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Immigration Solicitors

G4S takes over healthcare in immigration detention centres (15 October 2014)

Date: 15/10/2014
Duncan Lewis, Immigration Solicitors, G4S takes over healthcare in immigration detention centres

G4S has taken over healthcare at immigration detention centres across England, after being awarded seven-year contracts worth £24.3 million by NHS England.

Online publisher OpenDemocracy.net says that G4S will be running medical care at four immigration detention centres where men, women and children are held before being deported from the UK.

The company is taking over healthcare contracts from its rival Serco, which was recently at the centre of an investigation into allegations of improper sexual relationships between some staff and vulnerable female detainees at Yarl’s Wood Immigration Detention Centre in Bedfordshire.

G4S guards were also implicated in the death of a man being deported from Britain, who died after being heavily restrained on a British Airways flight out of Britain.

Jimmy Mubenga, 46, died four years ago. Last year an inquest found that the father-of-five had been unlawfully killed.

G4S has now taken over healthcare at Yarl’s Wood, as well as Brook House and Tinsley House immigration detention centres near Gatwick Airport. The company is also managing healthcare facilities at a unit for women and children detainees at Pease Pottage.

Immigration detention centres house failed asylum seekers who are due to be deported from the UK – as well as asylum seekers detained under the Fast-track detention process, under which cases thought to be straightforward are fast-tracked.

There is concern among immigration experts, however, that some asylum seekers are being deported before a proper assessment of their psychological condition has been carried out – or before full consideration has been given to their application for asylum, or any appeal they may be able to lodge against a failed asylum application.

As a result, some of those deported have been returned to their home countries to face the likelihood of torture, detention or even death.

The housing of vulnerable women and children in immigration detention centres has also provoked a public and media backlash, with young children potentially being separated from their fathers and held in prison-like conditions – as well as families being split up.

In 2010, the Children’s Commissioner for England reported that nurses working for Serco had failed to record accurately the history of female and child detainees at Yarl’s Wood: in one report, the condition of children in a family was recorded as “happy” and “jolly” with “nil of note” recorded on the family’s history. However, it was discovered that the mother in question had been raped in her home country of Africa and had tested positive for Hepatitis B.

Responsibility for healthcare in immigration detention centres was transferred from the Home Office to NHS England in 2013, in the hope that this would improve healthcare in immigration detention units. G4S took over the contract to provide healthcare from Serco in September this year.

Duncan Lewis Immigration Solicitors

Duncan Lewis immigration solicitors can advise migrants facing deportation from the UK on the Fast-track detention process, as well as asylum applications and appeals to the First Tier Tribunal and Upper Tribunal.

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