Staff at a Home Office immigration detention centre pinned England flags to their uniforms while guarding migrants, a damning report from the prisons and detention watchdog has revealed. The Independent Monitoring Boards’ national annual report, published on Wednesday, said the use of St George’s Cross flags risked perceptions of bias and intimidation among detained people, especially after recent immigration protests in which flag displays were prominent.
The interim IMB chair, Jane Leech, wrote that the board concluded the practice raised concerns about professional standards and workplace culture. The report is based on 127 annual reports from prisons, young offender institutions and immigration detention centres, and paints what it calls a “consistent and deeply troubling picture” of systemic failures.
“IMB report reveals staff wore England flags at immigration detention centre, as prison conditions are laid bare.”
Across England and Wales, prisoners live among vermin, spend most of their days locked in cells with no activities, and face violence from gangs that control entire wings. Toilets remain broken for weeks, inmates are not fed properly, and medical assistance is hard to access. “Failures once regarded as serious are at risk of becoming normalised,” the report concludes.
Among the cases highlighted: a man died in a cell fire at HMP Garth in Lancashire after an alarm apparently failed to sound; several prisoners were bitten during a spider infestation at HMP Bullingdon in Oxfordshire, with one warned he might lose his leg; and a spike in self-harm at HMP Foston Hall in Derbyshire during hot weather because managers had no funds to buy fans.
The report also provides the first watchdog overview of the Home Office’s controversial one-in-one-out scheme, under which some small boat arrivals are forcibly returned to France. The IMB found that children had been unlawfully detained under the scheme, despite the agreement stating lone children must not be included. At Gatwick immigration removal centre, 12% of those detained for one-in-one-out were children.
Conditions in immigration detention centres are equally critical, with the report describing “a troubling picture of systemic failings across immigration detention that continue year after year, exposing detained people to avoidable harm while falling short of the minimum standards that are meant to be upheld in detention.”
The crisis predates Keir Starmer’s government. On entering office in summer 2024, the then justice secretary Shabana Mahmood introduced early release schemes and diverted prisoners to police cells, warning that the criminal justice system was close to collapse. “There is now only one way to avert disaster,” she said. Despite those measures, the threat of the prison population exceeding the maximum of 89,800 continues to haunt the Ministry of Justice.