The reasons behind people leaving their home countries to seek safety elsewhere are legion but the jeopardy is always great. Whatever the cause, whether its flight for one’s life from repression or a range of threats, it must be strong to motivate a potentially dangerous journey into the unknown and with nothing but what can be carried.
Even with an apparently humane destination in mind, how can someone fleeing in desperation realistically know what may be expected of a distant, unfamiliar culture, no matter what they may have heard about it?
Countries which subscribe to the Human Rights Convention might seem attractive until you find that what they say and how they act are two different things; and that there are some people in all countries who will object to any immigrant.
How could anyone imagine that the United Kingdom would uniquely in the world allow indefinite detention without due process?
Immigration Removal Centres organised along prison lines
“A society’s worth is measured by how it treats its most vulnerable” said former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan. At a public seminar in East Hoathly on April 13th 2025, speakers with lived experience of asylum detention explored the truth about how those arriving with nothing but hope, surely our most vulnerable, are likely to be treated.
The findings were not to our credit – though, remarkably, former detainees claimed no regret at electing to come here to find sanctuary, despite personal testimonies of trauma and deprivation.
Sussex has two Immigration Removal Centres (formerly known as Detention Centres): Brook House and Tinsley House, near Gatwick Airport. They have a combined capacity of just over 600 temporary residents in accommodation designed deliberately along prison lines, leaving residents often, paradoxically, isolated but with no privacy, distressed but lacking agency or support.
According to one former detainee, “None of the contractors running the centre knew anything about how to do the job.” Another put it that to the contractors who run these centres, they are goods rather than people, to be stored or transported for profit. A volunteer described how prison inmates are treated so much better than detainees who have committed no crime.
Asylum seekers lack rights, advocates or decent healthcare
These are only the tip of an iceberg of over 200k asylum seekers either awaiting deportation or permission to reside in this country, many of these accommodated in hotels. If innocent people accommodated worse than criminals as policy was not cause for concern enough, their actual treatment is another.
They have few rights, no advocates, no name in the public record – forgotten. Many speak and understand little or no English and may lack interpreters who understand their language sufficiently to articulate their case.
Who can they turn to and how?
Detainees, who may be held for years awaiting decisions about their future, have nothing to do. While prisoners count down their days, detainees count them up. Unlike criminals in prison, they receive no education.
They are expressly forbidden from wage earning in their first year, though receive subsistence allowance of £8.86 per week (or £49.18 if self-catering). They are housed in such constrained spaces that “we have to get on with one another” but a majority was said to have unaddressed mental health issues.
Healthcare is apparently negligible. When, as may happen, someone is moved to another centre or released, any friendships are cut and isolation reinstated. As these facts rarely appear in the mass media, the public is under many misapprehensions about the conditions applying to detainees, each of whom is a human being with the same emotional and physical needs as all of us.
Gatwick Detainees Welfare Group campaigns for a maximum detention of 28 days
Charities, such as Gatwick Detainees Welfare Group in Sussex, offer individual support visitors and advocacy, where the detainee seeks it, but many refuse, seeing any external contacts as organs of the repressive Home Office.
Indefinite detention with minimal rights is against all decency. At the very least, says GDWG, asylum seekers should be guaranteed a maximum detention of 28 days, with right to employment thereafter, to allow them the self-respect of work and a taxable wage.
Processing within this time-frame would be fairer, less traumatising and less costly to the government. Meanwhile, the well-being, particularly emotional, of thousands of innocent, vulnerable people falls to good hearted volunteers, who, apparently unlike administrators, see asylum seekers as human beings just like ourselves.
Good though this work is, they would be the first to say that it is not right that such a function is needed. Like food banks, the very existence of this group shames the nation.
Let us treat people better and show our society’s worth.
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