Hastings Community of Sanctuary looks to Labour to end scandal of indefinite detention

Following Labour’s election victory, Hastings Community of Sanctuary (HCoS) has renewed its campaign, along with other refugee support groups, to end the scandal of the arbitrary and indefinite detention of asylum-seekers and refugees. But while the new government kept its promise to scrap the Rwanda plan, on indefinite detention the Home Office has so far done little except announce the reopening of two former detention centres. Felicity Laurence of HCoS lays bare the iniquities of the system.

When I tell people about indefinite immigration detention, they are incredulous. Immigration detention is a quiet malignancy, which has gone on for years and years, and most people have no idea of what it actually entails.

Every year, thousands of people in our country are seized without warning and locked up – without charge for any criminal offence, without seeing a judge, and without any knowledge of when or even if they will be released. There is no time limit; and we are the only country in Europe to allow indefinite detention.

People seeking asylum can be detained immediately on arrival in the country, or grabbed when they report to immigration control or from their beds in the small hours of the morning – sometimes in front of their children – bundled away in caged vehicles without reasons or destination given, purportedly as a precursor to being deported; very often, the person detained is in fact still in the middle of their asylum process with no decision of refusal having being made.

There is no judicial oversight; the decision to detain is made by a Home Office decision-maker, and is repeatedly so flawed that of the 20,354 people detained in the year to June 2023, only 22% were actually removed from the UK.  The rest – that is 15,876  – fifteen thousand, eight hundred and seventy six human souls – languished until someone ordered their release back into the community whence they had been taken away – or they languish still.

Most of the people detained each year are in fact released back into the community, their detention having served no purpose except to inflict huge suffering and often a breakdown of mental health. This is especially so for the high numbers who are acknowledged as being vulnerable (68% of those helped by the Gatwick Detainees Welfare Group while in detention, for example) – people who have been tortured: or who have been trafficked here, for example as slaves: people who are already grievously traumatised by war or persecution.

The main purpose of immigration detention is meant to be to hold people for a few weeks at most before deportation. The Government’s own guidelines state: “Detention must be used sparingly, and for the shortest period necessary.” It is supposed to be a place where people are properly cared for, treated as human beings despite their rejection and the presumed imminence of their departure. It is supposed to be brief, and it is supposed to be a last and not a first resort.

It is none of these things. It is a system of State cruelty; of wastage of human lives, often for months, and  even years in some cases; of devastation of the human spirit; and it lies largely hidden at the darkest heart of our asylum policy.

Efforts to change the laws

For many years, there have been persistent efforts to change the laws which allow such haphazard deprivation of so many people’s liberty. In 2019, following an in-depth cross-party inquiry, the Home Affairs select committee published a report ‘prompted by the exposure of appalling physical and verbal abuse by some staff at Brook House Immigration Removal Centre (IRC) […] and by persistent reports of the inappropriate use of immigration detention and its damaging effect on the mental health and wellbeing of detainees’.

The report called for a limit to immigration detention of 28 days, review by a judge within 72 hours of every decision to detain (as in other areas of UK law), and proper assessment of vulnerability, checks and safeguards. At that time, there seemed to be a real prospect of change, supported by people across the political spectrum.

Five years later, none of that has happened. Instead, conditions for detainees have worsened, and thousands more are now held in quasi-detention in mass accommodation in old army barracks as well, such as Napier Barracks, other former military places such as Wethersfield, and on the notorious Bibby Stockholm barge. Conditions at all of these places are consistently reported as deeply harmful, as described in this court case on Wethersfield and in Hastings Community of Sanctuary’s statement on Napier Barracks, to give a couple of examples.

In immigration removal centres themselves, conditions are appalling. The recent report by the Chief Inspector of Prisons on Harmondsworth was damning: its headline captures his outrage: “Harmondsworth Immigration Removal Centre: drugs, despair and decrepit conditions.”  It echoes the findings last September in the Brook House inquiry: the BBC’s heading of its own report again speaks for itself: “Pain and humiliation at toxic Brook House”.  The first paragraph in the executive summary of this huge document reads thus:

“Out of sight, out of mind: places of detention are the hidden spaces in our society. Most people will have no experience of being incarcerated and few will have worked in such environments. They are places where communication is restricted, rights and freedoms are curtailed, where isolation from loved ones is a fact of life, and where the toll of detention can have an impact on people’s mental and physical wellbeing. For anyone who has been detained by the State, it is a profoundly life-altering experience.”

The then-shadow immigration minister Stephen Kinnock declared evidence therein to be “utterly harrowing”, with no sign at all of either “control or compassion” from the Government.

Just in the last few days, a report by an independent monitoring board details evidence, almost inconceivably, of worsening conditions at Brook House: it tells of involvement of staff in drugs supply, a tripling of assaults and of handcuffing for hospital visits: a doubling of force used by staff in the past year, and staff being ‘unnecessarily aggressive  and intimidating’: and, astonishingly, the apparent concerns of Home Office personnel for their own safety when visiting the site. This powerful letter from a former detainee encapsulates the iniquity of this “blatant betrayal of human dignity”.

Our new Government promised to restore to our asylum system to some semblance of humanity and fairness. So their recent announcement that they intend to re-open two more immigration removal centres, Campsfield and Haslar, was met by incredulous dismay, and this impassioned joint statement from 50 leading organisations, including City of Sanctuary to which we belong in Hastings.

In July this year, I joined the five-day walk of Refugee Tales, the annual walk created by the Gatwick Detainees Welfare Group, which memorably came in 2019 to Hastings. As usual, there were people who had experienced detention, many of their stories now collected in the five volumes of the Refugee Tales series – each a powerful testimony of profoundly unfair mistreatment at the hands of our State.  Here is my account of that walk.

Our final destination this year was Westminster, where we (about 130 people) met with a panel including two newly elected Labour MPs and  Lord Alfred Dubs, long time champion of refugees. They told us that there was – maybe – a slightly open door now on immigration detention, and that now is the time to push at that door, and perhaps at last to bring about those changes demanded by the cross-party Home Affairs committee in 2019 as described above; and by hundreds of refugee support organisations across the country; and by us in Hastings Community of Sanctuary in our previous dedicated campaigning, which we are now resuming.

For many years, the people seeking asylum who are sent to Hastings, a ‘dispersal’ centre, have been welcomed into our community with kindness and acceptance, reflected in many and varied ways. Two weeks ago, at the  Bottle Alley event  and at our stall in the town centre, people willingly  wrote messages of support to those who seek sanctuary with us. Hastings people reacted firmly and in large numbers to the recent racist riots seen across the country, with a clear message of welcome to refugees as part of this response.

We hope that our new MP will very soon meet with us in Hastings Community of Sanctuary, to learn about indefinite immigration detention, and that she will support us in our quest to bring this inhumane practice to an end. People in her constituency are indeed affected – many in the asylum system will have been sent here from detention, while others have been taken into detention from our community.

We are requesting in particular that she attend the stall held by Refugee Tales at the Labour Party conference in a few weeks, where she will be able to speak with many experts on this issue.

 

Please email info@hastings.cityofsanctuary.org if you would like further information;  please see Hastings Supports Refugees Facebook page for updates on our campaign; and please write to Helena Dollimore (helena.dollimore.mp@parliament.uk)  even if only very briefly, to let her know that indefinite immigration must end.

Small sections of this article appeared in this account of the Refugee Tales walk 2024, published in Red Pepper.

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