A detention centre in Kent that processed the claims of asylum seekers who had arrived in the UK on small boats was “overcrowded, squalid and insanitary”, a public inquiry has heard.
The hearing is investigating the decisions, actions and circumstances which led to the conditions experienced by those detained at Manston between 1 June 2022 and 22 November 2022.
Overcrowding at the former RAF base in autumn 2022 led to an outbreak of diphtheria and scabies. Newly arrived asylum seekers were forced to sleep on filthy floors or on flattened cardboard boxes, and toilets overflowed with faeces. Women and children were forced to sleep close to unrelated men and there were claims of assaults by guards.
A Kurdish asylum seeker, Hussein Haseeb Ahmed, who was processed at Manston, died in hospital after contracting diphtheria on 19 November 2022, while a pregnant Syrian woman suffered a miscarriage after being denied immediate medical attention.
At the height of the crisis, the centre, designed to accommodate a maximum of 1,600 people, was holding 4,000 detainees.
Although people seeking asylum were supposed to be held at Manston for no more than 24 hours, documents show that 18,000 people – of the 29,000 processed there between June and November 2022 – were detained there for much longer. Home Office officials admitted that they “completely lost our grip” on the situation in documents disclosed as part of a court case about the facility.
Four government departments – the Home Office, Ministry of Defence, Treasury and Ministry of Justice – are participating in the inquiry, which is non-statutory and so cannot compel witnesses, along with the Cabinet Office and 171 asylum seekers. They are represented between them by six different law firms.
The former Home Office senior civil servant Dan O’Mahoney, who was previously the clandestine Channel threat commander, and the former home secretary Suella Braverman are also participants, along with the UK Health Security Agency, Mitie Care and Custody, the NGO Humans for Rights Network, Kent county council, and HM Prison and Probation Service.
Clair Dobbin KC, the leading counsel to the inquiry, which is chaired by Sophie Cartwright KC, said at the opening on Thursday: “People were being detained in large numbers in conditions not intended or detention beyond 24 hours.”
“These conditions deteriorated,” she added, saying that things became “overcrowded, squalid and insanitary”.
The extent to which conditions deteriorated will form a key part of the inquiry’s work. Dobbin said the inquiry would look at human experiences at Manston with an important consideration of “conditions that put people at risk, including mental wellbeing and physical safety”.
Actions of staff working on the site will also be examined. “There is evidence of misconduct on the part of some who worked at Manston,” said Dobbin.
A commitment to hold an inquiry into conditions at Manston in the second half of 2022 was first made by the former home secretary James Cleverly in March 2024.
In September 2024 the then home secretary, Yvette Cooper, decided to downgrade Cleverly’s inquiry from statutory to independent, meaning it has fewer powers to compel witnesses to attend. She cited the projected costs of the planned inquiry – about £26m – as a reason for downgrading it, with the new inquiry expected to cost £2.6m.
