The Home Office has proposed a massive expansion to two immigration detention centres, bypassing local councils through fast tracked planning applications.
Campaigners said they were “shocked” and “depressed” by the news that the Home Office wanted to reopen and expand a previously closed centre and more than double the beds at another that reopened last year.
Haslar Immigration Removal Centre in Gosport was closed in 2015, a few years after it was described by the inspectorate as being “the worst accommodation in the immigration estate”.
Now, the Home Office wants to reopen and redevelop the facility, more than quadrupling beds from 130 to 600, making it one of the biggest immigration detention centres in Europe, just behind Harmondsworth in Heathrow.
At the same time, a consultation has just closed on the Home Office’s plan to scale Campsfield House IRC in Oxfordshire from 160 beds to 400. The centre was brought back into use in December after previously shutting down due to years of issues including riots.
Plans to reopen the detention centres were proposed by the Conservatives, but are being carried out under the current government. Reopening Haslar and Campsfield will cost nearly £4m.
‘Conveyor belt of harm’
Gee Manoharan, co-director of Association of Visitors to Immigration Detainees, and who was deatined across three sites after arriving from Sri Lanka, said the environment inside is “volatile and violent” and it functions as a “conveyor belt of harm”.
He told The i Paper: “People often picture detention as simply waiting for an immigration decision and deportation. My experience was that it was waking up every day not knowing when I’d leave, whether I’d see my family again or what would happen next.
“The most difficult part was the uncertainty. I did not know how long I would be held or what would happen next, and that loss of control affected every part of daily life.
“For me, Immigration Detention centres felt like a conveyor belt of harm. I saw people driven to hunger strike because they felt unheard, while anxiety and uncertainty shaped every day. My roommate was self-harming and I was asked by the staff to look after him.”
Both applications are being rushed through under a new planning application system which was introduced by the government last year. Known as the “Crown development route”, developments deemed to be of “national importance” which can be submitted directly to the Planning Inspectorate, rather than the local council.
Only two other applications have been made in this way so far: redeveloping a border facility and pulling down Grenfell Tower.
Campsfield House is to be scaled up to 400 beds despite local oppositionThe measures come as part of the Government’s plans to tackle immigration. Expanding both centres will increase detention capacity by 40 per cent, which would then lead to more than 45,000 people to be removed over the next decade, the government said.
The Home Office has closed 11 hotels that were housing asylum seekers, replacing hotel rooms with more basic accommodation like disused army barracks. 171,000 people migrated to the UK last year, the lowest level since 2012 and excluding the pandemic.
Amnesty International believes immigration detention centres “waste huge amounts of taxpayer money”, in part because the majority of detainees end up being released into the community anyway.
Only 44 per cent of people leaving detention were removed from the UK over the year ending March 2026.
‘Irrevocable harm’
Amnesty’s Refugee and Migrant Rights Director Steve Valdez-Symonds said: “Until the Home Office can show it only detains people when it’s truly necessary, and only for as short a time as possible, it shouldn’t be given any more space to detain people – let alone hundreds more beds.”
Mike Brown, who lives near Gosport, used to run a voluntary visiting service when the Haslar was last open.
The Haslar centre has sparked local oppositionHe said: “It was a really cold, draughty kind of enamelled brick Victorian institution. There were dormitories for about 18 to 20 men, and there were portable dividers that would separate men into pairs, just with a space for their bed and very little else.
“The thing that really gnawed at their mental health was the fact was the fact that the length of their detention was indeterminate.
“Most of the people we visited were there for months, and one of our visitors had somebody that she’d been seeing for two years.”
Ally Swadling, Lead Legal Education Officer at Right To Remain, said: “Detention is not supposed to be punishment, and yet it looks and functions like a prison, and it causes irrevocable harm.”
A Home Office spokesperson said: “The public rightly expect that we seek to remove those with no right to be here, be they illegal migrants or foreign-born criminals.
“That is why this Government has recently expanded capacity at our immigration removal centres, and why we are proud to have increased removals and deportations by 41% since taking office.
“Detention for the purpose of removal is used only where there is a realistic prospect of removal within a reasonable timeframe.”
The public consultation on Haslar closes on 6 August.
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