‘Worrying deterioration in safety’ at UK immigration removal centres, warns chief inspector of prisons

The chief inspector of prisons has warned that the safety of immigration removal centres across the country is deteriorating and that the government’s use of them is potentially traumatising vulnerable migrants.

Charlie Taylor said the “worrying deterioration in safety” at sites like Harmondsworth and Yarl’s Wood was a major “cause for concern”.

Analysis by the Observer of official inspections into immigration removal centres (IRCs) found that every one of the eight main sites in the UK had received “key” and “priority” concerns from inspectors – terms used for the most serious failures that need to be rectified urgently. Some sites recorded more than a dozen serious concerns being raised by inspectors, many of which went unaddressed.

IRCs are administrative detention centres where immigrants who are set to be deported are held before their departure. But, increasingly, the centres have been used to house people who end up being released back into the community, sometimes for months or even years at a time.

Taylor said: “Depriving someone of their liberty is a very serious act, and people should only be detained in IRCs when the prospect of their removal from the country is imminent. In every inspection of IRCs, we find people being held for far longer than they should be, some for years, and at Harmondsworth nearly two-thirds were being released, which begs the question of why they were being detained in the first place at great expense to the taxpayer and potentially causing additional trauma to already vulnerable people.”

Last month, a report by the chief inspector of prisons into Harmondsworth IRC described the conditions as “truly shocking” and the “worst” in the country. Half of the nearly 500 detainees reported feeling suicidal, and there had been many suicide attempts at the site, including one during the two-week inspection.

The building itself was “dilapidated” and “decrepit”, with some detainees so cold they sat in their cells in their coats. Assaults at the centre had doubled in the past seven years. Detainees who complained about overcrowded shared bedrooms were punished with stints in a solitary confinement unit until they agreed to share their rooms.

There were also several reports of excessive use of force and physical assaults by staff, one of whom was dismissed last year for assaulting detainees, bullying and racism.

Taylor said: “The conditions we saw at Harmondsworth were the worst that we have seen in immigration detention.”

Harmondsworth is not alone. Last year, HM Inspectorate of Prisons found that Yarl’s Wood in Bedfordshire had dramatically worsened since the last inspection before Covid, with “more detainees, more protests and more evident frustration, fuelled by longer periods of cumulative detention without enough progress on immigration cases”.

Inspectors recorded that eight people had been stuck in the facility for more than a year, with others who were supposed to be released into the community being held for months at a time while awaiting final approvals or suitable accommodation.

Nearly half of men at the site and about a quarter of women told the inspectorate that they felt unsafe, while overcrowding and a lack of open space meant detainees spent much of their free time “congregated in corridors”.

At Brook House IRC, inspectors found some detainees had been held for more than two-and-a-half years, and high levels of force were being used on detainees. Conditions at the site were the subject of a government inquiry last year, which called out a “toxic culture” and identified “credible evidence” of several potential breaches of human rights law related to torture and inhuman treatment.

At Derwentside IRC in County Durham, an inspection in 2022 found that inexperienced managers “had not properly overseen the use of force in order to make sure that it was reasonable, proportionate and safe”.

One of the centres – HMP Morton Hall in Lincolnshire – has now been transitioned into a prison for foreign nationals.

A Home Office spokesperson said: “We take the health, welfare and safety of people in our care very seriously and it is vital that detention and removals are carried out with dignity and respect. We are concerned by some of the findings in previous reports and recognise that standards need to improve across immigration detention facilities. We are committed to taking robust steps informed by these inspection findings.”