Detention Forum Archive

Update – Please note that the planning meeting has been deferred to 19 February 2015.  This means that we still have time to submit objections to the planning committee to oppose the plan to expand Campsfield detention centre.  

While the newspapers are taking an interest in indefinite detention in ‘UK Guantanamo Bay’, with the news that one man spent 1,701 days in detention, the Government is still planning to expand the size of the detention estate.  There have been both local and national oppositions to stop the expansion of Campsfield House Immigration Removal Centre since autumn last year.  The Detention Forum has been calling for a moratorium on the detention expansion by urging members and others to lobby MPs on this issue.

Thanks to local and national actions that are taking place to oppose this plan, Nick Clegg, the Deputy Prime Minister, has now spoken against the Home Office plan to expand UK’s detention estate.

We need to take a further action now to stop the expansion.

The Cherwell District Council planning committee is meeting on 19 February 2015 to decide whether to grant planning permission to the Home Office / Ministry of Justice which would enable them to double the size of Campsfield House detention centre.

Anyone can send objections to the planning committee, who will consider issues that are relevant on planning grounds.  You do not have to be a local resident to participate in this process, but you must send your objections before 19 February 2015.  You can email them at planning@Cherwell-dc.gov.uk quoting ref 14/01778/F.  In our view, it is very important that as many objections as possible are received so that the planning committee recognises that it is a national issue.

The main planning issue is that the proposed site for expansion lies in a designated Green Belt area, in which construction of new buildings is generally not allowed.  This means that the Home Office / Ministry of Justice must demonstrate that there is a strong need for detention expansion in order to obtain planning permission.  See Appendix D of the planning statement document http://npa.cherwell.gov.uk/AnitePublicDocs/07770139.pdf for more details.  (Please note that this link is currently not working.  We have now asked Cherwell District Council several times for a new link but we have not been given one yet.  We will update this information as soon as we hear back from the Council.)

Please note that any objection should be on planning grounds connected to the fact that building on the Green Belt has to have very special reasons.  The local authority planning officers are recommending that the councillors only examine the application on ordinary planning matters (ie not on wider issue of immigration detention in general).

In a nutshell, the Home Office / Ministry of Justice are stating that there is a need to expand the detention estate because;

• The new Immigration Act, together with new 500 enforcement officers, will make it easier for them to detain and remove people
• They need to detain and remove more ‘illegal immigrants’ in order to reduce health, housing, education and policing costs which depend on the public purse
• 5,000 detention bedspaces (current capacity is 4,270), particularly for ‘longer stays for men’, is required for their ‘planned removals in the medium term’[1]

The Home Office / Ministry of Justice’s needs document fails to mention the following which undermine their ‘needs’ argument.  The Cherwell District Council planning committee must be informed that;

• More than a third of those who are detained are released back into the community and do not result in removals. In fact, UK has been removing fewer people while the size of the detention estate has grown.
• Detention is extremely expensive to maintain.
• The ongoing Parliamentary inquiry into immigration detention is yet to report its findings.

You are encouraged to use the information available in a briefing paper below to prepare your objections to send to the Cherwell District Council before 22 January 2015.  Please feel free to modify it, but we also recommend you state clearly who you are and in what capacity you are commenting on this planning application.  It’s important to remember that the planning committee members are unlikely to be immigration or detention specialists, and their knowledge of detention is likely to be limited.  You can play a useful role in informing them what you know – at the moment, all they have is what the Home Office / Ministry of Justice have told them to justify their plan to expand the detention estate.

For more information, please also visit the website of Campaign to Close Campsfield here.

[1] See Planning Statement, Proposed extension to Campsfield IRC, Home Office and Ministry of Justice (October 2014), Appendix D: Needs case (available at http://npa.cherwell.gov.uk/AnitePublicDocs/07770139.pdf)

FINAL expansion counter narrative for circulation Jan 2015

12 December 2014

The Detention Forum would like to invite like-minded groups and organisations who want to campaign together for a time limit on immigration detention to our national strategy day on 20 February 2015.

The Strategy Day will take place in London.  We are still working out the exact programme – however, if you are interested in attending, please keep the day free.

We will also be looking at other advocacy objectives of the Detention Forum on the day.

More information will be made available in due course.  If you have any queries, please contact us at detentionforum@gmail.com

The Detention Forum, together with many of our members, will be attending the Sanctuary Summit on 15 November 2014.

We are very pleased to know that one of the 8 key principles of the summint is ‘an end to the indefinite detention of asylum seekers and migrants’.

We look forward to working with others to make this change happen. We have been invited to run one of their workshops, on detention.  We will be making the handouts we used in our workshop available on this page.

indefinite detention briefing for workshop 1114

summit handout detention

MP template letter

detention quiz for summit

10 November 2014

As the Home Office plans to more than double the capacity of Campsfield House Immigration Removal Centre in Oxfordshire, the Detention Forum is calling for a moratorium on the detention expansion. 

We call on others to contact their MPs to put a stop to this ill-advised move by the Home Office.  

(You will find our briefing paper and a sample letter to MP below.) 

Over the last 12 months,UK immigration detention capacity has increased by 25%. Over 4,000 detention bed spaces are now available in eleven prison-like Immigration Removal Centres scattered across the country[1]. An extra 800 detention bed spaces have already been created in 2014, and the government has just announced a plan to double the size of Campsfield House Immigration Removal Center in Oxfordshire.

This expansion of the detention estate is taking place away from public and political scrutiny. Detention is harmful and expensive. The UK’s practice of detention, and the lack of a time limit, has been repeatedly criticised by various national and international observers. There is an ongoing parliamentary inquiry into the use of immigration detention, which is yet to report its recommendations. 

It is ill-advised for Immigration Minister to proceed with plans to expand Campsfield House Immigration Removal Centre before the findings of the detention inquiry are announced next year.  Locally, there is already strong cross-party opposition to the expansion plan, led by Nicola Blackwood, MP for Oxford West and Abingdon[2].  One of the Detention Forum members, Campaign to Close Campsfield, is also working with other local groups to create strong local opposition and challenging the planning application.  

We call for a moratorium on the detention expansion, urge the Immigration Minister to withdraw the Campsfield House planning application and ask the detention inquiry panel members and others to work towards providing parliamentary scrutiny of the Government’s detention expansion plan.  The current system needs a radical reform, not expansion.   

[1] http://www.aviddetention.org.uk/images/uk%20detention%20september%202014.pdf

[2] http://closecampsfield.wordpress.com/2014/10/23/press-release-campsfield-expansion-wrong-abusive-and-unnecessary-who-benefits%e2%80%8f/

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Detention Forum briefing paper Nov 2014 detention expansion

sample letter to MPs Oct 2014 detention expansion

29 September 2014

(We asked our friend, Detention Forum Scotland, to tell us their hope for the detention inquiry in light of the ‘NO’ vote for the Scottish Referendum.)

Many organisations working within the field of migration, and the individuals whose lives are affected daily by UK immigration policy, waited with baited breath for the result of the recent Scottish Referendum. Emotions ran high, the air was tense, everywhere you turned there was talk and arguments laid out for one side or the other. A Scotland with a new and progressive immigration system seemed possible.

For the Detention Forum Scotland and the people held in Dungavel Immigration Removal Centre (Scotland’s only detention centre) the promise that, ‘In an independent Scotland, we will close Dungavel’ (Scotland’s Future, p271) was encouraging. Like every other policy change and promise the Scottish National Party (SNP) put forward in the run up to the referendum, there was scepticism and unanswered questions regarding what closing Dungavel actually meant for the people held there. What would the future hold for people whom Scotland still planned to remove? Nonetheless, it was a hugely progressive promise. A promise that moved Scotland’s potential immigration policy far from the attitude that prevails in Westminster. A promise that could show what more humane attitude towards immigration policy throughout the UK would look like.

As Scotland voted to remain part of the UK with a majority of 55%, this promise must not be left to fade away into a distant memory. The organisations and individuals who were waiting hopefully for change must keep hoping, talking, and raising awareness of immigration detention. The parliamentary inquiry has thus come at an opportune time. We see that this Inquiry is the place where these memories can be kept alive.

Detention Forum Scotland has held two meetings to discuss some of the submission of evidence from Scotland. From these meetings organisations including; Bridging the Gap (a community organisation in Glasgow), Scottish Detainee Visitors (SDV), Glasgow Refugee, Asylum and Migration Network (GRAMNet), Scottish Refugee Council, and the Refugee Women’s Strategy Group will be submitting written evidence. There have also been individuals who feel strongly about detention involved, including an immigration solicitor, community members and former detainees.

Some of these organisations have also supported individuals who are currently held in Dungavel to tell their stories. For SDV, supporting current detainees to get their voices heard was more problematic than was first expected. For some detainees the task of giving evidence was too emotionally draining. The detainees who wished to submit evidence faced a number of barriers in getting their voice out. Language barriers prevented them from writing submissions, poor phone reception prevented visitors from being able to talk over the phone to detainees and record their evidence. This left the detainees having to give evidence to an SDV visitor in the centre’s visit room. A room in which there is no privacy, officers are present at all times. It is deemed neither a safe space nor a confidential one in which detainees are able to give a full account of their experiences.

It is crucial to acknowledge these issues both in relation to the barriers that immigration detention creates in allowing the voices of detainees to be heard, but also as elements of immigration detainees’ daily, lived experiences. These conditions will be familiar, wherever people are detained in the UK. But for a while, we in Scotland were able to experience those conditions in the hope that they might come to an end. For some of us, this referendum was not about nationalism, but about something more hopeful and inclusive. This Inquiry now carries forward that hope.

One of the most exciting aspects of the Detention Forum is an opportunity to work with many groups and organisations who are not traditional “detention” organisations.  We believe that a wide variety of organisations that come together at the Detention Forum demonstrates the strength of the civil society’s opposition to immigration detention.  The Quaker Asylum and Refugee Network (QARN) is a member of the Detention Forum, and is active in our Indefinite Detention Working Group.

We have asked Bridget Walker from QARN to tell us about the detention session they ran at Yearly Meeting.

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‘They’re all criminal, rapists and paedophiles’ shouted a man seeing this banner at a stall during Refugee Week.

‘What is Campsfield House?’ asked another passerby.

A couple approached the stall hesitantly :  ‘It is good what you say.  We are not criminals – behind every refugee there is a big story’.

This was the introduction to a session about immigration detention organised by the Quaker Asylum and Refugee Network (QARN) at the week long gathering of Quakers at the University of Bath in August this year.

We reflected on where the first speaker had picked up this view of asylum seekers and migrants.  Although his language might be more abusive it was not so different in tone from much of the popular media coverage of asylum and migration issues.

The second passerby was a long term resident of Oxford but knew nothing about Campsfield House Immigration Removal Centre just a few miles outside the city.  In this she is not alone.

The third speaker was a man from one of the Gulf States. His wife was Palestinian.   It meant a lot to them to be affirmed rather than demonised.

In the discussion Friends shared their own experiences of the detention system.  There was concern about the establishment of HMP the Verne as an IRC and the expansion of the detention estate.  Friends spoke of the arbitrary nature of the decision to detain. Examples were given of the damage to mental health.  The process of applying for bail had been ‘horrific’ in the experience of one witness.   There was concern about the impact of the legal aid cuts.

We looked at ways of challenging the myths, of raising awareness, supporting those in detention and working for change.   Friends are active throughout the country in visiting detention centres, providing advice, acting as sureties for bail, as well as supporting asylum seekers and refugees in the community.

QARN is co-ordinating two particular activities.  The first is a submission of evidence to the current Parliamentary Inquiry into detention.  Friends may also be involved in the hearings being held around the country.  Secondly QARN is encouraging Friends to take up the Detention Forum’s ‘time for a time limit’ campaign to introduce a 28 day time limit on immigration detention.  A template letter to MPs was drafted and about 100 copies were taken during the yearly meeting gathering.

The Quaker Asylum and Refugee Network held its inaugural meeting in  December 2006 .  We aim to work to change the way that refugees and asylum seekers are treated, whether recognized under the UN Convention of not, and for justice and compassion in our asylum and immigration system.  In our experience this is frequently lacking – there is a culture of disbelief, encouraged by the language of politicians and the tabloid press. This needs to be challenged and we are convinced that a principled critique of current asylum policy should be part of our corporate Quaker witness.

August 31^st 2014

Are you in detention now?  Or were you in detention?

The parliamentary panel wants to hear from you so that they understand what it is like to be detained and think what needs to change.

The Detention Forum is encourage all individuals who have direct experience of detention to consider taking part in this parliamentary inquiry into detention.  More information about the inquiry is available at www.detentioninquiry.com

To help you get going, we produced a guide.  We are sorry that it is a very long document but we wanted to cover all the issues that we think you need to be careful about.

The guide is here FINAL Detention Inquiry Guide for Individuals August 2014

We also created a sample submission form.  This is not an official form (because there aren’t any!) but we hope you find it useful.

SAMPLE SUBMISSION FORM the detention forum August 2014

Good luck and if you have questions, feel free to email us at detentionforum(at)gmail.com