Child detention: has the government broken its promise to end it?

After promising last year to end child detention in failed asylum cases – and closing the notorious Yarl’s Wood unit – the government opened a smart new centre for deportees. But isn’t this still detention?

A lot of care has been paid to the interior decoration of the new centre designed to hold families facing deportation from this country. Each of the nine apartments is named after a flower – lavender, iris, orchid – and pictures of these flowers are painted on the doors to the flats. The centre has an indoor play area for young children, decorated with animal murals, and a recreation area for teenagers, with a pool table. There’s a computer zone, a mosque and a non-denominational prayer area, as well as family-friendly communal kitchens. Outside there is a mini-adventure playground and extensive gardens.

There are also two boundary fences that make it impossible for residents to leave the premises unsupervised, and the centre is staffed by workers from the security firm G4S, paid by the UK Border Agency (UKBA). Guests are brought here by escorts, after being arrested at their homes. Belongings are x-rayed, and adults are taken aside to be searched on arrival. The pretty, white-gabled building will be inspected by Her Majesty’s Inspector of Prisons.

Officials avoid referring to Cedars as a detention centre, describing it instead as a “pre-departure accommodation centre” to hold families whose immigration requests have failed and need to be removed from the country. The children’s charity Barnardo’s (which campaigns for an end to child detention) has been contracted to work with the children who are housed there, and its chief executive, Anne Marie Carrie, says its involvement will ensure that the new regime never recreates the scandals of the old “immigration removal centre” Yarl’s Wood, particularly the notorious, now-closed family unit, where families of failed asylum seekers were held (often at length).

But there is a lot that is confusing about the new site. Is it a detention centre? Does it represent an end to the detention of children, which the government promised in its coalition manifesto last year? Is the presence of Barnardo’s a constructive attempt to ensure that conditions are better, or (as some asylum charities argue) just a useful fig leaf?

Last December Nick Clegg announced in an impassioned speech that child detention would be ended this May, promising that the government would end the “shameful practice that last year alone saw more than 1,000 children – 1,000 innocent children – imprisoned”.

“Children literally taken from their homes, without warning, and placed behind bars,” he said. “That practice, the practice we inherited, ends here.” By March there would be a “big culture shift” and “totally new process” for families in the immigration system would be introduced, one that “puts our values – the protection of children – above paranoia over our borders”, he said.

But a number of charities believe that the changes are superficial and point out that if children are still being locked up, child detention has not ended. A Freedom of Information request made by the Children’s Society revealed this week that almost 700 children were held between May and August this year at the UK’s south east ports, as they tried to come into the country. Cedars centre doesn’t take families as they come into the country, but holds them before they are removed, while final arrangements are made for their travel.

The government has not yet disclosed how many families or children have been held there since the centre opened in August, although the numbers are understood to have dropped substantially since the closure of Yarl’s Wood. In a written statement, immigration minister Damian Green said: “This facility could not be further in look or feel from an immigration removal centre or other detention facility. The completion of the pre-departure accommodation marks the final step in the government’s radical new approach to family returns.”

Officials say Cedars has brought a new, softer culture to the process by which families are removed from the country, but in the past few weeks one police investigation has already been opened in response to an allegation that a Nigerian asylum seeker who stayed at Cedars was assaulted in front of her three children, as she was taken on to a plane by the staff paid to escort her out of the country.

Earlier this year, it began to be obvious that far more children were being detained at the ports than the coalition had anticipated when they promised to end child detention. During an unannounced inspection of a holding facility at Heathrow Terminal 4, prison inspectors witnessed a G4S member of staff, wearing latex gloves, telling a five-year-old French boy: “You’re a big boy now so I have to search you.”

Elsewhere, charities remain concerned that UKBA staff are mounting dawn raids at families’ homes in order to remove them to Cedars.

At the Barnardo’s headquarters, Carrie explains that the decision to work with the government was “painful”, and repeatedly stresses that this was the “hardest decision” she has ever had to make. The step has been criticised by asylum charities and she recognises that if things go wrong donors may be less willing in the future to support the charity.

“Is it absolutely perfect that we’re in the PDA [pre-departure accommodation]?” she asks. “No. Would I rather the PDA didn’t exist? Absolutely. It’s difficult for us to be here. It’s difficult for us to be criticised, but it’s absolutely the right thing to do because there are vulnerable children and families here.”

Families at Yarl’s Wood went on hunger strike to protest at their treatment and the institution was criticised by prison inspectors as well as charities for its prison-like regime.

“What went on at Yarl’s Wood was completely unacceptable,” Carrie says. Barnado’s advised on how to make the new centre feel family friendly, on the best soft play equipment, the best colours for the walls, on creating private spaces where the charity could hold counselling sessions. The centre can hold nine families at once, and up to 44 people.

All G4S staff working at Cedars are being trained by Barnardo’s in child welfare, but Carrie admits to some unease about cooperating with G4S, which has a mixed record on working with asylum seekers.

“I’m not an idiot. I know that there are concerns about them as an organisation,” she says. “But we’re not there to work for G4S. Their job is to run the facility on behalf of UKBA, they are accountable to UKBA. I’m accountable to the children and families who are in there, and I’m accountable to my wider stakeholders, and to my staff at Barnardo’s.”

Struggling for the best way to describe the place, she says it looks like an “upmarket” holiday resort, perhaps a bit like Center Parcs, before adding: “Let’s not pretend it’s that, but … It looks the best facility it can be. It looks family-centred, child-centred …”

She dances around the question of whether Cedars is a detention centre, pointing out that residents are, theoretically, free to go to the cinema, shopping or swimming once they have gone through a formal assessment of the risks they pose (although this has yet to happen).

She gives a series of head-spinning digressions instead of a straightforward answer.

“It is the last process in a forced departure,” she says. “Regrettably and sadly, forced departure is part of the provision. We are there at the beginning of the immigration policy, all through the process; we should be there for the last 72 hours in this country to make sure that the children and the adults are treated with the dignity and humanity that we would expect.”

Is it a detention centre?

“It is where children and their families go through enforced departure and where they are detained for the last 72 hours that they are in this country,” she says.

So it is a detention centre?

“I’m saying that enforced removal of families is part of our immigration process and that is a sad and regrettable fact. And I do not agree with the detention of children,” she says.

So is it a detention centre?

“It is the last 72 hours of people being in this country in an enforced departure. And I just don’t know what the alternative is,” she says.

She is clearer in response to the question of whether child detention has been ended by the coalition government.

“You mean in the absolute? No, they haven’t if children are being detained for over 72 hours,” she says. “Fundamentally, I don’t see that there are any alternatives. Regrettably, enforced departure is a reality. Somebody has to be there for children and families.”

Barnardo’s position is that if Britain’s immigration system is to continue functioning, some families will inevitably be deported; those who refuse to go voluntarily will be forced to leave. Locking children up during the process of deportation might be avoided if families were to be split up and the children sent into foster care while their parents were detained, Carrie says, or if they were taken from their home and despatched straight to the airport and out of the country, but both alternatives are viewed as undesirable by campaigners.

The charity has hired 26 members of staff to work at Cedars and is being paid for its services by the UKBA. It has set out seven “red lines”, encompassing unacceptable practice. If after a year more than 10% of families who are being returned to the countries they arrived from are being forcibly removed (rather than going voluntarily), the charity will stop working with the government. It also promises to speak out if the level of force used with a family en route to or from the PDA is “disproportionate to the family circumstance”.

Liberal Democrat MP Tom Brake, a longstanding campaigner for ending child detention, said Cedars represented a huge improvement.

“My view is that the government has achieved what is achievable with a framework that ultimately will require some families to be deported. Unfortunately, once a family has exhausted all its appeals, they will have to be deported. Some of them may have to be detained for a very short period to stop them from absconding. We have to ensure that the period of detention is kept to an absolute minimum, because we know the effects of detention on children even for relatively short periods of time can be quite damaging.”

Under the new system, stays at Cedars beyond 72 hours require the authorisation of the minister and no family is to be held there for more than seven days – a big reduction on the length of stay at Yarl’s Wood, where families could be held for up to 28 days, before ministerial permission was required.

Brake later expressed concern at the high numbers of children being detained as they entered the country, at a separate detention centre, Tinsley House. It recently underwent a £1m refurbishment, and now has eight suites for families with 32 beds, a development that has triggered surprise among campaigners.

Among asylum charities who have a long track record of campaigning for an end to child detention, there is disappointment at the government’s failure to deliver fully on its promise and some frustration with Barnardo’s.

Emma Ginn, of Medical Justice, a charity that has documented the damage detention does to children’s mental and physical health, says: “We think that the promise to end child detention has been broken. They are still detaining children — it has been rebranded but it is still detention. They are arguing somehow that detention that isn’t in a big immigration centre is not actually detention. But you can’t deny the English dictionary definition of detention.”

She accepts that there are positives in the new approach – citing the reduced numbers of families being detained and a decision to give families a fortnight’s notice before they are to be removed – but she warns that the new regime falls far short of the promises made for it by the government. And she questions Barnardo’s ability to improve the treatment received by detainees, on their way to and from the centre. “They didn’t manage to stop the alleged abuses that the Nigerian family suffered last month. They haven’t stopped the scary dawn raids, or excessive use of force.

“Barnardo’s ruined the campaign to end detention of children. The coalition promised to end the detention of children, we were halfway through the fight to make it happen, and then Barnado’s jumped in and helped the government find a way of rebranding the detention of children,” she says.

Her organisation’s views are echoed by a number of other charities, although some were not willing to go on the record, anxious not to sour relations with Barnardo’s.

Donna Covey, chief executive of the Refugee Council, said: “While we of course welcome the improved, more family-friendly conditions at Pease Pottage [the village where Cedars is located] and the involvement of Barnardo’s, there is no hiding the fact that this is still a family detention unit. We will be keeping a close eye on the new process as there should be no compromising the protection of children.”

In a paper on Cedars, Heaven Crawley, professor of international migration from Swansea University, wrote: “It is important to call a spade a spade. To repackage detention as ‘pre-departure accommodation’ is disingenuous. Families with children will be taken to the facility against their will. Once there, families will not be allowed to come and go freely.”

Among charities active in this sphere, the response to Barnardo’s decision to get involved ranges from “gruff acceptance to downright hostility”, according to one campaigner who asked not to be named.

“The general feeling is that the UKBA was under a lot of pressure to end child detention and by negotiating with Barnardo’s, the government got cover for continuing to detain children,” he says. “Barnardo’s … have become complicit in the process.”

Carrie accepts that she will be criticised for the difficult decision she took. “We want to be open and transparent about the whole of the immigration process and we want to be transparent about our involvement in this,” she says.

The Home Office is less transparent than Barnardo’s would like it to be. Despite initial promises to show the new centre to the media, the Home Office decided over the summer that it would not. However, a number of charities that support individuals through the immigration process were given a tour in August. Ginn from Medical Justice was on one.

“It looks great; they have made it very stylish,” she says, but the design doesn’t detract from the fundamental purpose of the centre. There is an isolation room, with no furniture, she says, designed to be easily sluiced down, next to a flat designed to accommodate families deemed to be at risk of suicide or self-harm, with large glass observation panels.

Carrie says she is not surprised at the level of scepticism from fellow charities, but insists that Barnardo’s presence would guarantee that children’s welfare was paramount at the new centre.

“I totally understand it because what went on at Yarl’s Wood was so utterly terrible and I know how scared they [other charities] are that that’s what this is going to become. But we are in there as an independent voice. I have to hold it in my head that I’m not part of the system, I’m there for children and families and nobody was ever allowed in there before. “Trust me, if it isn’t like that I’ll be the loudest voice on the block,” she says.