The deputy prime minister’s announcement to parliament that the family wing at Yarl’s Wood immigration removal centre is to close is an important, but partial, step towards restoring the rights of some of the most vulnerable members of our society. The “moral outrage” expressed by Nick Clegg reflects only that expressed by immigrant families, doctors, campaigning organisations and even the children’s commissioner for some time. For too long the centre has come to embody the deep malaise in Britain’s treatment of those seeking refuge.

The article goes on to point out that the new Home Secretary has continued the previous government’s policy of refusing to accept that detainees in Yarl’s Wood have been denied their fundamental rights and its failure to address the chronic lack of legal representation and denial of justice that continues to be endemic within the UK asylum system. Read the full article here.

Esme Madill on behalf of End Child Detention Now.

Thank you very much for inviting us here today.

End Child Detention Now welcomes the coalition government’s commitment to ending child immigration detention.

In the light of this commitment and the review today I am going to talk about how the ECDN Citizen’s Campaign came about and hope this will show two things. One how critical it is that we hold the government to its promise to end child detention and strive to work towards a just and fairer asylum system and secondly how small groups of committed people can join with others and really make a difference.

We talk about the campaign beginning with a 2 year old boy Ali but in fact is started a year earlier when three sisters, Jeannie, Joyce and Lauren were woken at 5.50am. Their door was broken in and their mum was dragged and pushed down the stairs in front of the girls. Their mum has a life threatening illness – she relied on a cocktail of drugs to keep her alive so absconding was really not an option. Nonetheless the family were driven to Yarls’ Wood – Joyce, then aged 11 had a school trip to the seaside the next day, she had not been to the seaside before, she didn’t go then either. Lauren, then aged three was so frightened when she arrived at Yarl’s Wood she hid under the bed crying that she just wanted to go home. They spent 23 days in detention. We found a friend, a barrister who acted pro bono and they now all have refugee status. Their mum volunteers part time at the local school and is an active member of the church. The children are thriving.

Though we had begun to understand the horrors of child immigration detention when Jeannie, Lauren and Joyce won their case we decided we’d get on with our lives and hold a BBQ to celebrate – but by the time the BBQ took place – waiting for a sunny day and a time everyone could make – we were in the midst of another immigration nightmare.

Cicek is a friend of ours – she and her daughters come to the weekly drop-in for refugees and asylum seekers in York. Cicek’s family are Kurdish and were politically active in Turkey and they have suffered for it. A cousin was shot dead, male and female members of the family were imprisoned, and Fadima, Cicek’s sister has never really recovered from this. A quiet spoken, shy and nervous woman, one Monday she had gone to the police station in Barrow to sign on as she did each month without her 2 year old son. He was with her husband’s cousin as she did not like him to see her at the police station. She had been detained – her family were terrified. The custody sergeant thought she was at risk of harming herself

She was transferred to Dungavel where her husband had been held for 8 months.

For four days she was kept separated from her son. Every time I called Cicek who was looking after him to say what the latest news was from the UKBA all I could hear in the background was Ane, Ane, Ane, Turkish for Mum – He only stops crying when he is asleep Cicek tells me.

Finally on the Thursday a van took Ali to be reunited with his parents and they were then taken off to Yarl’s Wood to begin their 26-days of detention. A stay during which Fadima sank into a catatonic state, and was unable to sleep, eat or speak. Ali meanwhile lost weight and constantly called for his cousins.

Over the following three weeks the family were booked on a plane – the deportation was only averted when Cicek and I worked together to submit a fresh claim. We had no lawyer (we called 30 – and faxed papers to three who said they might help but could not).  Just before midnight the day before they were due to fly the appeal was faxed and at the 11^th hour was accepted. But they were to spend many more days in detention – living some kind of half-life.

Finally, through Medical Justice, we found a solicitor who secured their release. They have now been granted leave to remain but they have in no way recovered from their experiences.

That is just one story and through fighting to get this family out and keep them safe we learnt of so many others.

During the weeks that Ali and his parents were detained we campaigned ceaselessly. Clare Sambrook a former journalist on a national newspaper, a novelist and friend orchestrated the press campaign: the local papers in Barrow and Cumbria were hugely supportive, as were the Big Issue in the North and Radio Cumbria. We lobbied MPs, called on all our friends, set up a Facebook page and a website. This time the levels of support and our rage and anger made it logical not to stop.

We would harness this desire to protect Ali to protect many others like him – we would join OutCry! and Citizens for Sanctuary and we would not stop until children stopped being detained.

The campaign was launched in September 2009 with an Early Day Motion sponsored by Chris Mullin MP calling upon the government to end the practice of holding children in immigration detention centres. 121 MPs supported the Motion.

We knew changing people’s hearts and minds was crucial so we launched a tireless press campaign. Clare Sambrook researched and wrote investigative stories and articles — published in Open Democracy, Private Eye and The Guardian on-line — exposing Home Office efforts to bury medical evidence of harm at Yarl’s Wood and illuminating the government’s relationship with the security companies who run the detention centres for profit.

We helped child detainee Wells Botomani turn his account of incarceration at Yarl’s Wood into a Guardian Society cover story and a spread in The Baptist Times, enabled families detained at Yarl’s Wood to get their letter to Nick Clegg published in the Observer.

The End Child Detention Now team — a group of friends working unpaid — have written our own comment articles across the national and professional press — Guardian, Independent, Community Care, Nursery World, Big Issue in the North

We did not want to work alone – our close links with refugee community in York and London enabled us to organise public events, with those who themselves have experienced detention and seen the devastation it causes. In York the logo for our campaign- a child’s hand print – came from a 14 year old who was detained in Dover Holding centre – those 48 hours in detention were enough to make her an ardent supporter of our campaign and very proud of her now famous handprint.

At the York drop–in each Sunday Ali’s cousins and friends made prints of their hands and wrote asking the PM to stop locking up other little boys and girls. In London Luljeta Nuzi of the Shpresa Programme, consulted her young refugees – they were adamant they wanted to come on board – 200 hand prints later, on a freezing day in December Jeremy Corbyn joined a group of these young Albanian refugees to deliver hand prints and hard copies of the petition to number 10.

This same group of young refugees held a vigil between Christmas and New Year asking others not to forget the children spending Christmas in detention. In York Quakers and refugees joined together for a similar public event.

At the very outset faith groups embraced this cause. Bishop John Packer gave us our first quote for our very first press release. Bishops from the Church of England, the church of Scotland, the Church in Wales and the Catholic church, as well as leaders and moderators of the URC, Baptists, Methodists, the Salvation Army, the Iona Community, the Quakers and the Evangelical Alliance signed a public letter published in the Telegraph calling for an end to child detention. They stated that:

As faith leaders we affirm the value and potential of every child’s life and believe that this is seriously threatened by using child detention as part of immigration policy. We ask the Government to afford children who have come to our shores to seek sanctuary the same level of concern, care and protection of human rights that it affords all other children in this country.

As well as the faith leaders’ letters we co-ordinated public letters signed by prominent, novelists, children’s writers and actors, published in the Guardian, and Observer. Beverley Naidoo, one of the authors then visited Yarl’s Wood and ran a workshop for children incarcerated there. We corresponded with the then Prime Minister and the Chief Executive of the UKBA – meticulously researching the evidence of the harm detention causes and the more humane alternatives that exist.

We’ve used Facebook and Twitter to bring new readers to our published material, and to make our point again and again – there is no need to lock up children.

In seven months nearly 5000 people signed the End Child Detention Now on-line petition launched the same week as the EDM and more than many hundreds more signed the hard copy.

By Feb 2010 Jeremy Corbyn was telling us there had been a sea change in Westminster – the EDM and press coverage he assured us was making MPs feel very uncomfortable. The Lib Dems had also included a commitment to ending child detention in their manifesto.

So the combined efforts of the children’s charities, refugee community groups, faith leaders, community organisations, the Children’s Commissioner, medics, authors, actors and the men and women in the street – have brought an end to child detention.

So have we won? It feels like a victory but also not. We need to know the alternatives that are to be put in place. There has been talk of tagging and family separation.

Meanwhile Refugee and Migrant Justice has folded. In York, where we already struggled to find legal advice we now have none. How can families make their cases without access to any legal services – how can this be justice? Families remain destitute and isolated.

But we have learned lessons from this campaign and while we know there is so much still to fight for if the children of asylum seekers are to be treated as fully human, we also know what is possible – that small groups of people can join together and become a voice that cannot be ignored. We know that we cannot let evil prevail by doing nothing, but we have also learned it is possible to harness anger and rage at injustice, shame at our government’s treatment of the most vulnerable in society and use this to hold those in power to account. This is a valuable lesson.

Simon Parker on behalf of End Child Detention Now.

In our submission to the Home Office’s review of child detention we began by quoting Dr Julian Huppert, MP for Cambridge, in the recent House of Commons debate on alternatives to child detention when he said:

‘The main alternative that I can think of to detaining 1,000 children a year is not to detain them’.

That must be our starting point. It is for the UKBA and the other national and local government bodies along with relevant charities, voluntary agencies and campaign organisations to develop humane alternatives that keep this objective at the front of all the review’s deliberations.

We then point to the deficiencies of the existing asylum process, which have contributed to the UK having the lowest number of voluntary returns in Europe. These include

• the lack of adequate legal representation for families who wish to make an asylum claim or appeal against a refusal of asylum lies and the long delays in resolving cases lies at the root of the problem.
• the lack of contact with families or
• information on assisted voluntary return prior to the issuance of removal notices.
• the absence of a ‘children’s rights first’ culture within the UKBA, despite the provisions of Section 55 of the 2009 Borders, Citizenship and Immigration Act and the appointment of a Children’s Champion.
• This problem has been exacerbated by an institutional culture within the Home Office, the UKBA and among previous ministers of state that the maintenance of a detention regime is an essential deterrent against those who may make unfounded asylum claims in future.

End Child Detention Now believes that all those involved in considering alternative arrangements to detention must agree a clear distinction between the need to ensure the welfare and best interests of the child and the UK government’s legitimate objective in maintaining an effective asylum and immigration policy.

As Sir Al Aynsley-Green has stated, this requires a change of mindset from a culture of ‘deny, detain, deport’ to one which removes the adversarial aspect of case management, grants leave to remain to those who require the United Kingdom’s protection and supports and compassionately facilitates the return of those who do not.

Length of Detention

Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Prisons found that at least a third of child inmates are detained for more than a month.

The Immigration Law Practitioners Association found in each of the years 2004 to 2007 that a number of children had been detained in excess of 100 days with one child having spent a shocking 190 days in detention.

The former Children’s Commissioner for England has also stated that, ‘[w]e remain very concerned at the length of detention experienced by significant numbers of children and are not convinced that this is always “for the shortest appropriate period of time” as required by the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.

Damian Green said in the recent Westminster Hall debate

in some cases we may still have to have recourse to holding families for a short period before removal-where keeping the family together is seen as being in the best interests of the children, which of course must be the paramount concern (Hansard 17 June 2010 Col 214 WH).

The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child does not stipulate a time limit beyond which it would be unreasonable to hold a child, but the government must take account of the overwhelming medical evidence that even quite short periods of detention can have a significant harmful impact on a child’s health and well-being.

We are particularly concerned that if while a family is held in pre-removal detention there is a problem with documentation or an escort is unavailable (as frequently happens) or if there is an outstanding legal appeal then the period of detention could be extended for days or even weeks.

It is therefore vital that in the normal course of events detention should not be used at all prior to removal, but in the rare cases where it does prove necessary due to the timing of flights and travelling distance to the airport that families are held for no longer than 24 hours in hotel type accommodation and not high security detention centres such as Yarl’s Wood or Tinsley House.

If the UKBA fails to effect a removal within that time period it must return the family to the community and allow a period of at least 3 months before issuing fresh removal instructions.

Family Separation

We are concerned about the new government’s mixed messages on separating families – while Dame Pauline Neville-Jones appeared to rule out separating families as an alternative to detention in the House of Lords, Damian Green was much more equivocal in his speech during the recent Westminster Hall debate

…there will remain difficult cases where solutions will have to be found and where enforced removals are likely to continue. That approach could involve separating different members of a family and reuniting them before departure, so that some family members stay in the accommodation they are used to. However, I recognise that that approach would be hugely contentious and has its own practical difficulties

Not the least of the practical difficulties is that separating families for no good reason other than for the purposes of immigration control is a clear breach of the European Convention on Human Rights and the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.

What concerns us, and many of the organisations we work with, is that the Home Office in general and the UK Border Agency in particular appear to believe that they are ‘above the law’.

Damian Green’s civil servants continue to brief him on policy alternatives that confirm the impression of Mr Justice Collins in the case of two unaccompanied minors who were forcibly and illegally returned to Italy:

Ministers and senior civil servants at UKBA do not understand what is meant by ‘the rule of law’ and they do not understand that it is not something that can be selectively toyed with. Either they do not understand it or, more worryingly, they perfectly well understand it and don’t give a damn. There is undoubtedly a culture of institutional unlawfulness, to coin a phrase.

The Refugee Children’s Consortium and all the other agencies working in this field – including the Churches Refugee Network, along with current and former children’s commissioners have been consistent in opposing any attempt to separate families as an alternative to child detention and we hope that the Synod will be equally strong in highlighting the damaging effect that family separation can have on children as it has in the case of detention.

Inadequate Legal Support

Esme has already pointed to the Olympian efforts that had to be made just to secure legal representation for a family that now have leave to remain but who would otherwise have been deported and facing real hardship and danger in their country of origin.

In 2008, the European Commissioner for Human Rights, Thomas Hammarberg, expressed deep concerns at the serious reduction of legal aid provided to asylum seekers in the United Kingdom.

We are encouraged that the new government has rightly identified the issue of families’ access to legal representation as an important factor in improving the current system, but as many of you will be aware Refugee and Migrant Justice – the largest provider of legal support to asylum seekers is in administration and most of its regional offices have closed.

As the Churches Refugee Network wrote in its submission to the review:

In its press statement the Ministry of Justice blithely states that it is “confident that there is widespread provision of legal advice in this area, with more than 250 offices nationally providing this type of service”; the Ministry is well aware that swathes of the country are a legal desert so far as such provision goes.

The Spending Review is likely to impose even more draconian cuts on the Legal Services Commission meaning that publicly funded immigration work will only become viable for unscrupulous firms and practitioners who offer poor representation.

But the government will actually save money in the long run if it ensures the provision of early high quality legal advice, and provides independent case management to the family. A point that is strongly made in the Joint Children’s Commissioners submission.

As in Canada we also need to move to a system where it is not the Border Agency that rules on the merits of an individual asylum claim but an independent agency that is not judged by the number of returns in proportion to new claims but by the quality of its case-work and the welfare of its clients.

Concluding Comments

The campaign to end child detention has been a success, but it can only be considered a partial one until the outcome of the review is published and the alternatives scrutinised and the consequences for the thousands of families who will be affected properly investigated.

There is still much work to do and we have particular concerns about the fate of unaccompanied minors and government plans to return these very vulnerable young people to war zones such as Afghanistan.

Despite the provision of a ‘reintegration centre’ there are very grave risks that these youngsters will be exposed to and we cannot just wash our hands of our responsibility since it is a conflict to which the UK continues to be an active contributor.

We support the Joint Children’s Commissioners call for ongoing dialogue beyond the review, that ensures that the views, interests and well-being of children are at the forefront of new policy, practice and procedure.

We hope that that the Synod will continue to play an important role in that dialogue and we look forward to working with the Church in ensuring that the government honours its pledge to end the scandal of child immigration detention.

If you would be prepared to donate some funds, however small to help save RMJ and secure its services over the next three months, please read this post. If funds from both Government and other funders can be agreed, RMJ’s administrators would, in principle, support the proposal to take RMJ out of administration.

A consortium of charitable trusts and city law firms, supported by Simon Hughes MP, are putting together a proposal to Government to save Refugee and Migrant Justice (RMJ). The proposal asks the Government to at least pay the money that it would have to pay anyway on insolvency on the understanding that this will be matched with up to £1,000,000 by way of grants, secured loans and donations to meet cash needs to finance work in progress.

We need concrete commitments for these funds today or as early as possible tomorrow – actual cash can come a bit later. So far to day, we have been pledged £134,000. Significantly more could follow from charitable trusts and others we are already talking with. But at this point it is clear that this is going to be a very considerable challenge without some additional help.

savermj@gmail.com

If you wish to discuss this further please telephone Kathleen Commons on 0787 216 1271.

Writing in the Daily Telegraph, Malcolm Stevens, former lead Children’s Services Inspector with the Government’s Social Services Inspectorate, Director of Justice Care and a key advisor to Ian Duncan Smith’s influential Conservative think-tank, the Centre for Social Justice, explains why Yarl’s Wood Immigration centre is no place for children and families.

It is heartening news that the coalition Government will review child detention laws. But it is not surprising: the often traumatising practice of detaining children in places like Yarl’s Wood Immigration Removal Centre has been the subject of widespread criticism from paediatricians, psychiatrists and even the government’s own inspectorate.

When he became England’s first Commissioner for Children, Sir Al Aynsley-Green said that nothing in his 30-year career as a children’s doctor prepared him for his first visit to Yarl’s Wood, Bedfordshire, in 2005.

His reports and letters to the government read like a series of exposés, revealing the appalling life experiences of the children and families that he encountered there. He describes children snatched from their homes in dawn raids; transportation in prison-like vehicles, with young children separated from their parents; and incarceration in prison-like institutions provided by private contractors. These prison contractors, it transpired, showed little evidence of their suitability to the delicate task with which they were entrusted.

In March 2010, the Government’s Inspectorate (HMIP) reported that detention in Yarl’s Wood “clearly and adversely affected children’s welfare”. This came shortly after Sir Al himself concluded: “Yarl’s Wood is no place for a child”. And we still await publication of the investigation by Bedfordshire’s Local Safeguarding Children Board into allegations of “sexually harmful behaviour” between unrelated children, and the significant failures that may have led to these incidences.

So it cannot be stated clearly enough: Yarl’s Wood is not a centre for children and families. It is not run like one, it is not regulated like one and it is not inspected like one. It is unlike any other accommodation I have seen provided for children in the post 1989 Children Act era.

This has to change – and quickly. We now have an opportunity to rethink how children and families are looked after in what are complex, and invariably sad, circumstances. Hopefully, this will include consideration of the advances in this area that have been made elsewhere in Europe. Of course, it is reassuring to hear that ministers intend to move quickly on this, but we must ensure that a review does not mean another delay.

Equivocation is not an option in Britain. For a country which rightly takes pride in safeguarding its children, it is indefensible to force a small group of them to live in a place where they are known to be at risk – and where they are not protected by the same regulatory framework which applies to safeguard children elsewhere.

We must apply the same principles to immigration centres that are enforced nationwide. Children must be removed urgently from wherever their safety and welfare is at risk. As this includes Yarl’s Wood, it must be closed at once.

Malcolm Stevens is a Director of JusticeCare solutions. He is a former lead children’s services Inspector with the Government’s Social Services Inspectorate and now advises the Centre for Social Justice and Sir Al Aynsley-Green.

Neil Puffett in a good article for  Children and Young People Now gathers responses from a number of child welfare and refugee and asylum supporter organisations and highlights concerns at the prospect that Damian Green’s review could result in children being separated from their families.

The government must not be allowed to replace one form of child cruelty with another. Any alternative to detention must be humanitarian and in the best interests of the child and not designed to suit the operational convenience of the immigration detention industry and the UK Borders Agency.

I am distressed to learn that only days after the government agreed to end the iniquity of child detention, a mother and baby were summarily arrested, detained and deported last week. Sehar Shebaz – from Pakistan – and her baby Wania, who have been living lawfully in Glasgow for three years, were snatched on Monday when reporting as required every fortnight to the authorities, whisked to Dungaval prison, detained and then taken the 350 miles to Yarl’s Wood detention centre. At Yarl’s Wood they were segregated from fellow detainees in the “family care suite”, then taken to the airport on Saturday evening and flown to Pakistan.

Shebaz is the victim of well-documented domestic violence in the UK. Her escape from her husband is extremely likely to incur retributive violence when she sets foot in Pakistan. Her life and her baby’s are at serious risk. Damian Green, the immigration minister, refused to give Shebaz compassionate leave to remain despite receiving copies of police reports and letters from Blackburn Women’s Aid confirming she was subjected to domestic violence. I urge the new government to demonstrate civilised and compassionate values by doing everything in its power to secure Shebaz and her baby’s safety, to stop the shameful cruelty of arresting and detaining children and their parents, and to release the families currently being held without prevarication.

Colin Firth

London

Clare Sambrook, novelist and journalist, is a pro-bono co-ordinator of End Child Detention Now

This article is re-posted from OpenDemocracy 19 May 2010.

At the bustling Counter Terror Expo in London’s Olympia this week they are giving top billing to the security industry’s favourite politician. ‘The most experienced cabinet minister of modern times’, they call him: Dr John Reid.

Home office colleagues say Reid — Labour hard man, former secretary of state for health and defence, and home secretary — is the minister who brought business in from the cold. These days relations are warm and cosy. Marketing their wares as vital to the war on terror, while dreaming up everyday applications for intrusive high security kit, Reid’s friends have quietly advanced deep into the public sector — running schools, GP clinics and police investigations.

Out of government but still a serving MP, Reid has been taking £50,000 a year from G4S — the Group 4 Securicor giant.

He has been hosting ‘business breakfasts’, and talking up the scary threats and looming crises —  cyber attacks, pandemics, global warming, energy shortages, mass migration — that spell opportunity to his friends.

(They’ve made him honorary professor at the shadowy new Institute of Security and Resilience, at University College London; staff aren’t allowed to say whether industry is paying the bills.)

Life is good for G4S whose annual revenues have doubled to £6 billion in the past five years. Last month they picked up contracts for guarding foreign office buildings in the UK and in Afghanistan. They can afford to pay chief executive Nick Buckles (pictured) £3,835 every day.

G4S — slogan ‘Securing Your World’ — runs prisons, secure training centres and immigration centres including Tinsley House, where last year an asylum seeker who had been forcibly arrested and locked up, let go, arrested and locked up again, got predictably distressed — she was only ten years old — and tried to strangle herself.

Former Ghurkas-turned G4S personnel train British soldiers in mine clearance and ambush drills as part of their (increasingly outsourced) training before deployment to Afghanistan. John Whitwam, the former lieutenant colonel managing privatised Ghurkas, explains: ‘On Monday and Tuesday, they would be wearing Army uniform or dressed as the Taliban, by the end of the week they would be working elsewhere in G4S.’

Taking over core public services, G4S people monitor 12000 electronically-tagged offenders, run hundreds of police and court cells, tackle anti-social behaviour and transport half a million prisoners every year — as well as doing things like covert surveillance for insurance companies.

They are aggressively expanding the market for intrusive high security kit, touting number plate recognition technology to retailers so they can tell how frequently customers drop by.

They’re installing CCTV in schools — giving parents ‘an added sense of security’ — and more cameras in shopping centres, harvesting information about how we shop.

They’re promoting biometrics to help employers catch workers trying to cheat the clock-in system.

Their newest division screens and vets employees, not just at recruitment, but all through their working lives.

That’s G4S, ‘Securing Your World’.

All sorts of questions spring to mind. Do we want our world secured this way? What on earth was G4S doing locking up that little girl? Is the rise in surveillance evidence-based? Or is it Nick Buckles and his mates chasing five grand a day? Whose interests has John Reid been serving all these years?

And . . . are environmentalists so very dangerous that G4S had to deploy Ghurkas — battle-hardened in Iraq and Afghanistan — to protect ‘sensitive utilities’ ahead of last year’s London Climate Camp? Were they serious? Or was that a sales-boosting stunt?

G4S has even got a ‘police business unit’, whose managing director said late last year:  ‘We have a team of 30 of our guys in one force on a major investigation right now, practically doing all of the roles except that of the senior investigating officer.’

Does that make us feel secure? Or would we rather have real police officers, trained for public service?

G4S isn’t the only gigantic security company doing surprising things.

There’s Serco, ‘Bringing Services to Life’ and misery to thousands of children who have passed through the company’s Yarl’s Wood detention centre in Bedfordshire.

Business is brilliant. Shortly after celebrating record annual results — profits up 30 per cent to £177 million — chief executive Chris Hyman (£3,233 every day) spent one recent bright spring day down at Silverstone, test-driving his team’s Ferrari F430 ahead of the new racing season.

Besides locking up asylum seekers ‘with respect and understanding’, Serco brings its ‘deep public service ethos’ and ‘commercial know-how’ to defence, transport, civil government, science, the private sector and, with rising excitement, education and the NHS.

They have got an awful lot under corporate control.

Serco trains RAF helicopter crews, helps run the National Nuclear Laboratory and the Atomic Weapons Establishment.

They sell intelligence systems to law enforcement agencies including the National Crime Squad and the tax-man.

They help police forces connect intelligence with number plate recognition in systems so fast and flexible they can easily adapt to new police powers.

Serco supplies the rising numbers of covert surveillance vehicles that police forces demand, builds and runs prisons and youth offender facilities, monitors electronically tagged offenders, enforces curfews.

They’re running state schools in Bradford, Walsall, Stoke-on-Trent, they’ve got their fingers on 3,500 Sure Start children’s centres.

They provide out-of-hours GP services in Cornwall, employ ‘community matrons’ in Newham, they manage stacks of PFIs and will take more than £250 million from the NHS over the next ten years for pathology services alone.

They’ve got 7000 security-cleared staff working on ‘significant elements’ of the government’s counter-terrorism strategy.

And guess who has won the freshly privatised cabinet office contract to run the Emergency Planning College at Hawkhills in North Yorkshire? Yes. From Friday, Serco controls the training of the people who would take charge during emergencies and disasters when the Civil Contingencies Act — the one with all those alarming arbitrary powers — kicks in.

‘The challenges we face are unprecedented,’ says Serco. ‘They call for a seamless, holistic approach to security and civil contingency.’

Yikes.

For someone who gets so much business from the UK government, Chris Hyman seems surprisingly unruffled by the election. ‘We have very significant business with local authorities,’ he told CNBC’s business channel earlier this year. Regionalisation, ‘has gone very well with us.’

And anyway, ‘It’s pretty much, we work for the civil servants really. There’s not much that we do that has to go through Parliament for decisions.’

If that’s the case, then we must rely on civil servants to fight our corner should conflicts arise between the interests of society and the security industry.

Conflicts like this one, maybe.

For years, doctors working among asylum seekers noted disturbing numbers of injuries to people being moved about by private security companies. Two years ago, doctors and lawyers from Medical Justice published a report about it — called Outsourcing Abuse.

The government asked former Northern Ireland police ombudsman Dame Nuala O’Loan to make independent inquiries. Reporting last month she said there was, ‘inadequate management of the use of force by the private sector companies’, and made 22 recommendations for change.

The civil servant nominally in charge of the companies is Lin Homer, chief executive of the UK Border Agency. Responding to O’Loan’s criticisms, Homer spoke not a word against her commercial partners. She saved her reproach for the doctors and lawyers who had brought these troubling matters to light. Their offence? ‘Seeking to damage the reputation of our contractors’.

Read on:

Except where links are shown, all the information is drawn from company websites: Serco www.serco.com; G4S www.g4s.com.

The Hackney Citizen
Tuesday 30 March 2010

As former Hackney residents and [current] coordinators of the End Child Detention Now campaign, we wholeheartedly agree with Diane Abbott that Yarl’s Wood detention centre should be closed before further damage is caused to children and to the UK’s reputation (Hackney MPs clash over child detention at Yarl’s Wood, Wednesday 24 March).

Locking up innocent children in conditions known to harm their mental health can never be justified, yet Meg Hillier [MP] continues to argue that children should be taken from their homes and imprisoned in order to fulfil Home Office removal targets.

Hillier’s latest unfounded and scaremongering claim is that if the Home Office stopped detaining children, child trafficking would increase, because asylum seekers would buy children in order to escape detention!

We urge your readers to join Diane Abbott in calling for an immediate end to child detention by supporting our [No Child Detention] petition.

If you are a doctor or medic you can help by signing the Medical Justice petition.

Esmé Madill and Dr Simon Parker
End Child Detention Now
York

Commenting, Liberal Democrat Shadow Home Secretary, Chris Huhne said:

“It is a moral stain on this country’s proud reputation in accepting refugees that we are routinely locking up children for months at a time even though they have committed no crime.

“Locking children up in this way can do them serious physical and psychological harm. This is the behaviour of the Victorian workhouses, not 21st century Britain.

“The Government must find its long lost moral compass and put an end to child detention immediately.”