New stats show long term detention is still a feature of the system

SDV director, Kate Alexander, takes her regular look at the latest detention statistics.

Today the Government released its quarterly immigration statistics. They’re released just weeks after the Nationality and Borders Act received royal assent and as the news is dominated by war in Ukraine and by the continuing horror of people undertaking perilous crossings of the channel to reach the UK. They are also the first set of statistics that have been released since Covid restrictions were lifted across the UK.

All of these factors have had an impact on the statistics and the way they are reported in the media. The figures on detention rarely reach the news but we can see the impact of more newsworthy events in them.

In the year to the end of March 2022, 25,282 people entered immigration. This is almost double the previous year, when there was a large drop because of Covid 19. But it is 9 per cent higher than the year to the end of March 2020, before the pandemic hit. This is a reversal in the downward trend of detentions since they peaked in 2015 at 32,000.

The Government say this increase is explained by a change in the profile of people detained, particularly the short-term detention of people who have arrived from the channel. They point to the fact that nearly three quarters of people leaving detention over the year to March did so after having been detained for seven days or fewer, in most cases to make an application for asylum.

That people are locked in a detention centre after being traumatised by a dangerous channel crossing is shocking, particularly as we know that on at least two occasions in the year to March 2022, busloads of people were brought over 500 miles to Dungavel on arrival.

But this focus on what the government calls ‘clandestine arrivals’,who are released after a short time, obscures the fact that detention continues to fail to achieve its policy goal of removing people from the country.

A closer look at the figures, shows that of the 1,122 people who left detention after being detained for 28 days or more, just 278 (25 per cent) were removed from the country. This leads to a question we and others have been asking for many years:

Why were these people detained in the first place, at great financial cost to the tax payer and even greater personal cost to them and their families, friends and communities?

And despite the Government’s focus on short term detentions, prolonged detention continues to be a feature of the system.

A the end of March 2022, of the 1,440 people in detention, 830 (58 per cent) had been detained for more than 28 days. And some had been detained for far longer.

51 people had been in detention for a year or more, 14 of them had been detained for more than two years and four for more than three years.

One man had been detained for 1,391 days.

That’s more than three years and nine months. He had been detained since 2018, long before the pandemic, before Boris Johnson became Prime Minister and before the last UK general election. What have you done in those years?

And none of these people knew when their detention would end. Indefinite detention remains one of the cruellest aspects of a cruel system.

The year to March 2022 also saw an increased number of detentions in Dungavel. 404 people were brought to Dungavel as their initial place of detention compared to 150 the previous year. This may be partly a reflection of the gradual move out of Covid restrictions, but also of the wholly inappropriate use of Dungavel to detain people from the channel.

Generally, however, Dungavel continues to be significantly under capacity, which is 125. It is also detaining people for long periods. At the end of March 2022, just 18 people were detained there. 15 of them had been detained for more than 28 days and two for more than six months.

Since the period to which these statistics refer, SDV has been aware of an increase in the number of people detained in Dungavel, and we will continue to monitor the situation.

It is important to remember that these official figures on detention only include people held under immigration powers in removal centres, residential short term holding facilities and prisons. They do not include people currently held in “quasi detention” settings such as army barracks, hotels and other forms of institutional accommodation, such as the new “reception centres”.

As the APPG on detention has pointed out these sites replicate many of the features found in detention, including visible security, shared living quarters, reduced levels of privacy, and isolation from the wider community.

As the provisions of the Nationality and Borders Act come into force, we can expect to see a continued increase in detention and in the use of these quasi-detention sites.

It is more important than ever to continue to make the case for a system without detention: a system based on engagement, not enforcement, where a case-management approach supports people to resolve their immigration issues while living in the community.

Evaluations of Home Office pilots suggest such systems work. The hostile environment, 10 years old this week, doesn’t.