Out of Sight, Out of Mind

There are 2,800 or so people held in detention centres in the UK. Yarl Wood, the detention centre in Bedfordshire, is privately run by Serco, but publicly funded has a dreadful reputation for its treatment of asylum seekers. It is hard to say which of Britain’s 13 immigration removal centres is the “worst”, but Yarl’s Wood must be high on the list. The Home Office refuses to answer any specific questions about Yarl’s Wood unless they are put as individual Freedom of Information requests, which may be denied on the basis of infringing commercial interests. The Independent sent a reporterin to inspect the establishment.

Almost all the residents of Yarl’s Wood are women, save for a handful of men in the family rooms and a small, separate transit unit. The centre can now accommodate 405 people. When Yarl’s Wood opened in 2001 it was meant to be a place for short stays, where asylum seekers were held briefly before being removed from the country. But the British immigration system is in chaos and a backlog means cases can drag on; it is not unusual to spend a year in Yarl’s Wood. One woman was detained for four years without charge or trial. Serco will not say how long people stay there on average. That is a matter for the Home Office, it says. Only a third of the women will be removed from Britain, according to Government statistics. The rest will be released, eventually.

The Independent Monitoring Board has also identified a “worrying new phenomenon at Yarl’s Wood: the detention of women with serious mental health issues straight from the airport”. People with mental illness should not be detained in places like Yarl’s Wood, as was made clear by Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Prisons, Nick Hardwick, in his last report a year ago. A third of detainees have mental health problems, according to the charity Women for Refugee Women, and among these are psychosis, post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, insomnia and flashbacks. They bear the scars of the suffering that brought them to Britain: 41 per cent of past or present detainees surveyed by the charity said that they had been tortured in the past, while 72 per cent said they had been raped. A third had been put on suicide watch in detention.

Noel Finn was the mental health lead nurse and is one of several past and present members of staff, residents and support workers who say that inmates are suffering unnecessarily or that lives may be in danger because of the insistence on keeping levels of staffing and training as low as possible. Guards lack the proper training to spot the danger signs or are reluctant to raise the alarm by filling in the right forms for fear of “clogging up the system”. He saw the harmful effects of low staffing and low quality of training. “People were getting removed and deported without having a proper mental health risk assessment. That’s a human rights issue.”

Medical Justice, the charity that sends independent doctors to examine women inside Yarl’s Wood, says: “We are deeply concerned about the failures by detention centre healthcare units to identify vulnerable detainees, whose health is likely to deteriorate in detention. Our doctors frequently see detainees whose medical needs are not identified and whose health deteriorates dramatically as a result.”

Serco is a multinational corporation. Its chief executive is Rupert Soames, a grandson of Sir Winston Churchill. The company now has around 125,000 employees working for governments and private clients in 30 countries. In the UK it runs five prisons and two detention centres.

“If you pay a private company, it separates the state from responsibility,” Sophie Radice, of Women For Refugee Women says. “Also, there is this sinister glossing-over that private companies do so well: ‘We have a gym, this is like a nice motel.’ That is very Serco. It seems as if there isn’t any proper accountability.”

There has been 31 investigations into alleged inappropriate behaviour by staff since Serco took over the running of Yarl’s Wood and 13 people have been disciplined. Of those, six have been dismissed.

The all-party parliamentary groups on refugees and migration are in the middle of a joint inquiry into the use of detention centres and a report is expected at the start of next year. Sarah Teather MP, who is chairing the inquiry, said: “Insiders say that the company response at Yarl’s Wood has been to cut costs in order to maximise profit, with an impact on every aspect of life, from the amount of time inmates can exercise or socialise, to the care they get when they are sick.”

Anna, from Africa, says that she suffered a stroke inside Yarl’s Wood that left her paralysed down one side, but was put to bed with just paracetamol. A friend called an ambulance but it was turned away at the gates. The East of England Ambulance Service confirms that its crew was stood down by staff at Yarl’s Wood before reaching the patient. Anna says a guard snatched the phone away as her friend was taking advice from an emergency services nurse: “He told me I had no right to an NHS ambulance, as an asylum seeker.” Anna has since been released from detention on medical grounds, but remains paralysed on her left side. She blames the lack of proper care inside the centre for her ongoing physical problems. There was an assumption that all residents were lying, Finn says.

Zadie Smith, the novelist and campaigner, calls Yarl’s Wood “an offence to liberty, a shame to any civilised nation, and a personal tragedy for the women caught in its illogical grip…For the women detained inside it, Yarl’s Wood is a surreal waking nightmare... Transported in the back of a van – often by cover of night – handcuffed, detained for no crime, and held indefinitely with no stated date of release – how could this happen, in Britain?” She goes on explain that the women inside felt they were being dealt with in secret, she said. “Out of sight, out of mind. For how many of us want to wake up with the knowledge that we live in a country willing to imprison victims of rape and torture, who have arrived at our shores to request asylum? How many want to hear how much it costs our Government to contract a private company to detain hundreds of vulnerable women who have committed no criminal acts? Who wants to think a civilised country would give a woman 71p a day to spend? Or deprive her of decent medical care? Or force her kicking and screaming on to a plane? These things could only make a form of twisted sense if we, as a country, had come to see migration itself as a criminal offence. Is that really what we believe?””

The first immigration detention centres opened in the 1970s, near Heathrow and Manchester airports. They were run by the private firm, Securicor, because prisons were considered too oppressive for people who had committed no crime. That is ironic, given the way they are treated now. In Yarl’s Wood roll call happens three times a day. Beyond the double-locked doors of the visiting area, there are five residential units connected by a central corridor, as well as a healthcare centre, gym and sports hall, but Charles – who was until recently one of the few men held with their wives in the family unit – says it still feels like a prison: “Every door you walk through has to be unlocked first. It is impossible to relax.”

A woman called Abri, does not feel like a subject of the British legal system, but a prisoner of a multinational corporation. “To Serco, we have a price tag; we are part of million pound business deals, and our pain is Serco’s profit,” she wrote, from inside Yarl’s Wood. “And while we are in these premises they have the power to do as they will with us, because after all we are just parcels that need to be sent to a different address by all means necessary. And they call this justice?”