Deported criminals are among those returning to the United Kingdom by crossing the English Channel in small boats, an official report has revealed.
Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Prisons has confirmed that at least one migrant who had previously received a prison term of more than 12 months and was deemed to pose a “medium risk of harm” to others had crossed the Channel, and ended up being held in a facility hosting women and children.
“The safeguarding processes weren’t good enough to make sure [criminals] weren’t filtering out and making sure that people like that won’t be held in the same facility as women, children and families,” said HM Chief Inspector of Prisons Charlie Taylor of his annual report for 2021-22 on the state of play in prisons, immigration detention centres, and so on, in comments reported by LBC.
The report itself raised concerns that “[f]amilies, women and children were held for long periods, sometimes days, alongside unrelated men” and that there was “a lack of oversight of who was being transferred to and held at” a particular centre, within some detainees arriving at the centre “with incomplete paperwork, often without a risk assessment”.
The report also raised concerns with the conditions migrants are being detained in, with the infrastructure available to accommodate them clearly not sufficient to cope with a Channel crisis that has consistently grown in its scale and severity since the Conservative Party government first declared boat crossings a “major incident” in 2018.
“People are arriving wet, sometimes with petrol burns. People are still having to occasionally spend a night in a tent without proper bedding,” Taylor, a former schoolteacher, told reporters.
“I remain very concerned about the haphazard arrangements in place for those who have crossed the Channel in small boats,” he said.
“Promised facilities in Dover had not materialised when we inspected in November 2021, and we found that some families were sleeping on the floor in flimsy tents with inadequate bedding or crammed into facilities where some basic safeguards were not in place.”
Proposals to tackle the crisis, such as the stalled plan to disincentivise sea crossings by transferring migrants to Rwanda and other safe countries away from the British Isles, have so far done nothing to stem the flow of boat migrants, with over 440 people on more than a dozen boats reported to have reached England on Monday.