A ‘Review into the Welfare in detention of vulnerable persons’ has just been published by the Shaw Review. The report made 64 recommendations including:
- The Home Office should prepare and publish a strategic plan for immigration detention.
- The Home Office should review the adequacy of the numbers of immigration staff embedded in all prisons.
- People with Learning Difficulties should be presumed unsuitable for detention.
- The Home Office and the Department of Health work together to consider whether current arrangements for safeguarding are adequate.
- All caseworkers should meet detainees on whom they are taking decisions or writing monthly detention reviews at least once. The meeting should be face-to-face, or by video link, or by telephone.
- The Home Office should give further consideration to ways of strengthening the legal safeguards against excessive length of detention.
- The Home Office should investigate the development of alternatives to detention.
- The Home Office should consider how far electronic monitoring can contribute to the goal of fair and efficient border control.