High-concern areas of Home Office policy and guidance

This section highlights three areas of Home Office policy and guidance on the treatment of people detained which has given rise to major concerns over fairness, decency, and lawfulness. People impacted by detention, visitor group coordinators, campaigners, parliamentarians, and legal advisors will recognise these concerns.

These areas are the use of segregation, age assessments and the identification of people at risk of harm from detention (including victims of torture). These pieces of Home Office guidance are of concern usually for not one or two but for all of the following reasons:

• They fail people who are especially vulnerable, such as children, people who have been tortured, and severely mentally ill people with consequences that are destructive and long-lasting, in addition to their loss of liberty.

• They are set out in broad terms only and they typically lack sufficient detail to enable Home Office or contractor staff to make good operational decisions.

• They are flouted by Home Office or contractor staff.

• They may result in a person being kept in detention without proper reason, or even unlawfully.

• They repeatedly feature in successful or settled unlawful detention litigation against the Home Office, yet the Home Office resists revising the relevant instruction.

• They enable Home Office operational convenience to be achieved at an unacceptable and unjust human cost to the detained person.

As an organisation in solidarity with people detained for many years, AVID continues to collect evidence of the effect of these high-concern policies from member organisations, and bring this to the attention of the Home Office, along with other prominent detention organisations.