There has been a self-harm incident or suicide attempt requiring medical treatment almost every day on average over the last nearly six years across the Home Office’s largest immigration detention centres, the Guardian has learned.
Data obtained from the Home Office by the Scottish Refugee Council using freedom of information laws and shared with the Guardian provides information about self-harm incidents requiring medical treatment over the period from January 2018 until 30 September this year.
Over this period of 2,099 days there were 1,743 self-harm and suicide attempts so serious that they required medical treatment across four immigration removal centres: Brook House and Tinsley House near Gatwick airport, Heathrow, and Yarl’s Wood in Bedfordshire.
The Heathrow centre recorded 1,093 cases and Brook House had the second highest number, 498.
The Home Office has been repeatedly criticised for its failure to protect vulnerable people locked up in its immigration detention centres, most recently in the Brook House public inquiry, which found the safeguarding system in detention to be dysfunctional and that people’s mental health was allowed to deteriorate.
The inquiry found that healthcare staff did not always understand their safeguarding obligations and sometimes force was used to manage people with mental health problems. It called for a fundamental review of the safeguarding framework in immigration detention centres, known as rule 35. The Home Office has an adults at risk policy that is supposed to protect vulnerable immigration detainees.
There have been two deaths in detention centres in recent months that are believed to have been suicides: Frank Ospina, who was Colombian, died in March, and the Home Office confirmed the death of an Albanian man this month.
Graham O’Neill, a policy manager at the Scottish Refugee Council said: “Self-harm is a grimly reliable indicator of heightened suicide risk amongst those in immigration detention. These persistently high rates of self-harm requiring medical intervention of vulnerable people, against the backdrop of the authoritative Brook House inquiry report, are yet another reminder to the Home Office to not only start consistently and fully to uphold their adults at risk policy in detention, but, more fundamentally, to step back from the threatened ramping up of mandatory detention in the Illegal Migration Act 2023 and its fear-inducing Rwanda emergency law. To not step back will mean needlessly endangering lives.”
Emma Ginn, the director of the charity Medical Justice, which was a core participant in the Brook House inquiry, said: “Despite knowing the harm it causes, the government plans a massive expansion of detention, wilfully allowing the inevitable harm to the hundreds of thousands of men, women and children it aims to indefinitely detain.”
A Home Office spokesperson said: “The health and welfare of individuals in our care is of the utmost importance and we are committed to protecting vulnerable people in immigration detention. All incidents of self-harm are treated very seriously and every step is taken to try and prevent incidents of this nature. Our staff are rigorously trained to ensure the safety of residents, and all individuals have access to healthcare provided by doctors and nurses.”
In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org, or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org
