ACTIVISTS are to step up their efforts to close the Dungavel detention centre after the Home Office scrapped plans to build a replacement “short-term” holding unit beside Glasgow Airport.
Councillors in Renfrew refused planning permission for the “fast track removal centre” in Paisley, and while the Home Office said it was “disappointed” by the decision, it would not appeal against it.
Campaign groups We Will Rise, the Unity Centre and Stop Detention Scotland (SDS) said that during the campaign against the new centre, “it was an obvious danger that local rejection of this would lead to a decision to keep Dungavel open”.
However, they said replacing it would have been a “furthering of the UK’s brutal border regime, seeing migrants and refugees being removed from their support and families faster and further without adequate access to legal support”.
In a joint statement, they said public opinion against the proposed new unit had helped defeat it.
“The clear message from campaign groups, Renfrewshire Council and the Scottish people of ‘not here, not anywhere’ is what played the defining role in the Home Office’s failure to enact this savage plan,” they said.
“Our message to the UK Government and Home Office is clear, that we can, and will, continue to fight their inhumane immigration system in any arena we can.”
Jennifer Dear, a member of SDS and We Will Rise said: “The building of a new fast track detention centre in Paisley would have been a disaster for those detained there.
“The people of Renfrewshire essentially forced the hand of the Home Office in an un-devolved immigration policy issue.”
By mobilising public opinion, the group said they could beat the “brutal UK border regime” and added that their next target was Dungavel itself.
“We shift our energies once again to closing Dungavel. After Dungavel, we will move on to the next detention facility. Our message remains: not here, not anywhere.”
A Home Office spokesman said: “We always made clear that the closure of Dungavel immigration removal centre was dependent on the opening of a new short-term holding facility in Scotland.
“As the application for a new facility at Paisley was rejected, Dungavel will remain open.”
Mark Macmillan, Renfrewshire Council leader, said: “The proposed facility’s location in a commercial and industrial area would also have introduced an inappropriate use through the attendant noise, activity and disturbance.”
Dungavel, near Strathaven, South Lanarkshire, has long been a political issue, with regular debates and protests around the treatment of detainees and the length of some detentions.
In the latest high-profile case there, a woman from Singapore, who has been married to a British man for 27 years is being held pending her deportation.
Irene Clennel, 53, from the village of Ouston, in Durham, was given indefinite leave to remain in the UK, but periods spent in Singapore caring for her elderly parents appear to have invalidated her residential status.
She said she has made repeated attempts – both in Singapore and in the UK – to re-apply for permission to live with her husband, John.
During a visit to a reporting centre in Middlesbrough last month, she was detained and brought to Dungavel, and told it was because she had failed to make her own arrangements to return to Singapore.
“The kids are born here. My husband is from the country. So I don’t see what is the issue. But they keep rejecting all the applications,” Clennel said.
Her husband was in poor health and she had become his principal carer. She added: “I want to be with my family. If I do go back, I don’t know when I’ll be able to see them again.”
SNP MSP Linda Fabiani said: “The UK Government must make a serious effort to explore alternatives to detention, as the current regime is simply not treating people with the respect they deserve.”
The Home Office said all applications for leave to remain in the UK are considered on their individual merits and in line with the immigration rules.
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