Asylum seekers win funding for inquiry into 'appalling' overcrowded UK immigration centre

Detainees at the Manston processing centre were locked up for weeks in unsanitary conditions

An inquiry is being launched to examine the treatment of migrants at a processing centre in the UK.

Asylum seekers who had been kept in "appalling" conditions at a former UK military base have won their challenge to stop the Home Office downgrading an inquiry into it.

Thousands of small boat migrants had been kept for weeks longer than the 24-hour processing limit at Manston Immigration Centre in Kent.

Despite the centre being designed to hold a maximum of 1,600 people, it was accommodating around 4,000, with the overcrowding leading to outbreaks of diphtheria and scabies. Many people were forced to sleep on dirty floors.

A view of the Manston immigration short-term holding facility.

Home Secretary Yvette Cooper had sought to downgrade an inquiry into the catalogue of failings at the centre, but days before a legal challenge was due to be heard the Home Office made a U-turn on the decision.

There will now be an independent public inquiry, which will include funded legal representation for the claimants.

Refugee charity Care4Calais described conditions inside Manston, a former military base in Kent, as "unthinkably bad", which migrants described as being like a prison.

The facility opened as a processing centre in February 2022 and was meant to host migrants for 24 hours while they underwent security and identity checks. But reports soon surfaced that people were being kept there for several weeks in conditions described by those staying there as being like prison.

A young girl runs towards the fence carrying a message in a bottle describing conditions inside the Manston immigration short-term holding facility. PA

Around 18,000 people out of 29,000 processed between June and November 2022 were detained beyond the 24-hour limit.

A letter thrown over the wall at the time claimed there were pregnant women and sick detainees who were not receiving treatment. It also claimed there was a disabled child at the site and added: “He's really bad, they don't even care about him.”

Conditions at the site left the UK’s immigration watchdog “speechless”. The independent chief inspector of borders and immigration, David Neal, described the facility as “pretty wretched”.

The detainees were kept in tented accommodation with poor sanitation and washing facilities. In 2022 a man who had contracted diphtheria amid a large outbreak at the site died.

An Independent Monitoring Boards report said migrants were “accommodated in marquees which we would describe as at best basic, at worst unsanitary and unacceptable”. Conditions were also described as “dire” by senior MPs.

Asylum seekers asked for an inquiry in November 2022 and this was granted by the former Home Secretary James Cleverly last year.

However, Ms Cooper sought to downgrade the inquiry to a non-statutory one, without a requirement to hold it in public.

It will now be held in public but will remain a non-statutory inquiry, which does not have the powers to compel witnesses to give evidence under oath, however, the complaints will still receive funding for legal representation.

In separate legal proceedings, more than 100 former detainees are suing the Home Office for unlawful detention.

The Home Office has not commented on the case.

A person gestures through a fence at the immigration processing centre in Manston, Kent in southern England. Reuters

Security staff work to cover the view of people thought to be migrants in the Manston centre. PA

An aerial view of the facility in Manston. PA

Seven hundred people were moved to the centre for safety reasons after incendiary devices were thrown at a Border Force migrant centre in Dover on Sunday. Reuters

A man holds up a baby in the immigration processing centre. Reuters

A woman at the Manston centre. Reuters

A tent inside the processing centre. Reuters

The entrance to the Manston immigration holding facility. AP