News

BID and The Children's Society have published a new report on detention of children, titled ‘Last resort or first resort? Immigration detention of children in the UK.' Download the report and executive summary here.

The report is based on detailed research into the cases of 82 families with 143 children who were detained during 2009, and uses data from 82 clients' case files, interviews with 30 family members and 27 legal representatives, and full Home Office files for 10 families.

Although this research is only being formally published now, its findings have informed much of our lobbying work over the last year, and were considered by the administrative court in the Suppiah case, in which the court found that two families were detained unlawfully by the Home Office.

Our research found that in a considerable number of cases, families were detained when there was little risk of them absconding, their removal was not imminent, and they had not been given a meaningful opportunity to return voluntarily to their countries of origin. Indeed, in a large proportion of cases, there were barriers to families returning to their countries of origin during the time they were detained, which meant it was not possible, lawful or in the children's best interests for the Home Office to forcibly remove them.

Key findings:

• 61% of families in our study were eventually released, their detention having served no purpose.
• In the cases of three families who lodged judicial reviews in detention, it was subsequently found that the Home Office had made errors in the way their cases were considered, so they needed to be reviewed in full. We know of three further families who participated in this research who had been granted leave to remain in the UK at the time of writing this report. 
• A cohort of thirty families, released between January and August 2009, were tracked for six months following their release from detention. All 29 families for whom we were able to obtain this data reported regularly to the Home Office for the entire research period.
• Information about families' health situations was not consistently collected or considered by the Home Office before decisions to detain were made. Reviews of detention did not function as an effective safeguard to prevent prolonged detention for children and did not register cases where ill health had become a barrier to removal.

The report's findings are of grave concern, particularly given the considerable existing evidence of the ill health experienced by children in immigration detention. It is our view that the practice revealed in this report is at odds with the Home Office's duty under s.55 of the Borders, Citizenship and Immigration Act 2009 to safeguard and promote the welfare of children in its care.

While the findings presented here relate to decisions to detain children made in 2009, it is our view that they offer important lessons for the future treatment of children in the UK's asylum and immigration system. In order to avoid further inappropriate and damaging decisions about enforcement action against children, significant changes are needed to the current processes for managing families' asylum and immigration cases.

The report recommends that:

• Children and their families should not be detained for the purposes of immigration control.
• Families should have access to good-quality, publicly funded legal representation from an early stage in their claim, and throughout the asylum or immigration process. It is particularly important that families are able to access quality legal advice at the point when a legal application has been refused and the Home Office is preparing to take enforcement action.  
• After being informed that an immigration or asylum application has been refused, parents should be offered a reasonable amount of time - at least three months - to consider their options, including voluntary return.
• Effective procedures should be introduced by the Home Office to gather information about legal, documentation, health or any other barriers to a family's removal before enforcement action is initiated.
• The reasons for any enforcement action taken against a family should be shared with the family and their legal representatives.
• There should be effective, accessible routes available to families and their legal representatives to complain about and challenge decisions about enforcement action which the Home Office plans to take against families.