End Child Detention Now

Key findings from: The Children’s Commissioner for England’s follow up report to: The arrest and detention of children subject to immigration control.

Introduction & Executive Summary

• Sir Al Aynsley-Green reaffirms that in the UK ‘each year some 2,000 children are detained for administrative purposes for immigration control’.
• “…my contention remains that detention is harmful to children and therefore never likely to be in their best interests. There is a growing body of evidence, not least from the medical Royal Colleges, that documents that detention has a profound and negative impact on children and young people.”
• “we continue to argue that the detention of children for immigration control should cease”.

• “the UK Government must be held to account over its knowledge of what happens to families who are returned as a consequence of its immigration removals policy”.

Safeguarding

• Safeguarding children systems require urgent systemic review. This should be considered high risk.
• A Welfare Assessment using the Common Assessment Framework (CAF) must be undertaken prior to any decision to detain being made.
• A four-year-old boy was noted to appear withdrawn and traumatised on arrival. His mother’s overdose, and the removal of his father to another detention centre was not mentioned as a cause for his subsequent regressive behaviour.

• A child aged three had a fracture of the left humerus (upper arm) after a fall. She woke crying at night, unable to lift her left arm. She was seen by a nurse that night but not seen by a doctor until 14:00 the next day. It was not until 19:00, more than 24 hours after the incident that she left for the A&E department of Bedford Hospital.
• The enquiry team found examples in the Welfare Assessment Reports produced by Bedford Social Services instances where children’s needs were not properly addressed or where there was evidence that continued detention was detrimental to their welfare.
• These WAR reports are submitted to the Minister of State used and used as the basis for authorising further periods of detention beyond 28 days despite the fact that neither the children, their parents nor their advocates are allowed to see or challenge them.
• Welfare Assessment Reports use formulaic language such as ‘detention to be kept to the minimum’, which has no bearing on case manager’s decision to persist with detention.
• WAR authors engage in inappropriate attempts to persuade parents that they should voluntarily return to the country to which the UKBA is seeking to remove them and try to convince parents that they are responsible for their children’s detention and its negative impact.

Healthcare

Contrary to UKBA claims, standards of health care at Yarl’s Wood are not comparable to the NHS. Specifically:

• There is inadequate access to mental services, and a lack of monitoring of children’s mental state on arrival and at regular intervals while in detention.
• Chemoprophylaxis of children who are to be returned to malarial zones is very often not administered to children over 5, and insufficiently for younger children.
• Despite undertakings, malarial nets are still not issued to families returning to endemic malarial zones in Africa.
• There is evidence of inappropriate and harmful prescribing, which was not picked up through medical oversight systems at Yarl’s Wood.
• Women with HIV have been detained only to be released on the instructions of the European Court. The Commissioner recommends that children whose parent/s is/are HIV positive should never be detained.

Arrest

• There needs to be a systematic way of feeding back children’s comments on the arrest process to enforcement teams.
• UKBA appear to be no longer using caged vans. There appears to be more use of separate vehicles to transport children and their parents to and from Yarl’s Wood.
• Only 3/14 children said that they knew what had happened to their property after arrest, many were similarly unaware of the fare of their pets.
• Children reported how the arrest process was deeply embarrassing and made them feel like criminals – particularly when they were physically escorted from their homes in the sight of neighbours.
• “They told us we were going to a hotel not a prison and then they locked us up.” (Girl aged 6).
• A number of parents reported to us that force was used during arrest operations, particularly when children are being escorted to the awaiting vehicle.

Decision to detain or to continue detention

• Local enforcement officers are supposed to ensure that ‘all barriers to removal’ are cleared prior to booking detention space at Yarl’s Wood, but 11 million found no evidence that this system is audited, checks were not properly made on case files thus increasing the risk of prolonged detention.
• “[T]he records we saw indicated that detention sometimes continued for up to 70 days before release was authorised”.
• Eight percent of parents interviewed had no memory of being provided with information about assisted voluntary return.
• The requirement for ministerial authorisation to prolong detention of a child beyond 28 days has been described by UKBA as a ‘safeguard’. The fact that such authorization has never been refused raises questions about the way in which the process is applied and therefore of its safeguarding value.
• Where removal had not been effected within 48 hours, a judge should review whether continued detention is lawful and appropriate.
• Very few cases in the 11 Million sample resulted in a period of detention of under 1 month and typically most lasted between one month and two months.
• The majority (12/21) of cases were returned to the community.
• There should be an independent review of why some children remain detained for long periods.

Appropriateness of removal

The length of time a child has lived in the UK should inform the decision on whether or not to enforce removal. This accords with the ‘best interests’ principle enshrined in children’s legislation and the UNCRC. The current threshold of seven years of residence for a child before settlement is considered needs formally reviewing.