A radical new approach is needed to immigration detention

Less detention spaces with stricter limits on their use would force the Home Office to focus on actual removals

Photo by Christian Lue on Unsplash

Time after time inspectors report that the United Kingdom’s immigration detention centres are, not to put too fine a point on it, a disgrace. The latest example is a report on Brook House.

Conditions were found to be abysmal. Safeguarding measures were inadequate. The mental health of some detainees had collapsed.

One person was found to have been detained for 500 days. 58% of people released were released into the community. Which means that, as well as being traumatic for the person concerned, their detention was a complete waste of time and money. Detention at Brook House is supposed to be for the purpose of removal.

This is the latest proof of two important realities:

1. Immigration detention centres themselves are very badly run.

2. The whole process and philosophy of immigration detention is badly broken.

Let’s be clear: there’s no nice way of forcibly removing someone from the country. It’s a coercive, violent process. People get hurt, physically and mentally. If it’s going to be done, which in my view it must, then the harm done should at least be minimised.

Some proposals for reforming immigration detention and removal

My own view is that campaigning for an “end” to immigration detention is like asking Father Christmas for a live unicorn.

Immigration detention is a necessary part of an immigration control regime. It is not just a love of queuing that keeps us all in line for passport control, for example. It is the implicit, largely unspoken threat of detention. Without really thinking about it too much, we know that barging our way through isn’t a good idea. And some people, when the time comes for their removal from the country because they have exhausted their legal avenues for seeking to remain, will not go willingly. They will need to be detained first if they are going to be removed.

One of the problems with public discourse on immigration control is that civil society is effectively prevented by their stakeholders and sometimes their beliefs from making some of the arguments that follow. That is not a criticism. Organisations exist for a purpose and it’s not reasonable to criticise them for pursuing that purpose. There’s no organisation tasked with making immigration control a bit less awful. Academics, at least in public, will often advocate for ideals. That is an important function and someone should be doing it. The same goes for many prominent voices in our rather small sector. And then no-one else is all that interested in immigration law or control. We see sectoral lobbying for numbers of workers and students. We see studies and analysis of overall immigration. We don’t see much, if anything, on the nitty gritty of how to actually carry out immigration control functions. I’d make an exception for the IPPR and Social Market Foundation think tanks, both of which have sometimes done some valuable work on a number of issues.

But that does leave a bit of a vacuum in public discourse. It leaves the Home Office to try and work stuff out on its own. It means that ministers looking for ideas on policies they could actually implement in real life have no other voice to hear than Home Office officials who have been institutionalised in certain ways of thinking.

So here’s some reform suggestions. I think these are pretty radical. Some readers really aren’t going to like them. But they overlap very considerably with campaigns by civil society. I’ve framed and justified them in a very different way.

1. Reduce the number of immigration detention centres

At the very least don’t re-open new ones, as the new government says it will. The outcomes would be saving money, allowing better and more intensive monitoring of the existing centres (perhaps take them back under direct government control) and reducing the number of detention spaces.

This last point is crucial. By reducing the number of detention spaces, this would force officials to be more intelligent in their use of detention. It would force careful thinking on both decisions to detain in the first place and on decisions to maintain detention.

2. Introduce a maximum detention period

This should be 28 days. Perhaps it could be extendable in exceptional cases. This would encourage officials to detain only when a person is likely to be actually removable in real life. At the moment far too many detainees languish in detention completely pointlessly because of a bad decision to detain and then reluctance to release.

Some of this is politics. For example, officials, protecting their superiors and ministers, perhaps understandably do not want to release a foreign criminal in case they go on to reoffend, leading to bad press coverage. Detention therefore goes on and on even though everyone knows the person has to be released eventually. Officials rely now on judges to release on bail. This not only wastes Home Office detention resources but also Ministry of Justice resources, which are sorely needed right now to address the massive asylum appeals backlog.

From a government and administrative point of view, this means the detainee is basically “bed-blocking”. The detention space could be used for an actual removal but instead is occupied by someone who is going to be released into the community, after being detained for a long time at very considerable expense. Having to release at the 28 day period would cut through these considerations.

3. Make removability a key criterion for detention

At the moment, decisions to detain are too often opportunistic, based on an individual’s status rather than the individual’s removability. Removability should be the key factor driving decisions to detain.

Casework should be done on removal before a person is detained rather than afterwards. The absconding rate for those on immigration bail is tiny so where someone is encountered and detained, they should quickly be released unless it is clear removal is straightforward, for example because the person will make a voluntary departure or has no application to make to remain. Casework can then be done on removal after they have been released.

4. Review forced removals policy

Detention should be used for the purpose of removal and for the minimum time necessary. Detention policy should therefore flow from removals policy. This is where I don’t really have a clear proposal. I’ve written before on the difference between high resistance and low resistance removals. As I said in that piece, if the government is going to focus on increasing removals then the easy answer is to focus on low resistance removals.

The problem is that those who are relatively easy to remove aren’t necessarily those the government (and public) might most want to remove. And targeting people because of their removability, which is significantly governed by nationality, is discriminatory (albeit not necessarily unlawfully so).

Instead of ignoring these problems, the government should have a long hard think about what it is attempting to accomplish and how. There’s only imperfect solutions here but the government should face up to these difficulties.

5. Boost voluntary returns

It is far better for everyone if a person without permission to be here and who has exhausted their legal options for remaining makes a voluntary departure from the country without being detained. It is more humane and it’s a lot cheaper.

The Social Market Foundation took a look at some policy options back in 2019. It would be sensible to incentivise departure through support after return. It would be sensible to talk to and work with migrants in this position before detaining them to make clear to them they’ve reached the end of the line. And this would give migrants a chance to make any final applications to remain before they get detained rather than after.

One of the issues at the moment is that a lot of migrants without permission have been living here for a long time because so few have been removed since 2010. If they’ve been here a long time, they might well have human rights claims to put forward. They should have a chance to do so and they should have help from lawyers so that the process is fair. But if those claims fail, they’re going to have to leave.

6. Stop tagging everyone

Nothing happens to the data. There’s no point. The absconding rate from immigration bail is tiny anyway. It’s a waste of time, money and resources as well as being intrusive and demeaning.

I’m not going to give it a number but I’d really like someone to sit ministers and senior civil servants down and explain opportunity costs to them. The Home Office only has so much money and so much management time. Frittering it away on pointlessly detaining and tagging people means that the department can’t do other stuff.

How realistic is this agenda?

Most of these measures are politically difficult. Immigration detention sounds like it is tough on illegal immigration. Introducing limits on it sounds like it’s being soft on illegal immigration. There’s no doubt that’s how it would be presented by the Conservative Party opposition and by the right wing media. It would fuel conspiracy theories.

But governments have to make hard choices to govern well and effectively. In the long term, saving money, using the saved resources for other purposes and increasing the number of actual removals would allow this new government to distinguish itself from the failures and mere performance theatre of the last one. It might not satisfy the Daily Mail, ‘Tommy Robinson’ or Elon Musk. But they’ll never be satisfied.

The new government would have a record to point to come the 2029 election. They’d be able to say Rwanda was not only inhumane and morally wrong but also a pipe dream. By cancelling it and focussing on delivery, real immigration control has been restored.

Framing and persuading

Some will find some of these proposals seriously objectionable. “More removals please” isn’t a piece of advocacy many in the immigration and asylum sector can get behind, for very understandable reasons. Even “more voluntary departures which are better supported and funded” isn’t, as this (in my view very ill-judged) letter shows.

But we can surely all agree that “shorter and less awful detention” is a step in the right direction, even if isn’t “end detention right now”.

If the government were to follow this course, it should be balanced by other more positive reforms to create a more humane asylum and immigration system. There is a lot wrong with the immigration system in particular. I’ll publish some ideas on Monday.