arls Wood is a Serco run immigration removal centre in Milton Ernest, built in an
industrial park more than an hour from central London. Allegations have been made
against Serco staff, including of sexual assaults by guards against detainees, yet the
British government continues to use the facility.
During a visit inside the centre, I briefly experienced the prison-like conditions suffered
by immigrants on a daily basis. After submitting myself to a biometric reading of my
index finger a Serco brochure in reception helpfully informed me that the information
could be kept indefinitely because the Data Protection Act is so vaguely worded I met
a young couple from Sri Lanka who were confused and anxious.
The woman was pregnant, and told me Serco staff often didnt believe her when she said
she needed to visit a local hospital for care. She was depressed and worried about her
baby. She regularly missed meals and begged me to help them get out. Thankfully, they
were released shortly after my visit, to an undisclosed location.
Emma Mlotshwa is the head of Medical Justice, an NGO that provides doctors
toimmigrants in detention. They offer independent assessments of asylum seekers
condition while campaigning for the end of prolonged incarceration. She told me that
the system was making people sick.
The lowest price wins the contract, she said. They cut corners, which results in less
care, lower paid staff, lower qualified staff and at Yarls Wood, this deliberately aims to
fudge responsibility between Serco and the Home Office. Serco often tries to stop us
visiting, saying detainees cant be found or we have the wrong paperwork.
One thing is clear: keeping the Sri Lankan couple locked up for months was about
punishment; they werent a security risk, nor flush with funds and able to disappear into
the community. This brutal treatment is supposedly a deterrent for future migrant
arrivals landing in a country where politics is increasingly defined by leaders who talk
tough against the most vulnerable.
The desperation of immigrants behind bars was repeated during my visits to the Geo
Group-run Harmondsworth and Serco-managed Colnbrook sites, both near Heathrow
airport. The centres will be taken over later this year by Mitie, a less well-known British
provider than G4S and Serco.
In October 2013, a large fire broke out in Mitie's Campsfield detention centre.
Subsequent investigations found no sprinklers had been installed. Mitie's CEO, Ruby
McGregor Smith, told me that when her firm took over the facility from the Home
Office, she wasnt asked to install a sprinkler system.
She was confident that she had a good team to manage what would soon be, according
to the corporations February press release, the largest single private sector provider of
immigration detention services to the Home Office, less than three years after entering
the market.
I asked McGregor Smith why she thought her company could run these centres any
differently than other contractors. She talked of a more humane policy towards asylum
seekers she damned G4S and Serco for their failings in Australia, and argued that both
firms were clearly incapable of managing remote facilities, but didnt admit this to the
government in Canberra.
She also slammed competitors for having a prison culture. Theres a danger, she
said, that if you bring in companies who have run some of the toughest prisons in the
world to run detention centres, you wont get anything different. Thats all they know.
Nick Hardwick, Britains chief inspector of prisons, told me that contractors like Serco,
G4S or Mitie arent entirely to blame for problems in detention centres. What causes
people's despair in immigration removal centres, the bulk of them, why they are such
unhappy and sad places, is because of peoples distress in how their immigration case is
being handled. Its not generally about the centre itself.
When detainees are released, they still often face indefinite insecurity. In Sheffield, I
visited G4S housing in one of the poorest areas of the city. On a windy summer day, with
Roma children playing in the streets, I saw squalid houses, with up to nine men packed
into small rooms. I heard stories about the Home Office taking years to reach a decision
on immigration claims, which precludes many migrants from building a decent life,
given their lack of work rights.
G4S in Sheffield is opposed by local campaigners, such as the South Yorkshire migration
and asylum action group. The privatisation of asylum seeker housing has led
toallegations of corruption, incompetence and wilful blindness. A senior Serco source in
Australia told me last year that his company wanted to run all Australia's asylum
housing, concerned that the immigration centres would empty and their bottom line
suffer.
The political class in Britain rarely highlights the personal cost of outsourcing the most
basic social services. The complete privatisation of welfare services is a real possibility,
despite G4S and others failing to assist the unemployed after being paid by the state to
do so. Across the UK, Europe and the world, the same few companies are competing for
an ever-widening range of contracts.
What I saw and heard across Britain confirms the startling facts: poverty is soaring and
the government and corporate media response is to pass these people into the warm
embrace of multinational bureaucracy.
