Detention concerns in annual report by Independent Monitoring Boards

We were interested to see the recent publication of the annual report of the Independent Monitoring Boards, which covers findings from IMBs across prisons, young offender institutions and the immigration detention estate. We wanted to highlight some of their key concerns on immigration detention:

“In the immigration detention estate, ‘Operation Hillmore,’ a pilot ‘one in one out’ scheme under which individuals crossing the channel were removed to France, loomed large in the second half of the year. Boards raised serious concerns about the significant number of people detained under this operation who were found to be children – which must be taken in the context of wider safeguarding failures that Boards have repeatedly highlighted. The absence of effective safeguards results in routinely illogical situations. Extremely vulnerable people are detained, then assessed as unfit for detention, but cannot be released because of the lack of hospital beds or support in the community. Meanwhile, their health continues to deteriorate.

Uncertainty about the future was a regular, and often agonising, part of detained people’s day-to-day existence. People in immigration detention often received minimal information and faced unacceptable barriers to accessing legal advice and translation services.”

The full report is available here.