Immigration detention in 2024: a look at Home Office and SDV statistics

In our latest blog, SDV director Kate Alexander, takes a look at the Home Office detention statistics, released yesterday and compares them to our own visit statistics for 2024.

Yesterday’s release of the quarterly immigration statistics from the Home Office was quieter than usual. Keir Starmer’s visit to Washington pushed the rise in asylum applications to their highest level since 2002 off the top of the news agenda. Nevertheless, reports of the figures also noted the rise in detention revealed by the figures.  

The figures take us to the end of 2024 and allow for comparisons with SDV’s own visit statistics for 2024.

People entering detention

In 2024, 20,604 people entered immigration detention, 12 percent more than in 2023. The rise in Dungavel was much sharper, with 823 being sent there as their first place of detention, 59 percent more than in the previous year.  

This figure does not accurately reflect the number of people entering Dungavel over the course of the year as some people are transferred from another centre. Throughout 2024, we visited a number of people who had been detained elsewhere before their arrival in Dungavel, most commonly from the residential short term holding facilities at Larne and Manchester.

Nevertheless, the rise indicates a far busier centre than in recent years and reflects our own experience of visiting the centre. In 2024, SDV supported 231 people, the highest number in our history, during most of which the capacity of the centre was 249, considerably higher than its current 150.

Detention is an overwhelmingly male experience – just 11 per cent of people entering detention were women (2,178). Dungavel, which has 12 bedspaces for women, is one of the few places in which women can be detained, so it is unsurprising that a higher proportion of people entering detention there were women (14 percent, 112 women).

The difficulties faced by women being detained in a predominantly male centre are well established and have been consistently raised in HMIP inspection reports of Dungavel. Those difficulties are further compounded by the fact that women are now escorted by staff everywhere they go in the centre. Introduced as a temporary measure during the COVID 19 pandemic, this policy is still in force in recognition of the fact that men who are detained in Dungavel sometimes have convictions for offences of violence against women.

SDV make a particular effort to support women. Two thirds of our visitors are women, so we are usually able to offer women the opportunity to speak to a woman. We know, however, that some women feel uncomfortable in the visit room as, like most of the centre, it tends to be male dominated. Nevertheless, 20 percent of the people we saw in 2024 were women, a much higher proportion than in previous years, when 5-7 percent has been more typical.

People in detention

There were 1,870 people in immigration detention on 31 December 2024, 9 percent more than at the same time in 2023. The figure for Dungavel was 106, 22 percent more than in 2023. Of those, just three were women, a stark reminder of the extent to which women are outnumbered and how uncomfortable and isolating experience it can be for them.  

The data on the length of time people have been in detention has not been updated since September 2022, denying us important information about the experience of nearly 2,000 people held without time limit.

We know, however, that at the end of last year SDV were visiting 30 people, 17 of whom had received their first visit from us more than 28 days before 31 December 2024. Some may have been detained for much longer before they met us. Four people had received their first visit in June, meaning their detention had lasted for at least six months. None of the people we were visiting then knew how long  their detention would end, and for some, it lasted well into 2025.

People leaving detention

A total of 20,422 people left detention in 2024, 14 per cent more than in 2023. In what is now an established pattern, well under half of those leaving detention (43 percent) were returned from the UK. As ever, this raises the question of detention’s purpose. We are consistently told it is necessary to effect removal or deportation, yet consistently it fails to achieve this, meaning it has served no purpose other than to traumatise people at vast expense to the public purse.

The figures also lead us to ask questions about the UK Government claim that detention is for the shortest period necessary. A third of people had been detained for more than 28 days when they left detention. 570 people had been detained for more than six months, and 97 had been detained for over a year.

One person left detention in 2024 after being detained for more than four years.

Our own figures also show that long term detention is still very much part of the system. 49 people we visited for longer than 28 days, and one person left Dungavel in 2024 after having been detained there for more than two years – our first contact with him was by phone, as COVID 19 restrictions were still in place at the time.

Once again, the experience of women is worth highlighting. In recent years, we have tended to visit women for short periods, but 2024 was unusual in that we saw women detained there for longer. We visited one woman for over four months.

Our understanding is that women brought to Dungavel are given the option of a transfer to Derwentside, the one women only detention centre in the estate, but there are several reasons why they might not wish to do that. Some women are detained at the same time as their male partners and detention in Dungavel means that they can be in the same place; we sometimes see couples sitting together in the visit room. Where this is not the case, a move to Derwentside might take them further away from other sources of support such as family and friends in the communities they were detained from. Finally, a move away from Dungavel could also lead to a disruption in legal support.

It is not possible to say from the official figures how many people left detention in Dungavel in 2024. However, the latest Independent Monitoring Board report (for 2022) showed that most people leaving the centre are transferred to another centre, often in an effort to remove them from one of the London airports.

At SDV, we rarely know where people have gone when they leave the centre. Sometimes staff know and are able to tell us. Occasionally, and happily, we get a call or a visit from someone who has been released and is back in Glasgow, with their family and community. More commonly, we simply don’t know.

Time for change

We do know, however, that the experience of being detained has been a profoundly damaging one. We often see people’s mental and physical health suffer in detention. We know that we are often the only people they see who are not connected to the immigration or detention centre staff.

And we also know that there are alternatives to this system. The current Government’s continued emphasis on the expansion of detention is wholly unnecessary and it goes against established evidence from a range of official reports and inquiries, most recently the report of the Brook House Inquiry, all but one of whose 33 recommendations are yet to be implemented, nearly two years after it was published.

 You can read more about Dungavel and the changes in policy SDV wants to see in our briefing on detention in Scotland.