Moral imperative

“I didn’t think anything could be worse than prison, but this is.”

That’s how one of our service users described being held in an immigration detention centre.

Sadly, while polling suggests widespread support for people seeking asylum in the UK, people who arrive seeking protection are met with cruel laws and policies that make their lives harder, including being locked up indefinitely in harmful detention centres.

Immigration detention is the practice of locking people up while their immigration status is being resolved. People in detention are detained administratively, rather than being punished for any crime. However, detention centres are becoming increasingly prison-like, often run by private security companies for profit, while people are held in horrible conditions.

Detention is harmful for anyone, but LGBTQI+ people face significant additional risk of harm, including harassment and abuse from staff and other residents. For LGBTQI+ people seeking asylum who have experienced violence, torture and imprisonment in their country of origin, detention can be retraumatising: a former service user from Cameroon told us: “[I] got flashbacks of everything I’ve been through in Africa. I’ve been free for two or three years and then here I am back in a cell”.

The people Rainbow Migration supports have fled persecution in their countries of origin, and deserve safety and sanctuary in the UK. Our goal is to work towards an asylum and immigration system that treats LGBTQI+ people fairly and with dignity.

Central to Labour’s pitch in the general election campaign was its focus on sorting out the UK’s public finances, having inherited a projected overspend of £22bn. As it looks to find savings, the government will have to make some difficult decisions; but reforming immigration detention should be an easy choice to make, because the current system is both counterproductive and costly. The detention estate under the last government was estimated to cost between £3bn and £6bn per year, which Yvette Cooper, then shadow Home Secretary, said demonstrated the “Conservatives [were] in total chaos on asylum.”

Indeed, in response to the Conservative government’s 2023 Illegal Migration Act, Cooper highlighted that it costs £7,000 per person to keep someone in detention for 40 days, more than double the current average cost of keeping people elsewhere in the asylum system. “Where are the hundreds of millions of pounds for the detention plan going to come from, and where are these detention facilities going to come from?” she asked.

This was the right question. It is shockingly cruel to lock up people fleeing persecution; it also costs far more than the more humane alternatives available.

It was therefore sad to see Yvette Cooper once in government announce plans to grow the size of the detention estate, looking to find nearly 300 extra places to detain people seeking asylum. The government has pledged to prioritise fiscal responsibility. It should therefore reconsider its decision to double down on the harmful status quo.

There is an alternative. In 2018, as part of its response to Stephen Shaw’s review of the detention of vulnerable people, Theresa May’s government introduced a series of pilot schemes to offer community-based support to people who would otherwise be at risk of detention. The first of these saw women who would have been held at Yarl’s Wood detention centre instead being housed within communities and receiving wraparound support from a local charity.

The Home Office press release at the time advocated a deliberate reduction in the use of detention and the development of alternatives; Sajid Javid even told parliament that he was considering ending indefinite immigration detention and working with charities and communities to develop alternatives.

The two initial pilots the government carried out were independently evaluated by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) on behalf of the government. That evaluation found that alternative models were “cheaper and [offered] better value for money compared with the costs of detaining asylum seekers”, and that “by building on the networks and experience of civil society, [they] were able to better support asylum-seekers’ access to services and quality advice.”

Angela Eagle, Labour’s minister for border security and asylum, has said that she will “keep under review the feasibility of alternatives to detention pilots, taking account of effectiveness and cost efficiency”, as the new government looks to reset the asylum policy landscape.

We at Rainbow Migration believe that the rollout of a new alternative to detention pilots would demonstrate that building a fairer asylum system can coincide with its ambitions for fiscal responsibility. Introducing a community-based scheme would move us one step closer to being a country that no longer locks up LGBTQI+ people in places they aren’t safe.

People voted for the new government for change. The new government could deliver a real departure from division and chaos by working to create a fairer asylum system.

Image credit: Eye DJ via Flickr