The Home Office ordered the removal of child-friendly murals from the controversial Manston detention camp near Ramsgate, as well as a separate reception centre, the Guardian has learned.
The i newspaper revealed last week that the immigration minister, Robert Jenrick, had ordered the removal of colourful murals of Disney cartoon characters including Mickey Mouse and Baloo the bear painted on the walls at the Kent Intake Unit (KIU) at Dover.
The KIU, 20 miles from the Manston camp, is where children, mainly those who are unaccompanied, are processed after arriving on small boats.
Now it has emerged that the order to paint over murals also extended to Manston, where at its busiest time, towards the end of last year, about 4,000 people were held – including many children ranging from babies to teenagers.
It is understood that the murals at both sites were painted over last Tuesday by the Ministry of Justice’s estates team.
The child-friendly images at Manston were praised in an inspection report published last month by His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Prisons (HMIP), on conditions at Manston, KIU and another initial reception centre on the Kent coast, Western Jet Foil.
Referencing the decorations, the HMIP report states: “The family marquee was decorated in bright, cheerful colours.”
That praise was set against multiple concerns raised in the report about the welfare of children.
The report found that children were detained for “far too long” at all of the reception sites, with 232 children held for more than 96 hours, although the time limit is currently 24 hours.
The longest a child was held was 19 days. In one case, a 17-year-old girl who had a 10-month-old baby she said was conceived through rape was held at KIU for almost 24 hours.
It was initially reported that Jenrick had said the murals had to be removed because they were “too welcoming” but on Tuesday he told MPs they were not “age appropriate” for teenage migrants.
However, the Home Office has admitted that unaccompanied children as young as nine have arrived in the UK on small boats, and there is a family section at Manston that includes facilities for parents with babies and toddlers.
At prime minister’s questions on Wednesday, the SNP MP Peter Wishart called on the deputy prime minister, Oliver Dowden, who was standing in for Rishi Sunak, to condemn the Home Office’s decision to paint over the KIU mural.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything quite so grotesque as the painting over of Mickey Mouse on a children’s mural, as was done by the Home Office in a detention centre in Kent,” Wishart said.
“No minister so far has raised the necessary compassion or concern to speak out about this. So can I ask the deputy prime minister to look into the deeper recesses of his soul and just simply condemn it?”
Dowden replied: “I’ll tell him what real compassion looks like and that means stopping the vile people-smuggling trade across the Channel condemning women and children to death.”
The murals row has come at a time when refugee and children’s charities have raised profound concerns about what they describe as “non-concessions” in the illegal migration bill that will allow unaccompanied children to be in detention centres when they arrive with no time limit
Andy Baxter, assistant general secretary of the Prison Officers Association trade union, said: “The instruction from the minister conflicts with both the immigration inspectorate and HMIP’s ambitions to make vulnerable children feel safe.”
He added that his members believed the instruction conflicted with the policy of promoting the welfare of children in their care.
A Home Office spokesperson said: “Manston is a short-term holding facility where we conduct comprehensive security and health checks as part of the arrivals process. All buildings are regularly reviewed and assessed for health and safety compliance.
“Our priority is to stop the boats and disrupt the people smugglers. The government has gone further by introducing legislation which will ensure that those people arriving in the UK illegally are detained and promptly removed to their country of origin or a safe third country.”
