Home Office's Dungavel detentions spark call for powers to be handed to Holyrood

It follows revelations that asylum seekers arriving in England after crossing the Channel have been transported 500 miles by bus to be processed in Scotland.

Until recently, asylum seekers – often suffering physically and mentally from an extremely dangerous crossings in flimsy boats – were sent to Home Office short-term holding facilities in southern England.

But the Guardian reports that some arrivals are now being forced to undertake an eight to nine-hour bus journey to Dungavel detention centre in Strathaven, South Lanarkshire.

Scottish Detainee Visitors director Kate Alexander told the paper: “When I visited Dungavel on 14 October, I learned that around 50 people who had crossed the Channel in small boats had been brought there for ‘processing’. Staff said this was the second time it had happened in a month, but not before that.

“I was profoundly shocked that the Home Office is putting people traumatised from a dangerous Channel crossing on a bus journey of over 500 miles immediately on arrival.”

Responding to the report – and Priti Patel’s vows to take tougher action on people crossing the Channel – the Greens said the Home Office’s “disgraceful” conduct shows Holyrood should be in charge of immigration in Scotland.

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Scottish Greens immigration spokesperson Ross Greer said: "Many of the people who have crossed the Channel have fled war, poverty, violence and persecution. They deserve our support, empathy and solidarity, not the disgraceful hostility and scapegoating we have seen from the Home Office. The last thing they need is to be put on a 500 mile bus journey and detained in somewhere as inhumane and brutal as Dungavel.

"The Home Office has shown time and again that it cannot be trusted to ensure the welfare of refugees. It has a long and shameful record of institutional malice and cruelty. The same goes for the Tories, who established the policy of making Britain a 'hostile environment' for immigrants and presided over the Windrush scandal.”

He added: "With independence we can build a fairer, greener and inclusive Scotland that extends a hand of friendship, rather than a UK which detains refugees in prison-like conditions and sends vans into our communities to remove residents in dawn raids. We can take a different path and introduce a humanitarian and welcoming immigration policy that reflects the better society and economy we want to build."

Patel and the UK Government are currently trying to pass the anti-migrant Nationality and Borders Bill, which campaigners say will lead to the criminalisation of asylum seekers.

A Home Office spokesperson told the Guardian: “The British public have had enough of seeing people die in the Channel while ruthless criminal gangs profit from their misery and our new plan for immigration will fix the broken system which encourages migrants to make this lethal journey. People should claim asylum in the first safe country they reach – rather than making dangerous journeys to the UK.

“That is why we will have rules in place to make asylum claims inadmissible where people have travelled through or have a connection to safe countries.”