Reflections on a week of disappointing detention news

In this blog SDV director, Kate Alexander, considers the latest Home Office detention statistics in the light of an extremely disappointing announcement about the expansion of the detention estate

The latest detention statistics from the Home office, out yesterday, tell a familiar story.

In the year to the end of June 2024, 18,918 people entered detention. The Home Office tells us that the purpose of detention is to facilitate the return from the UK of people who no right to remain in the country, and that detention is for the shortest period necessary to achieve that.

But the fact is that with no time limit on detention in the UK (a situation unique to the UK in Europe), none of those 18,918 knew how long they would be detained. They also did not know how their detention would end. Many people subject to detention have been in the UK for a long time. They know people who have been detained, only to be released, sometimes on multiple occasions.

This week’s figures confirm this. Of the 18,968 who left detention in the year to the end of June 2024, just 42 per cent were returned to their country of origin. The rest were released back into the community, with their detention having served no purpose but to traumatise them and their families at vast cost to the public purse. This is nothing new. The proportion being removed has been below 50 per cent for nine years.

The figures also show that on 30 June 2024, 1,788 people were in detention. This is 7 per cent fewer than on the same date in 2023. The number of people held in Dungavel, however, has increased by 98 per cent. 141 people were detained there at the end of June this year, compared to 72 in 2023. Our own experience of visiting the centre means that this comes as no surprise to us.

The figures for the length of time people in detention have been detained have not been updated since 2022, but we are currently visiting people in Dungavel who have been detained for well over six months.

The figures do tell us the length of detention of people who have left detention and, as ususal, they call in to serious question the notion that detention is for the shortest period necessary. Thirty-seven per cent of people leaving detention in the year to the end of June 2024 had been detained for more than 28 days, and 3 per cent (577 people) had been detained for over six months. Sixteen people left detention after being detained for more than three years.

Detention doesn’t work, and it causes harm. We know this and have known it for years. As long ago as 2015, a parliamentary inquiry took harrowing evidence from people in detention and their advocates, concluded that detention was “expensive, ineffective and unjust” and called for a time limit of 28 days and a move to community based alternatives. Subsequent reports and inquiries have made similar recommendations and only this week, soaring rates of self harm in detention have been exposed.

It is therefore extraordinarily disappointing that the new UK government this week announced that it would go ahead with the previous government’s plan to reopen two detention centres: Haslar, which closed in 2015 and Campsfield House, which closed in 2019.

The decision is all the more disappointing as the rationale for reopening them was to facilitate removals to Rwanda. With the (very welcome) scrapping of the Rwanda plan, this expansion of the detention estate by around 1,000 places is wholly unnecessary.

The new government could have decided on another course, particularly in the light of the recent verdict on Harmonsdworth, which in its inspection report was described as “truly shocking” and “the worst HMIP has found in its immigration removal centre inspections”.

The Government could instead have looked to the shamefully inadequate response of the previous Government to the report of Brook House Public Inquiry, and resolved to fully implement the report’s recommendations, which had implications for the entire detention estate, including the introduction of a 28 day time limit.

Taking such a course of action would have gone some way to addressing the many concerns about detention that we and our colleagues in Detention Forum and AVID have articulated over many years. A decision to prioritise enforcement over engagement with people with immigration issues is a decision to continue harm. We must continue to resist it.