Home Office overseeing ‘serious failings’ in almost every stage of immigration detention process, MPs warn

Ministers accused of presiding over ‘irresponsible’ failures which see people wrongfully detained

The government’s approach is ‘careless and cavalier’, the Home Affairs Committee says (PA)

The Home Office is overseeing “serious failings” in almost every stage of the immigration detention process, according to a new report which makes fresh calls for a time limit on detention.

The Home Affairs Committee said a series of “irresponsible” failures by the department had led to people being wrongfully detained, held in immigration when they are vulnerable or unnecessarily detained for too long.

In a damming indictment of the system, the cross-party MPs concluded that the government had “utterly failed” to oversee the safe detention of individuals in the UK, and called for “urgent reform” to ensure it is more transparent and humane.

Yvette Cooper MP, chair of the committee, described the Home Office’s approach to immigration detention as “careless and cavalier”, citing casework failures, insufficient judicial safeguards and a general lack of humanity in the system.

She added: “Making the wrong decision on detention can have a devastating impact on people’s lives – as we saw from the Windrush scandal, but also from many other cases we have seen.

“The lack of any time limit and of proper judicial safeguards has allowed the Home Office to drift and delay, leaving people stuck in detention for months who really shouldn’t be there at all.”

Pressure has been mounting on the government to impose a time limit on detention. In January, Tory MPs David Davis, Dominic Grieve and Andrew Mitchell joined forces with Labour MPs to impose a 28-day limit on all detainees apart from foreign national offenders.

A recent report by the Joint Committee on Human Rights (JCHR) also backed a time limit, as well as calling for the Home Office to lose the power to detain people in immigration centres and for detention estates to be made “less like prisons”.

One former detainee who spent 11 days in detention, and did not want to be named, said the process reminded him of the physical torture he had escaped in his home country.

The man, a youth activist who was kidnapped and tortured in Gambia during an opposition crackdown before fleeing to the UK in 2010, said: “When I arrived here, they screened me and put me in a car. I repeatedly asked them where they were taking me, but they didn’t tell me anything.

“We drove for an hour and a half to a detention centre. It was like a prison and I felt like a criminal. The toilet was next to the locked cell, and I had to ask a guard if I wanted to use it.

“I was tortured physically back home, but in immigration detention, I was tortured mentally – from the frying pan into the fire.”

Sonya Sceats, chief executive of charity Freedom from Torture, welcomed the committee’s report, saying: “Far too many vulnerable people are being wrongly detained, for no good reason, and without adequate safeguards.

“The impact of detention on torture survivors is devastating. It compounds trauma and can severely hamper recovery. Yet torture survivors continue to be detained.”

A Home Office spokesperson said: “Detention is an important part of our immigration system – but it must be fair, humane and used only when absolutely necessary.

“We do not detain people indefinitely, and the law does not allow it – most people detained under immigration powers spend only short periods in detention.

“As the home secretary made clear in our response to Stephen Shaw’s follow-up review of the welfare in detention of vulnerable people, we are committed to going further and faster with reforms to immigration detention, and a comprehensive cross-government programme of work is in hand to deliver on that commitment.”