An Albanian man who was being held in a secure psychiatric unit was taken directly from his hospital bed to a Home Office deportation flight, a report has revealed.
The Independent Monitoring Boards (IMB), a watchdog for prisons and immigration removal centres, has raised concerns about the incident last summer in its annual report published on Thursday.
According to the report, the removal paperwork was served on the man at the secure psychiatric unit by a clinician there rather than a Home Office official.
The man signed release documents but the IMB monitors said they were uncertain he knew what he was signing – all the paperwork was in English and they were unclear about his level of understanding.
When he was removed from the psychiatric unit he was forced to wait in a van of the Home Office contractors before being put on a plane to Albania.
When the monitors asked the Home Office about the incident, officials said it complied with published policies but did not engage further with the concerns raised.
There are almost weekly deportation charter flights to Albania. The IMB inspected nine of them and found that treatment of those removed “fell short of fair and humane treatment in all respects”.
The report also raised concerns about a fourfold increase in the use of restraints – from four incidents in 2022 to 16 in 2023.
Some of those removed had been classified as vulnerable while in detention and the IMB was aware of three incidents where returnees had tried to take their lives just hours before their flights were due to take off. This did not halt the removals.
The quality of coach drivers taking people from detention centres to airports was also criticised, with a third of the coaches the monitors travelled in deemed to be driven unsafely. In one case a man was transferred from one vehicle to another by the side of the motorway after a smell of electrical burning became apparent in the first vehicle.
Emma Ginn, director of the charity Medical Justice, said: “To be held in a van for seven hours is concerning for anyone, let alone someone so unwell that they needed to be in a psychiatric hospital.
“Both acting as a clinician in assessing their patient’s mental capacity and having some immigration enforcement role, raises concern that clinicians can be drawn into sanctioning actions that may transpire to have serious adverse consequences to their patient’s health.”
A Home Office spokesperson said: “We expect the highest standards from staff working on the returns process and will assess all recommendations from this report, responding as soon as possible.”
• In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org, or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org
