Visiting Dungavel in 2023
SDV director, Kate Alexander, takes a look at what we know about who our visitors have visited so far in 2023
SDV’s brilliant volunteer visitors travel to Dungavel two evenings a week, come rain or shine, to offer support, solidarity and friendship to people detained there. Dungavel, where up to 125 men and women can be detained indefinitely, is in a remote rural location. It’s not on any public transport routes, so our visitors travel in car sharing groups, usually from Glasgow or Edinburgh. Our staff also visit twice a month to run our morning drop in.
After every visit, volunteers and staff complete monitoring reports, noting the issues the people we’re seeing are encountering and any follow up that’s needed. The reports help ensure consistency in our service but they also allow us to generate statistics on who’s using our service, how often and for how long.
I usually aim to collate these statistics every quarter, but much of my focus this year has been on making funding applications to secure the future of SDV, in a much more difficult fundraising environment than we’ve seen for some time. We’ve had a bit of funding success lately (thank you funders!) so I’ve been able to take my foot off that pedal for a while and get up to date with our stats to the end of October. What follows is an overview of what they tell us.
We visited Dungavel 92 times until the end of October. We saw an average of 8 people per visit, but the number seen varied a lot. The highest number of people seen at a visit was 18 and the lowest was just one, so our visitors really need to be prepared for anything
The rest of the figures relate to people we've seen in 2023 who we know have left the centre up to the end of October, so they don't include people who remain in Dungavel and who we are still visiting. I'll keep updating the figures as people leave so we will have the full picture by the beginning of next year.
Up to end of October, we saw 149 people who have now left the centre. If we add the people we are currently seeing, it brings the figure closer to 190. It’s clear from this that we're seeing a lot more people than last year, when the total was 136 for the whole year.
Pre-pandemic, we saw an average of 200 people a year. It looks almost certain that this year we will see considerably more than that – a sign of the increasingly hostile environment facing people who migrate to the UK, especially as we have yet to see the impact of the horrendous Illegal Migration Act. At the beginning of the year, we were told that there were 40 people detained at the centre but we have seen numbers rise to over 100, before dropping down again to 70-80. But the trend is very much upwards.
Of the 149 people we saw in 2023 but who are no longer in Dungavel, 135 (91%) were men and 14 (9%) were women. There are just 12 spaces for women in Dungavel, compared to 113 for men, but we always prioritise women for visits as the experience of being detained in a predominantly male centre can be profoundly distressing and isolating for women.
Women tend to only be detained in Dungavel for a few days, although there have been exceptions to that general rule. Up until now, they have usually been moved quite quickly to Derwentside, the women only detention centre in County Durham. However, it was announced last month that Derwentside is to be re-purposed as a male centre, and we will be monitoring whether this results in an increase in the number of women detained in Dungavel and the length of time they are detained.
The people we visited came from 36 different countries, from Brazil in the west to Timor-Leste in the east, and from Latvia in the north to Zimbabwe in the west. But by far the largest group was Albanians, who accounted for 28% of the total (41 people).
I was aware we had seen a lot of Albanians, but I was surprised by how many more we saw than any other nationality – the next largest group was Romanians (22 people, 15%). The official detention statistics from the Home Office also show that Albanians are the biggest group detained. A high proportion of people crossing the channel are Albanian, and the UK Government has decided that it is a safe country (despite concerns about trafficking), and has an agreement with the Albanian Government for their swift return.
Nearly three quarters of the people we visited were seen just once or twice. In pre-pandemic years, this figure was closer to two thirds, so this is a higher proportion than usual and is probably a reflection of the how many Albanians we saw, who were swiftly removed. But 4% of the people we visited were seen 10 times or more, with our visitors getting to know them well, providing long term support.
Our reporting allows for a calculation of the length of time between someone's first visit and their last. Even though over half of the people we visited were only seen once, this calculation shows that some people were detained for a considerable period in Dungavel. 28 people (18%) had more than 28 days between their first and last visit, and they may have been detained for even longer than that, especially if they had been moved from another detention centre. Six people had more than four months between their first and last visit and one had more than 10 months.
Despite the UK Government's claims that people are detained for as short a period as necessary, it's clear that long term detention is still very much part of the system, with all the harm we know that causes to people, their families and their communities.
And it is important always to remember that nobody in Dungavel knows how long they will be there. The lack of a time limit in the UK makes detention a uniquely stressful experience. You could be moved at any moment, but you could also be there for weeks, months or even years. It’s impossible to plan your time, you don’t know when you will next see your loved ones, or whether you will be removed before you do, friendships formed may be lost at any moment, and you live with this terrible uncertainty every day.
Our visitors bring a short respite from this stress and despair. They can listen to people’s worries and offer support. But they also bring an oasis of normality: chatting about the news, sport and TV, playing games, finding out about people’s home countries and sharing their own stories about life in the outside world. By making the journey to Dungavel twice a week, they ensure that people detained there know they are not forgotten.
I’d like to thank them, and Georgie our volunteer coordinator, for all their hard work, especially for their diligence in reporting, which provides us with so much useful information.
SDV is really lucky to have them all.
