Visiting Dungavel in 2022: a transitional year

In 2022, SDV was finally able to return to regular volunteer-led visits to Dungavel, after the pandemic. In this blog SDV director, Kate Alexander, looks at our visit data for this transitional year.

In January 2022, SDV’s new volunteer coordinator, Georgie, started work. With pandemic restrictions beginning to ease, it seemed the ideal time to start rebuilding our team of volunteers and getting back to regular visiting. Importantly, Georgie would be able to visit the centre right away to start meeting people in detention and become familiar with the routines and staff at Dungavel.

But it wasn’t to be. Because of an outbreak of covid at the centre it was at least three weeks before she was able to make her first visit and over the next few months there were several further covid-related disruptions to her attending the centre. Where possible, though, she visited every week, with back up support being provided by Skype and phone.

Throughout this time, we started recruiting a new team of volunteers to join the few stalwarts who stayed with us as phone volunteers throughout the pandemic. By May, when all remaining covid restrictions were finally lifted, we were able to run our first volunteer-led visits to Dungavel in over two years. Quite a moment! And by the end of the year we were back to our pre-pandemic service of two volunteer-led evening visits a week and two staff-led drop ins a month.

Each time we go to the centre we record information about the visit, the people we’ve seen and the issues we’ve encountered. It ensures consistency in our service and allows us to monitor what we do. In a typical, pre covid year, SDV would support approximately 200 people. In 2020 and 2021, that figure dropped to around 50 as the Home Office detained fewer people and visiting was difficult.

In 2022, our visitors and staff supported 136 people. As in most years, the vast majority of the people we saw were men. Just 17 (13 per cent) were women. For many years, we have been concerned about the detention of women in an overwhelmingly male centre. Our concerns are shared by HMIP, who carry out inspections of detention centres. It’s not unusual for just one woman to be detained in the centre, so it can be a lonely and frightening experience, especially as women are now escorted by staff at all times. Because of this, our volunteers always prioritise women for visits, even though their detention in Dungavel tends to be short lived.

Over the year, we saw people from 40 different countries across the world: from Paraguay in the west to Timor-Leste in the east and from Sweden in the north to Namibia in the south. The largest nationality group we supported were Albanians (21 people, 15 per cent), followed by people from Poland (17 people, 13 per cent) and Romania (14 people, 10 per cent). Home Office figures show that in the year to end of September 2022, more Albanians than any other nationality entered detention across the UK, and people from Poland and Romania were also in the top 20 nationalities detained.

As was the case in most years pre-pandemic, most of the people we supported were seen once or twice (67 per cent). This reflects the fact that around three quarters of people are detained for 28 days or fewer.

However, as we have explored in previous blogs, long term detention is still very much part of the system: eight per cent of the people we visited were visited 10 or more times, with one person receiving 30 visits over a stay in Dungavel that lasted more than seven months.

Thirteen of the people we saw (10 per cent) were visited for more than three months, with six people (4 per cent) being visited for more than six months. And of course none of them knew when their detention would end.

2022 was a year of rebuilding our volunteer team and getting back to what we do best – face to face support of some of the most isolated people in the country. We started 2023 with a much stronger volunteer team and we thank them all for their hard work and look forward to working with them, and new recruits, for the rest of the year.