and provide initial support on arrival”.
That people arriving in the UK after a traumatic journey across the channel are placed in detention is a real cause for concern, especially as we know that on at least two occasions they have been detained in Dungavel, which entailed a journey by bus of more than 500 miles immediately on arrival.
At the end of December 2021, there were 1,179 people in detention across the UK, 30% more than at the same time in 2020. More than half of these people were detained under immigration powers in prison, under a more restrictive regime than exists in the immigration detention estate.
64% of the people detained at the end of last year (754) had been detained for more than 28 days and some had been detained for far longer. 14% (166 people) had been detained for six months or more and 4% (49 people) had been detained for a year or more.
Shockingly, two people had been in detention for more than three years. Those two people were in detention for Christmas 2018 and were still there last Christmas. And still did not know when their detention would end. Theresa May was Prime Minister when they entered detention, the UK was still in the European Union and the pandemic was way in the future. Just think about what you have done in those three years.
24,280 people left detention in 2021. The vast majority of them (87%) were not removed from the country, which is the stated purpose of detention. The Government says this is partly explained by people detained after arriving from the channel being released a few days after their detention. Certainly the figures show that three quarters of those leaving detention in 2021 did so after being detained for seven days or fewer, compared to 53% in 2020 and 39% in 2019.
But this difference is a matter of scale, not of substance. Since 2015 the proportion of people leaving detention who are removed from the country has consistently been below 50%. Detention has failed to achieve what the Government says its purpose is for many years. We still need to ask why so many people are detained. And why so many are detained for long periods.
In Scotland, the figures tell us that at 31 December 2021, 13 people were detained in Dungavel, compared to 24 at the same date in 2020. But at the end of the previous quarter (30 September 2021) 96 people were detained there. We know that the large jump last quarter was because of an influx of people who had arrived from the channel.
It is to be welcomed that there are so few people detained in Scotland, and that the numbers detained here have been consistently low for several years, with the exception of last quarter’s jump in numbers. It does, however, raise questions. It is massively costly to detain people in Dungavel, even more so if the centre is operating at well under capacity. Is this really the best use of tax payers’ money as we move out of a pandemic?
Of the13 people detained at Dungavel at the end of last year, eight people had been detained for more than 28 days, six had been detained for three months or more, and two had been detained for six months or more. SDV knows that being detained in Dungavel when the numbers are so low brings its own problems. The small number who are detained there feel even more isolated and forgotten than usual, especially those who have been there for many months. These feelings were further exacerbated by an extended lockdown at the centre over the Christmas period and into the new year.
We could not end this overview of today’s figures without noting that this is the first time women detained at the new detention centre at Derwentside have been recorded in the statistics. At the end of the year, nine women were held there. It is a matter of great shame that this new detention centre for women was opened a month before an evaluation report on an alternative to detention pilot scheme for women was published. Despite the promising results in the evaluation, it seems likely that the detention of women is set to increase.
The Borders Bill continues to make its way through parliament and we know that, if enacted, it is likely to further increase the use of detention, and will introduce offshore detention and a greater variety of quasi-detention in the form of “accommodation centres”. Recent work by Together for Refugees has shown that implementing the bill will cost a massive £2.7m, with the bulk of those costs coming from detention.
Despite the increasingly hostile environment, we continue to argue for an end to immigration detention, and a move to community based alternatives, within an overall immigration system based on engagement rather than enforcement.The 2015 parliamentary inquiry called detention “expensive, ineffective and unjust”. It still is.
