We Need to Talk About Brook House
The 'UK's Most Notorious Detention Centre' provided inspiration for my debut novel SANCTUARY and remains, one fears, a stain on our collective moral conscience.
As a junior barrister, I cut my teeth on immigration bail hearings. The stakes were considered lower than those in, say, deportation or asylum appeals. But they weren’t always. Sometimes the brief would contain expert medical evidence that a client was suffering from complex PTSD or suicidal ideation. And while such reports offered hope - vulnerable people were generally not suitable for detention; there was a good chance of persuading the judge to grant bail - lurking in the back of one’s mind was always the fear: what if the judge refused?
Something else bothered me about such hearings too, namely why on earth the Home Office hadn’t released the client themselves? Yet, tempting as it sometimes was to label them all malevolent psychopaths, I soon realised the answer was probably far simpler. The likely cause was incompetence or neglect; principally a failure properly to review the files. I’ll come back to this.
If you haven’t yet read Holly Bancroft’s blistering report in The Independent last Wednesday about the continuing horrors occurring inside Brook House Immigration Removal Centre, then please do. People need to know about what goes on in such places – not least British taxpayers, in whose name they are run.*
The report makes for distressing, if by now familiar, reading. It reveals vivid evidence of the ‘chaotic conditions in which restraint and force are being used against vulnerable migrants’, and cites warnings from Emma Ginn, the director of the charity Medical Justice, of ‘widespread failures’, including the ‘failure of clinical safeguards, inappropriate and indiscriminate use of segregation, inadequate healthcare provision, lack of medication and access to hospital, and unnecessary and excessive use of force on torture survivors and people who have lost mental capacity through deterioration during long periods of detention’.
When working as an immigration lawyer, I bore witness to similar accounts of mistreatment and neglect, and found it staggering how poorly some of my clients were treated. Yet what troubled me equally was a nagging sense that by arguing points of law, and by turning away vulnerable clients whose cases fell outside its scope, I was complicit in a system which appeared to prioritise profit over basic humanity. It was to explore these thoughts that I began writing my debut novel, Sanctuary. And without wishing to overstate my case, the story could hardly be more pertinent.
The novel follows a flawed, idealistic lawyer in the throes of a personal and professional crisis. Posing as a refugee, he claims asylum in his own country, gets detained and finds himself investigating a series of abuses so reprehensible they barely seem plausible. Fanciful stuff, you may think. But what I didn’t know at the time was that much of what I was writing was taking place in real life – most of it in Brook House (in this regard, see screenshots from the novel’s Endnote at the end of this piece).
The same was true of the most heinous, racist and inhuman abuse depicted in the novel. I’d deliberately dreamt up something so extreme that I believed it could never happen in real life. But in May 2024, while Sanctuary was on submission to publishers, Lighthouse Reports broke a gut-wrenching story that mirrored the abuse so closely I felt physically sick and began to wonder if I’d lost all sense of reality. And though the report was picked up by the international press, I struggled to understand why it wasn’t all over every news outlet.
With hindsight, neither development should have surprised me. Like the revelations of the latest mistreatment at Brook House, they stand as evidence of what happens when we as a society fail to prioritise humanity over profit.
Towards the end of the report, Bancroft writes, ‘Ginn also warned that staff were continually failing to report a person’s likelihood of carrying out suicide to the Home Office in order that their detention could be reconsidered’. Reading this triggered a memory of a particularly intense bail hearing I once appeared in, which underscores the critical importance of exposés like this one. People need to know what goes on behind all those closed doors.
It was two days before Christmas, the hearing was in Stoke-on-Trent, and the evidence bundle had been meticulously prepared by an excellent solicitors firm. Along with the usual documentation, evidence of a bail address and copies of the relevant law and guidance, it contained two medical reports: one by a psychiatrist, the other by a psychotherapist. Both experts documented previous attempts by the client to take his own life, both assessed him as high risk of suicide, and both stated unequivocally that this risk was aggravated by his ongoing detention.
On arrival I found my opponent, the Home Office presenting officer, and invited him to take instructions on conceding the case. But for reasons best known to himself, he refused, adding that the judge had not granted a single bail application all morning. Not what I wanted to hear.
I called the solicitor for instructions on whether to withdraw the application. To clarify: some judges seemed more inclined to refuse bail than others, and a refusal meant waiting another month before we could reapply. If, however, we withdrew before the hearing, we needed to wait only a week for another chance - and might be allocated a more sympathetic judge.
‘Not an option, mate: he’ll kill himself,’ the solicitor said.
Not for the first time, I was struck by the sheer lunacy of the situation. Why was I here?
‘All rise!’ The judge entered, and to the best of my recollection, this is how it went:
‘M’am,’ I began. ‘Have you…’
‘Mr’-she consulted her notes-‘Gaisford. Will you at least wait until I have had a chance to sit down before addressing the bench?’
I glanced at the tiny image of my detained client on the videolink, before she released a customary ‘Yeees’ - the indication for me to proceed.
‘Have you had a chance to read the papers, M’am?’
‘I have indeed.’
‘Then you’ve seen the expert medical reports, the suitability guidance and the statutory bail address?’
‘I have.’
I remember my leg shaking. What I was about to do felt discourteous and very high risk, but I couldn’t afford to give her any rope to hang me with.
‘Then I request a grant of bail and have no further submissions,’ I said.
A few minutes later, reluctantly it seemed, she granted my client bail. And I shan’t ever forget her parting shot.
‘I hope you’re happy with yourself, counsel? Thanks to you, your client will now be spending Christmas on his own.’
I didn’t remind her that he was Muslim and didn’t celebrate Christmas.
Later, in 2017, BBC Panorama blew the whistle on abuses in Brook House, and for a time at least, I was able to refer to the program as evidence to secure my clients’ release from the facility. Such is the power of reports like these.
Eight years on, one wonders: is there something inherently wrong with the culture in Brook House — that even after the full-blown public inquiry following the 2017 exposé, and despite the prison inspectorate raising further concerns in 2024 and 2025, mistreatment of detainees seems to be continuing? Quite possibly. Bancroft highlights, for instance, that according to the latest figures, use of force by officers at the site is higher than at any of the UK’s other detention centres.
Either way, the problem appears deeper, wider and more systemic. If we must hold people in immigration removal centres, might we at least impose strict time limits on detention, as our partners in Europe do? And in the immediate term, rather than continue plans to expand our perfunctory and inhumane immigration detention network, might it be more dignified and altogether less costly to follow Spain’s example of last week and announce an amnesty? At risk of sounding didactic, the answer is almost certainly yes.
*Do, of course, also read the comments/responses by Serco and the Home Office at the end of the Bancroft’s report.
Powerful