Undercover: Britain’s Immigration Secrets.
What happened after the horrific exposé of Brook House Immigration Removal Centre.
In 2017, Callum Tulley, an immensely courageous 18-year-old, member of staff, employed by G4S at Brook House Immigration Removal Centre, used a secret camera to film horrific abuse of inmates by staff. Over a 14 month period he risked his life operating as a mole for the BBC.
The resulting Panorama documentary Undercover: Britain’s Immigration Secrets caused a widespread outcry when it graphically revealed the toxic culture of violence, racist abuse and malicious neglect at Brook House.
But what happened next? So often, following the initial reaction generated from such exposures, they quickly drop out of public view, and the follow up is lost as other news unfolds. The revelations about Brook House are no exception. 5 years on a public inquiry is still underway. Meanwhile memories have faded about the whole affair and most people’s focus is elsewhere.
Public inquiries are notorious for being painstakingly slow and generally take many years to publish their conclusions. It therefore becomes critical to look at what happens in the gap between an appalling revelation such as this, and the point at which the public inquiry finally makes policy recommendations.
That’s what this article is about. Specifically it asks: were the revelations of the documentary receptively received into a culture keen to change its policies for the better, as transparently, and effectively as possible; did we learn from our lessons, what changes were made, and how willingly?
Before answering these questions let us briefly remind ourselves of some of the detail of what the documentary revealed. For those who don’t want to revisit this upsetting material I suggest skipping the next 3 paragraphs which most will find upsetting to read.
The documentary exposed many shocking incidents. Perhaps the worst was when a Detention Custody Officer (DCO) named Yan Paschal exerted excessive force on the throat of a suicidal detainee and whispered ‘Don’t fucking move, you fucking piece of shit’, adding ‘I’m going to put you to fucking sleep.’ There were a number of witnesses to this strangling incident but not a hint that anyone was prepared to do anything about it.
Mr Paschal later approached Mr Tulley (the brave 18 year old) and said ‘Listen, that wasn’t a use of force’, thereby confirming that a ‘force review form’ would not be filled in — as required by the procedures. This was a blatant cover-up of an abuse of force, which, rather than being condemned, was instead respected: when Mr Tulley asked how to deal with a suicidal patient another DCO replied with ‘What Yan did.’ In another incident an employee who was also the ‘restraint trainer’ at Brook House instructed staff to refer to a detainee using a racist label and to ‘fuck him up’ in the corner out of view of cameras.
Other footage included staff bending back a detainee’s fingers and shouting racist and verbal abuse. On another occasion when one of the inmates tried to kill himself by tying a ligature and attempting to swallow batteries, the manager in charge said “If he wants to suck batteries plug him up like a Duracell bunny” and a Nurse said “He’s an arse basically.” The documentary exposed numerous other examples of abuse not reported here, many of them involving violence.
Footage also betrayed a culture of secrecy and lack of consequence. In the staff room a member of staff said: “if I killed a man, I wouldn’t be bothered.” There was a disdain for whistle blowers and a discouragement of staff from issuing complaints. The posters of G4S’s whistleblowing campaign ‘Speak out’ were scrawled with the words ‘snitches’, ‘grass’ and don’t be a rat’. Further endorsement of Mr Tulley’s bravery.
Immediately after the program in October 2017, the Home Office and G4S agreed an action plan for how G4S would improve its management of the centre. Under this action plan, G4S suspended 9 staff and later sacked 6 of them. It changed its initial training course (which had been woefully inadequate), recruited extra staff, introduced body-worn cameras and reduced standard weekly hours for detainee custody officers from 46 to 40. So far so good.
However, the Home Office did not formally serve G4S a ‘rectification notice’, meaning it would not have been able to terminate the contract had G4S not met the terms of this new action plan. Moreover, until 2018 the Home Office did not have the personnel in place to properly verify or validate G4S’s reported level of performance. The on-site monitoring of G4S’s contractual compliance was part of one executive officer’s role (a junior civil servant), who sat in the detainee casework team and focused mainly on monitoring G4S’s level of staffing. This was insufficient to enable the Home Office to properly examine G4S’s self-reported performance, or challenge G4S on its management of the centre. In short, the new agreement had no teeth and largely relied on trust.
Meanwhile investigations were underway as to what had happened. A Home Affairs Select Committee inquiry found that the Home Office had ‘utterly failed’ in its responsibility to oversee the safe and humane detention of individuals in the UK.
There was also a police investigation but, no prosecutions resulted either for the perpetrators of the abuse or for G4S generally.
One of the allegations that had emerged was that G4S had been deceptively claiming more staff than there actually were on duty, in order to present as meeting their contract, whilst at the same time increasing their profits. The Home Office commissioned an audit, the Kate Lampard review, to investigate this possibility. When the results came back, however, the department at first refused to reveal its findings on the grounds that it was information confidential to G4S. When (presumably under pressure) the findings were finally released no revelation of misrepresentation had been uncovered. We can only hope the investigation had been sufficiently thorough. We do know however that during the few months in question there were 13 days in which the minimum contracted staffing level was not met.
The Home Office conducted its own general enquiry into what had happened as reported by the National Audit Office. Contractually they were allowed to award deductions in fees awarded to G4S for specific incidents of underperformance. But, despite their investigation counting 84 separate incidents , they ended up charging G4S a grand total of £2,768, for only 8 offences. This is a trivial amount compared with profits earnt by G4S from this contract of around £2 million every year.
As part of their analysis, the Home Office pointed out that: ‘the use of force or verbal abuse of detainees are not counted as a performance failure under the contract.’ This is a staggering revelation when you think about it. Essentially verbal abuse and violence were contractually condoned. Let us not forget that the ‘use of force’ witnessed by Mr Tulley was far more sinister than safely monitored and executed ‘restraint’.
The Home Office went on to conclude that the behaviour depicted in Panorama did not constitute evidence of systemic failures or a material breach of the contract and that it was not necessary to try to terminate G4S’s contract.
Worse than that, rather than taking the opportunity to end the contract with G4S when it ran out, first in 2017 and then in 2018, they renewed it for further periods until 2020. You couldn’t make it up.
All of this meant that with the exception of a trivial levy of £2,768 G4S has so far emerged from this sinful affair without any meaningful penalty for gross mismanagement.
The matter had also been reported to the ‘Prisons and Probation Ombudsman’ (PPO) for an investigation. The Home Office, however, argued that effective investigation should not require the PPO to have powers to hold public hearings, to compel witnesses, or for any claimants to have funded representation. This was a cynical attempt to prevent staff at G4S from being required to attend the hearings and to make it harder for those with a case against G4S to have it heard. Not an intervention in the direction of transparency.
It took two years and a legal challenge by MA and BA, two former victims of abuse at Brook House, for investigations to be restored into a meaningful context via a High Court ruling. Drawing on Article 3 of the European Commission for Human Rights (ECHR) (which imposes a duty on the state to prevent individuals from being subjected to inhumane or degrading treatment and includes a requirement to investigate when that duty has arguably been breached), the court ruled that perpetrators should be required to attend hearings. This was on account of there being “very good reason to believe that perpetrators and former G4S staff will not voluntarily attend to give evidence, as previous investigations had found that staff didn’t whistle blow and were under a “malign and under influence.”
The court also ruled that detainees should have the opportunity to confront their abusers on equal terms “as a means of restoring dignity and respect”, and supported their public funding to enable ‘victims’ interests to be properly protected’.
On account of this ruling and the court also recommending a requirement for ‘significant public scrutiny’ a full public enquiry was finally agreed by Priti Patel in November 2019. Talk about pulling teeth. One wonders if this would ever have come about if it wasn’t for the bravery of MA and BA and the fact that the UK was signed up to the ECHR.
The public inquiry was instructed to finalise its enquiries within a year but nearly 3 years later we are still waiting — the pandemic having been given as the reason for the delay.
Public inquiries are renowned for overshooting their deadlines and I have some sympathy with this. It is essential that all the evidence is heard in a safe unpressured and calm context, and that resultant policy recommendations are carefully thought through. All this takes time to do properly.
What is essential, however, and what I hope this article has highlighted, is that whilst we are awaiting the results of a public inquiry effective action needs to be taken on an interim basis to address the underlying issues. Too often public inquiries are used as an excuse for booting accountability and responsibility for change into the distant future while the matter of public concern continues unchecked and unabated.
Consider the following graph drawn from a National Audit Office analysis of Home Office documents:
We can see that in the quarter following the documentary (which was in September 2017), reported use of force against detainees actually increased as did reported assaults on staff. We have to be careful interpreting this, as it may be that, following the investigation, G4S began reporting incidents of their own use of force more honestly. But what seems safe to conclude is that the culture of violence has sustained following the inquiry. Moreover, the average number of detainees self-harming, a statistic less likely to be mis-reported, has increased slightly following the documentary, from 40 to 41 per quarter — the distress has continued. Throughout the whole period there were 336 self-harm incidents, 387 reported assaults on staff, and 667 uses of force by staff. This for a detainee population that never exceeds 448 at any one time. It would appear from this that little, if any, headway was made in improving the situation following the documentary and that the Home Office demonstrated minimal interest in being truly committed to making changes for the better, or opening itself transparently to scrutiny.
It is important to note also that the documentary did not expose just one offensive culture in an otherwise well-functioning detention regime. There have been countless other reports of racism, violence, suicides, self-harm attempts, and unexplained deaths in the UKs other immigration removal centres and by other contractors. UK detention centres are sick to the core. For a broader analysis of the UK detention estate, what’s wrong with it, how it could be improved and whether it is really needed, see my article here.
Moreover this was only the latest in series of well-documented problems in relation G4S who had already been brought into disrepute on many occasions prior to the documentary.
For example in November 2013, 3 G4S guards were accused of the manslaughter and the unlawful killing of Jimmy Mubenga, who died on a deportation flight. Jimmy, whose hands had been handcuffed behind his back had been forced by the guards into his seat with his head pinned downwards so violently that it affected his ability to breathe. Despite him shouting out repeatedly that he could not breathe, shouts that were heard by many passengers sitting further away, the guards continued to restrain him. By the time they realised Jimmy was in a critical state, he had gone into cardiac arrest and subsequently died. But the guards were acquitted. In their defence they claimed not to have heard his shouts.
In the past G4S has also been temporarily banned from bidding for government contracts over allegations of overcharging on contracts to electronically monitor offenders. They have been reprimanded for their running of a child jail at Oakhill which according to inspectors has been plagued with high levels of violence and stripped of a contract to run Medway Secure Training Centre after another undercover Panorama exposé.
One might have thought that the Home Office, fully aware of these prior incidents, would not have awarded the Brook House contract to G4S in the first place, or if they did, that they would have focussed on ensuring proper contractual accountability from the outset.
The sequence of events outlined in this article suggest, however, that the Home Office is far less interested in protecting the rights and welfare of detainees and the quality of its provision for them, than in protecting G4S, its contracts with them and its own reputation.
As we have seen on many occasions, subsequent to the documentary, the department went out of its way to hinder and obscure a proper public scrutiny of what had happened. This had the net effect of protecting G4S from significant consequence, and preserving a toxic culture.
The desire to reduce expenditure and keep within budget must prejudice the Home Office to award contracts to the lowest bidder. Put this together with the desire of private contractors to maximise profits by minimising expenditure, and a general lack of meaningful scrutiny, and you have a recipe for the types of abuse we have seen.
Much more needs to be done to hold organisations such as G4S contractually accountable and meaningfully liable for their actions. The same, of course, is true for the Home Office.
But to finish on more hopeful note: none of this was necessary. It could have both been avoided and saved the tax-payer money.: there are tested, cost-effective and humane alternatives to locking asylum seekers up, see my article: Viable Alternatives to Immigration Prisons for more detail. We need to make these alternatives happen in the future. Do, also, sign up to follow Refugee Think Tank and if you would like to receive notification of new articles just email me here (don’t worry you can always cancel).
Finally, if you think the conclusions of this article are important, do, PLEASE, share it widely now. We need to reduce the suffering by making change happen and one way to help with this is to spread information about the current situation.
