How routine is routinely?
Home Secretary just evades getting stuck in a hole
There was a hefty swerve performed this morning by Suella Braverman on the Today programme just as it was becoming clear that she was in something of a hole.
It goes without saying it was the home secretary who had dug herself into the situation, as she appeared on the Radio Four show to deliver the predictable word soup that ministers dish up on almost every subject matter.
Ms Braverman was ostensibly there to waffle on vaguely about one of the government’s next u-turns on net zero commitments. But, taking the opportunity, presenter Justin Webb turned to reports that Ms Braverman halted annual inspections of immigration detention centres seemingly because ministers were tiring of reading conclusions which awkwardly kept reminding them that vulnerable detainees were being left unprotected from abuse.
It followed from an article in The Guardian, by David Neal, the independent chief inspector of borders and immigration (ICIBI), after an inquiry found evidence of verbal and physical abuse in 2017 at Brook House immigration removal centre, with detainees in ‘prison-like’ conditions while staff made racist and dehumanising comments and were quick to use force.
Mr Neal wrote: ‘When I submitted my last report to the home secretary in September 2022, I called for a meeting with the immigration minister, Robert Jenrick, to give him the latest findings and to convey my concern about the lack of progress in making improvements to immigration detention.
‘I told him that the system – specifically the mechanism through which medical staff at immigration removal centres can bring vulnerability concerns to the attention of Home Office officials effectively – was not working. I said that there was a need for a “foot on the ball moment” and a concerted effort to do better to provide protections for vulnerable detainees.’
‘The response? My discussion with Jenrick was quickly followed by notification from the home secretary, Suella Braverman, that she was terminating the commission for an annual ICIBI inspection.’
It’s not so easy to dismiss Mr Neal as a wishy-washy member of the liberal, do-gooding, elite, he is a retired brigadier of the Royal Military Police and former head of the unit in Afghanistan, who was only appointed to his current role in Marvh 2021 by Priti Patel.
He wrote that while in Afghanistan he ‘never once saw my soldiers behaving in anything other than a decent, respectful and professional way with the detainees’.
But added: ‘It is all the more shocking, then, that as the Brook House inquiry has found, immigration detention staff at a site just outside Gatwick airport should have been capable of such cruelty towards individuals whose alleged transgression was to be in the country without proper documentation.’
Challenged by Justin Webb, Ms Braverman said it wasn’t true inspections had stopped - only introduced by her predecessor Sajid Javid in 2018 - saying firmly ‘no, we haven’t stopped inspections’.
Braverman was determinedly trying to keep things as unfocused as possible, but Webb went on.
‘Did you terminate the annual inspections? I want to be really clear about this… this would be pretty serious matter, he would be lying in his article in The Guardian. He says these annual inspections have been terminated, is he right or wrong?’
Faced with this challenge - the obvious implication being that if Mr Neal was not lying then it could only be the home secretary - Ms Braverman rearranged her words:
‘What we’ve changed is an annual report from the inspectorate…’
JW: ‘Right, so it was terminated.’
SB: ‘…but we have not ceased inspections of detention centres.’
JW: ‘Sure… but that wasn’t what he was claiming. What he says is his specific [inspections] that have come up with a number of things that caused difficulties in the Home Office, that those inspections were terminated and you accept that that was done?’
SB: ‘I accept that we disagreed with his request for an annual report but that is not the same as having regular inspections routinely on all of our detention centres.’
Of course, ‘routinely’ in this context can mean almost anything and it left it rather clear that Mr Neal had not been lying at all but Ms Braverman has managed to shovel just enough sand into the hole to stop her sinking any further.