The government has announced plans to build a new mega prison in Chorley, Lancashire. It will be huge, locking up more than 1715 people. It is part of a wave of prison expansion which has been reported on by Corporate Watch since 2017. See our Prison Island report for more info.

The site is owned by the Ministry of Justice (MOJ) and sits next to two existing prisons, HMP Garth and HMP Wymott. It is close to Chorley, Leyland, Preston, and Southport and only a train ride away from Manchester. It will no doubt imprison people from communities across the North West.

The government is currently running a consultation and intends to apply for planning permission later this year. It anticipates a planning decision by early 2022 and hopes to start construction in 2022 or 2023 before opening it in 2025. This timeline can’t be certain however – every single prison project the MOJ has begun has experienced massive delays due to organised resistance, tensions in the planning system, financing issues and sheer poor project management by the programme’s managers.

18,000 new prison places

The prison is part of the government’s ‘New Prisons Programme‘, formally branded the ‘Prison Estates Transformation Programme’ (PETP). It is spending £4 billion to create 18,000 additional prison places by the mid 2020s. Ten thousand of these places are due to be created in six new prisons and eight thousand will come from expanding existing prisons. Scroll down to see the status of these various mega-prison projects across England.

In documents about the project, Alex Chalk MP, Prisons and Probation Minister, said that prison numbers change over time, which is why it must have ‘robust plans in place to make sure we will always have enough places available’. However, it is clearly tied to the growth of other areas of the prison industrial complex, such as policing:

“The increasing numbers of police, in line with the Prime Minister’s commitment to recruit 20,000 additional officers, is also likely to contribute to a higher prison population, and we therefore believe that creating 18,000 additional prison places will help to mitigate pressure on prison places in England and Wales in the coming years.”

Photo by Ehimetalor Akhere Unuabona on Unsplash

A local prison economy

The Ministry of Justice is skilled in its location choices. After massive community resistance in places like Port Talbot, it’s clear the MOJ are now choosing sites adjacent to existing prisons. These locations have existing local prison economies; communities are already used to their presence and many people are employed by them. Chorley is no exception with HMP Garth and HMP Wymott next door to the proposed prison site. Are these local prisons good examples of what we may expect from a new mega-prison next door?

Prisoner deaths, violence and suffering

HMP Garth is a category B mens prison holding over 800 people. Its latest inspection reported that illicit drugs were easily available and that one in four prisoners said they had developed a drug problem while at the prison. In the six months preceding the inspection, there had been 119 violent incidents, with force used by officers more than 143 times. There was a massive 450 incidents of self-harm in the same period and 1406 complaints.

Disturbingly 29 people lost their lives in HMP Garth between 1995 and 2019, including 10 suicides. The average age between them is just 51 years old. Gross neglect has been reported on a number of occasions. Andrew Jones took his own life after being illegally held in isolated custody without essential medication, access to showers, exercise, or telephone calls. An inquest showed the prison broke the rules at least 600 times. The jury found that “a failing by senior management to ensure understanding of, proper use of, and monitoring of” the segregation rules was the “greatest contribution” to Andrew’s death.

Another prisoner Imre Paul Thomas died aged 47 after taking lethal doses of the painkiller tramadol. A total of nine medical appointments were cancelled by the prison before he overdosed on drugs. Grant Alam died at 28 years old after being electrocuted in his cell. Tales of neglect continue – from missed opportunities for treatment, delays in calling ambulances and poorly trained officers with inadequate first aid or mental health training, to not regularly checking people who were suicidal. HMP Garth’s history is wrought with so many preventable deaths. Yet the Ministry of Justice want to build a prison double its size next door, and increase the demand on local healthcare services when people are already dying through institutional neglect and poor management.

HMP Wymott is also a category C men’s prison. It imprisons 1100 men, including a special wing for elderly prisoners. 68 people died in the prison between 1995 and 2019. The deaths include not only some of the many elderly prisoners suffering from cancer and chronic illness, but younger people taking their lives. Once again, many have died unnecessarily due to failing to access treatment they needed. Ryan McGrath died in 2016 aged 46 from a heart attack. The Prisons and Probation Ombudsman investigated and said the healthcare was not equal to that in the community. His ongoing complaints of chest pains were ignored.

The prison was hit with a serious outbreak of Covid-19 at the start of the pandemic. The wife of one HMP Wymott inmate said “None of the prison officers at Wymott have ever worn masks or PPE, which I found quite alarming.”

Creating the conditions to exploit prisoner labour

Many existing prisons do not have facilities for extensive workshops to exploit prisoner labour. This is one of the reasons that the government is building the mega-prisons. In the consultation notes about the prison, the MOJ explicitly talks about building workshops inside:

“Workshops will help prisoners to gain new skills and qualifications. This will help them to gain work after release. Having work can help stop people re-offending. The workshops will include both heavy and light industry. For instance, prisoners can learn how to weld or how to make clothes. The exact industries will be decided closer to the prison opening.”

At HMP Garth, prisoners refurbish power tools for the company Speedy Hire. They also assemble lighting and smoke detectors and have plastics and textile workshops. None of these skills offer external accreditation and are basically ways to make money for the companies involved. Most work is monotonous and offers no real job training for life after prison.

HMP Berwyn. Image from https://www.meee.global/what-we-do/prisons.php

Prisoners at HMP Berwyn, the most recent prison to open in Wales, are paid next to nothing to work for companies including DHL, Interserve, Ink2Work, Emerald Trading, Census Data, City Windmills and LMB Textiles. Many people could be earning full salaries on the outside to sustain their families, yet prisoners are paid between £7-£25 per week depending on their job role. HMP Berwyn was touted as a ‘prison for the future’ due to its design and approach. However, like all prisons, no amount of cosmetic change can reduce the trauma of being locked up, nor solve the complex social and economic problems of why people are criminalised in the first place. One former prisoner described the jail as ‘the worst he’s ever been in‘.

Mega prisons being built around the country

The state currently has a number of prison construction projects happening around the country:

• Wellingborough: HMP Five Wells in Wellingborough is at the most advanced stage of construction and is due to open in early 2022. It will be run for-profit by G4S who have a ten-year contract until 2032.

• Leicestershire: HMP Glen Parva is still under construction. The prison lies on the outskirts of Leicester. It is due to open in 2023.

• East Yorkshire: A new mega prison next to HMP Full Sutton is in the final planning stages. It received outline planning permission but are still processing ‘reserved matters’ through the planning system.

• Buckinghamshire: The MOJ has announced plans to build a prison on land next to HMP Grendon and HMP Springhill in Buckinghamshire. The announcement came just before Christmas to reduce the likelihood of objection. The prison would lock up 1,440 people and be a category C prison like the new one announced for Chorley.

• One final location is due to be announced, most likely in the South of England.

Click here to see an overview of the companies building the prisons.

Constructing Wellingborough Prison. Picture from: https://www.kier.co.uk/media/5258/wellingborough-prison-1.jpg

Resisting the new prison

Local villagers are outraged and residents in Ulnes Walton are mobilising to fight the government after the proposal was announced.

The Parish Council will be opposing the plan, citing increased traffic, loss of greenfield land, construction noise and the impact on wildlife amongst its objections. Councillor Nicola Watson says: “We don’t want another prison here. The impact it will have on residents will be massive.”

National campaign group Community Action on Prison Expansion is also encouraging people to object to the plans. They say that since the George Floyd Uprising in 2020, interest in the campaign has grown massively, as many people recognise the racism and oppression that the prison system is founded on and seek alternatives to prison and policing. They said:

“We are trying to shrink the state’s capacity to repress. There is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to fight these prison expansion projects, and that time is now.”

People can object to the prison by completing this form: https://consult.justice.gov.uk/digital-communications/proposed-new-prison-in-chorley/

People are also encouraged to attend the live webinar sessions with the MOJ and make their views heard. You can also send your views via letter to PO Box 347, Manchester, M21 3ES. The deadline for objections is the 19^th July.

Learn more about prison expansion in our report, Prison Island.

The post Chorley mega-prison plans announced as part of plan for 18,000 new prison places appeared first on Corporate Watch.

This article looks at a few ways the economic system we call capitalism has been fundamental in spreading the virus – and in fostering a wider crisis of panic, repression, and looming poverty. And this is by no means a complete list. The general point is that capitalism, based on prioritising profits over people’s lives, is incapable of serving our health and well-being. To care for each other now and in the future, can we use our anger to fight for change?

Feature image above: occupation of Deutsche Bank owned building to create a mutual aid hub in Chicago, US

Medics protest against lack of resources in Athens, Greece

1. Industrial agriculture incubates new viruses

COVID-19 didn’t appear out of the blue. It is just the latest pandemic linked to industrial agriculture, and in particular the mass-scale production and sale of meat.

In this case, the disease has been traced to the Wuhan seafood market and to China’s “wild animal” trade, also implicated in the 2003 SARS pandemic. However, as biologist Rob Wallace, author of Big Farms Big Flu, makes clear: “this is no Chinese exceptionalism […] The U.S. and Europe have served as ground zeros for new influenzas as well, recently H5N2 and H5Nx, and their multinationals and neocolonial proxies drove the emergence of Ebola in West Africa and Zika in Brazil.”

The common factor is profit-driven intensive meat farming. “Zoonotic”, or cross-species infections from animals to humans, count for the majority of new human pathogens. Wallace identifies at least two common origin patterns. One is a leap from intensively farmed animals such as cows, pigs, chickens – as in the recent avian and swine flu pandemics. As he puts it:

“You couldn’t design a better system to breed deadly diseases. […] Growing genetic monocultures of domestic animals removes whatever immune firebreaks may be available to slow down transmission. Larger population sizes and densities facilitate greater rates of transmission. Such crowded conditions depress immune response. High throughput, a part of any industrial production, provides a continually renewed supply of susceptibles, the fuel for the evolution of virulence.”

Covid-19, like SARS or Ebola, appears to belong to the other pattern – in which the virus leaps from non-domesticated species. But again, capitalism plays a key role. The Chinese economy’s rapid growth drive and marketisation in the 1990s included corporate consolidation of agriculture, alongside major deforestation and destruction of biodiverse habitats. As smaller farmers were squeezed out of traditional livestock farming, one state-promoted strategy was to move into intensive breeding and farming of captive “wild” species. This led to further incursions into remaining forest areas and to new zoonotic infections, which can then spread rapidly through high-volume markets like Wuhan.

NB: see also this more detailed account by Wallace and other authors in Monthly Review; and this in-depth essay by Chuang journal examining how these factors played out in Wuhan and China.

2. Big Pharma diverts medical research

We still know relatively little about COVID-19 and its impacts. Although obviously dangerous, research is inconclusive as to precisely how virulent it will turn out to be, or how it can best be combated. But some issues are clear enough. One is the absence of drug treatments: no vaccine, and a lack of proven antiviral treatments.

Respiratory infections are well known to cause harm. So why is medical research so far behind on this area?

Much medical research is led by profit-chasing corporations – along with the universities and foundations they sponsor. One issue with the capitalist research model is that, because drugs are high value property, research data is guarded as “commercially confidential” rather than being shared for all to develop.

Another big problem is that drugs targeting respiratory viruses just aren’t that profitable. Adrian Hill, the professor who led UK research on the Ebola virus, has condemned the pharma industry’s “market failure” to tackle that pandemic in Africa. He explained in an interview with the Independent in 2014:

“Today, commercial vaccine supply is monopolised by four or five mega- companies – GSK, Sanofi, Merck, Pfizer – some of the biggest companies in the world. The problem with that is, even if you’ve got a way of making a vaccine, unless there’s a big market, it’s not worth the while of a mega-company …. There was no business case to make an Ebola vaccine for the people who needed it most.”

In a recent interview, Mike Davis – author of The Monster at Our Door: the Global Threat of Avian Flu – calls the problem: “Big Pharma’s abdication of the research and development of new antibiotics and antivirals.” He says:

“Of the eighteen largest pharmaceutical companies, fifteen have totally abandoned the field. Heart medicines, addictive tranquilizers, and treatments for male impotence are profit leaders, not the defenses against hospital infections, emergent diseases, and traditional tropical killers. A universal vaccine for influenza — that is to say, a vaccine that targets the immutable parts of the virus’s surface proteins — has been a possibility for decades but never profitable enough to be a priority.”

So in the US, as reported by Bloomberg, venture capitalists have poured $42 billion into drug development in the last three years. Nearly half of that has flooded into potentially lucrative treatments for cancer and rare diseases. Only 5% went into drugs that prevent infections.

Medics protest against lack of resources in Quetta, Pakistan

3. Markets decimate public healthcare

It started with a virus, but it’s the failure of our healthcare systems that have made this a serious health crisis. As well as lack of drugs, we can add the shortage of key equipment from testing kits to ventilators, down to masks and other basic protective clothing. And the shortage of hospital places, of doctors and nurses to treat people with severe symptoms. Whatever the real scale of the pandemic turns out to be, one thing is certain: because of these shortages, people will die.

Again, none of this comes as a surprise. In the UK, there have been repeated warnings, including the 2016 “Exercise Cygnus”, that the NHS couldn’t cope with a new pandemic. In fact, the NHS is in continual “winter crisis”: overwhelmed ICU wards and images of patients dying in the corridors are not extraordinary but regular events. With hospitals already at full stretch, it only takes a slightly more aggressive virus to turn this “normal” crisis level into something even worse.

This is not just a UK issue. In Italy, for example, the healthcare union USI identifies recent cuts of “43,000 workers (which means the loss of 70,000 beds, including 3,000 in intensive care).” They write that continuous funding cuts have:

“led to a widespread collapse of the healthcare system. As a result, access to treatment has been reduced for an increasing number of people. Today it is the coronavirus, tomorrow it could be another virus or even any trivial disease: to maintain only Essential Levels of Care (ELC) is to sign a death sentence.”

In the UK, the number of hospital beds has halved in 30 years. There are less than 3 hospital beds per thousand people and only 7 Intensive Care places for every 100,000 people.ⁱ Hospital places are just the most obvious indicator – all the same points could be made about testing facilities and other resources.

These health shortages are entirely avoidable: the UK and Italy are richer than ever before. The basic problem is that capitalism does not prioritise collective healthcare: the services we do have are concessions that people have won and defended through decades of struggle against “market forces”. In recent years, these victories have been eroded by privatisation and “austerity”.

In England for example, successive governments have failed to give the NHS the money it needs to care for a growing and ageing population. The other issue is where the money goes – much of it returns to corporate pockets. Here are just three examples of NHS profiteering:

• PFI debt. Debt on “private finance” schemes costs “up to £1 in every £6” of the budget for some NHS trusts, according to the IPPR thinktank. These were schemes pushed by the last Labour government in which hospitals were refurbished by borrowing from the private sector at extortionate long-term interest rates.
• Drug companies. According to The King‘s Fund, “estimated total NHS spending on medicines in England has grown from £13 billion in 2010/11 to £17.4 billion in 2016/17.” This is over 10% of the total NHS budget.
• Private health businesses and outsourcers. Much NHS work, for example cleaning or transport services, is now outsourced to profit-chasing companies. The latest development has involved handing contracts for actual medical services to private sector companies. These were worth £3.6 billion in 2019, with the biggest winners being Care UK and Richard Branson’s Virgin Care.

4. Work makes us sick

A well-prepared health system might respond to the virus with wide scale testing, plus hospital care for those hit by severe symptoms. Instead we get a brutal last-ditch measure: mass lockdown. Medics hope this can slow the pandemic so that fragile health services aren’t overwhelmed. Many governments are happy to seize the opportunity and race through new police state powers.

But here too, the capitalist drive for profit takes precedence. Even as police and public outrage target “irresponsible” individuals taking some air, workers are still being crowded into factories, building sites, and tube trains.

The European corona epicentre so far has been Lombardy, Northern Italy. This is Italy’s “industrial heartland”: the home of steel mills, car plants, textiles factories, and in total over one fifth of all Italy’s GDP. Lombardy was placed under the first quarantine measures on 1 March, and went into deep lockdown on 7 March, with people confined to their homes other than for “essential” activities. These measures then went nationwide on 9 March.

But there were no rules against the most obvious transmission sites of all: workplaces. Car factories and fashion sweatshops kept on going through the lockdown. This only changed on 21 March when the government finally ordered closure of “non-essential” workplaces.

While shouty Italian mayors berated joggers, workers were taking action against being forced to turn up in corona conditions. Wildcat strikes began on 12 March, and spread across Italy the next day. Workers are up against the employers’ confederation Confindustria, which has lobbied hard to keep the factories open. Despite the 21 March decree stopping “non-essential” work, calls for a general strike continue – even from the country’s three biggest unions. They argue that the “essential” rules are full of loopholes: making machinery for the tobacco industry is included, for example.

In the UK, much the same drama played out with a two week delay. The government ordered people to “stay at home” on 23 March – with the big exception being if you have to go to work. On 24 March, as building workers walked out of a 1,700 person site in Middlesborough, the housing minister tweeted: “If you are working on site, you can continue to do so. […] Outside of work, remember to #StayHomeSaveLives.”

As anyone who’s ever worked in construction knows, and has been widely pointed out on social media, the idea of observing “social distancing rules” on building sites is a bad joke.

Like Italy’s manufacturing bosses, the British building industry has political influence. At the top are a handful of big contractors – many close to the Conservative Party, and with a shady record of ignoring safety issues and blacklisting organising workers. In the manufacturing sector, too, we get stories about companies like William Cook Rail or Wren Kitchens, major Conservative Party donors refusing to shut down.

So, which are more dangerous, parks or workplaces? We haven’t seen any research assessing that. What we do know is that, in capitalism, “essential” is a close cousin of “profitable”.

5. Click-hungry media feed panic

Corona is a healthcare crisis, but it has also become something more: a crisis of fear. The 24/7 feed of anxiety through our TV, computer and phone screens has created a social panic of unprecedented scale and speed. This has spiralling impacts on billions of people’s mental, social and material well-being, and is used by governments to justify brutal power grabs.

Here are a few basic observations about media coverage of coronavirus:

• The pandemic has swiftly achieved almost total media dominance, eclipsing every other issue. Even back in January, as a study in Time magazine showed, corona had received extraordinary coverage in English speaking media – for example, more than 20 times as many headlines as the Ebola outbreak in its first month.
• It is largely framed in terms of fear and death. Back in February, media scholar Karin Wahl-Jorgensen analysed the use of fear language in major newspaper reporting. Social media platforms ramp up this sensationalism. A post presenting cautious analysis is unlikely to go far – as opposed to a viral tweet thread like “HOLY MOTHER OF GOD […] the most virulent virus epidemic the world has ever seen.”
• Coverage is pinned to simplified and obsessively reported numbers: the daily tally of “confirmed cases” and deaths. Questions about the accuracy and comparability of these headline figures may be discussed in a side note – but not allowed to get in the way of the constant countdown.
• It fixates on authority. While medical and scientific expertise are clearly extremely valuable they are subject to the distortions of the media and are open to being exploited by political leaders, who are either heroes to rally round, or castigated for failing to play their roles. Here the corona panic has elements of the classic sociological model of a “moral panic”, in which the media’s call on authorities to save us from a threat to society presents a serious threat of authoritarian abuse.

While capitalism isn’t the only force shaping these patterns, profit is again a crucial factor. Psychologists point out how “our minds like to jump to threatening headlines with big, alarming numbers”. But if that’s true, it isn’t simply a settled fact of human evolution – it is actively used and reinforced by the dominant media business model.

Most major media platforms have a financial model based on advertising. Advertising revenue depends on audience, meaning attracting the maximum possible views and “hits”. While this has been the case since the birth of the popular press in the 19^th century, online technologies have accelerated the feedback loop between content and “clicks”.

The well-known market leader is Facebook’s algorithmic News Feed Editor, which automatically selects and targets news. More “traditional” media outlets, including state-backed broadcasters, now also have to compete with the social media giants and adopt their methods – or lose even more of their market share and relevance.

The upshot of this profit imperative is a constant and rapid bombardment of the most click-worthy images, figures, tragic anecdotes, and “hot takes”. We are left swimming in numbers, information, and anxiety, with no space for reflection and critical thinking. And if we’re unable to sort through the noise and form our own informed and considered views, all we can do is trust and obey the authorities.

6. Gross inequality threatens lockdown poverty

Now the corona crisis is mutating into an economic crisis, as lockdown measures shut “non-essential” production, travel and consumption. In itself, switching off much of the capitalist economy is no bad thing: we really don’t need all the disposable plastic crap it churns out; wildlife, forests, and oceans could do with a breather. The problem is not “the economy”, but that billions of people rely on wages to eat and live.

Capitalism has created the most unequal society in human history: billionaires with unimaginable wealth, billions on the breadline. The lockdown affects us very differently depending on where we are in this pyramid.

To the rich, “stay at home” is no great hardship. For online professionals, or better off workers with permanent contracts, recipe swaps and yoga classes can take the edge off the frustration. To low-income, precarious and informal economy workers, it means the threat of unemployment and impoverishment. And as the crisis spreads to countries without welfare and healthcare safety nets, many millions will be hit.

In India, as Arundhati Roy writes, Modi has “borrowed the playbook from France and Italy” to impose a rapid lockdown on 1.38 billion people. In this context:

“The lockdown worked like a chemical experiment that suddenly illuminated hidden things. As shops, restaurants, factories and the construction industry shut down, as the wealthy and the middle classes enclosed themselves in gated colonies, our towns and megacities began to extrude their working-class citizens — their migrant workers — like so much unwanted accrual. […] The lockdown to enforce physical distancing had resulted in the opposite — physical compression on an unthinkable scale. […] The main roads might be empty, but the poor are sealed into cramped quarters in slums and shanties.”

In the rich world the curfew is, so far, largely maintained by agreement and social pressure. In India, where quarantine may mean starvation, it requires widespread “beating and humiliation” by police. In Kenya, one case of police enforcing lockdown by the lethal shooting of a thirteen year old boy has already been widely reported.

But here in Europe, too, when it comes to the margins of society – migrants, prisoners, the homeless – “stay at home” takes on very different meanings. We have already seen evictions and mass arrests in Athens, round-ups of refugees in Calais, at least eight dead in prison riots in Italy, as barbed wire fences go up around migrant accommodation in Croatia, and the army imposes quarantine on Roma settlements in Slovakia.

“Solidarity is the virus that capitalism fears.” To knit (back) our networks. Organise you neighbourhood, common pot, mutual aid.

Conclusion

This crisis is developing on multiple levels. The pandemic itself is just one. Then there are wider psychological and social impacts of continuing fear and isolation. There are political impacts as governments take advantage to rush through new powers. And there are the looming material impacts as millions are threatened with poverty and violent repression.

On all these levels, capitalism is a big part of the problem. The virus kills, and responses to it by states and corporations could kill many more. Many of these deaths are avoidable. We live in an age of enormous wealth, where vast amounts of human labour and natural resources are directed to produce trillions of dollars worth of anything from smart phones to fighter jets. These resources could be used to safeguard the health and wellbeing of all.

To quote Arundhati Roy again:

“Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.”

The post #CoronaCapitalism: six ways capitalism spreads the crisis appeared first on Corporate Watch.

Capitalism helped create this crisis: see our article here on a few of the ways this economic system makes and spreads the healthcare crisis and its wider impacts. And as with every crisis, capitalism looks for ways to cash in. Companies like Amazon put workers at risk to pump out deliveries, hedge funds make millions short-selling the stock markets, everyone from banks to landlords push for government handouts even as they lay off staff. Governments take advantage of the panic to ramp up authoritarian powers.

People are organising against this, in their communities and workplaces. Responding to increased isolation, mutual aid groups have sprung up across the UK and the world (see https://covidmutualaid.org/). Fear can turn into anger, not against each other, but against the system that has brought us here. And radical change can happen.

To help us stay informed and think through these important issues, we are using this page to compile some of the most useful and interesting articles, news and resources on coronavirus and capitalism that we come across. If you see some yourselves, tweet @corpwatchuk with the #CoronaCapitalism hashtag or email us at contact[AT]corporatewatch.org. Sign up to our news update emails to receive info straight into your inbox.

In solidarity,
the Corporate Watch crew

Our own articles on Corona Capitalism

6 ways capitalism spreads the corona crisis: industrial agriculture, Big Pharma, healthcare profiteering, work conditions, panic media, lockdown inequality and repression — and the profit system that drives it all.

Riots, resistance and releases — the corona virus and the Prison Industrial Complex: an overview of prison struggles worldwide in the time of corona

Companies cashing in on the crisis — Part 1: featuring Big Pharma; Crispin Odey; Amazon; Deliveroo; Balfour Beatty; Britannia Hotels; Marshall Wace; Richard Branson

Companies cashing in on the crisis — Part 2: featuring airline bailouts, Travelodge, Blackstone, Goldman Sachs, Wren Kitchens

Other recommended Corona related compilations

Netpol and the Undercover Research Group have a regularly updated blog on the policing of Britain’s #COVIDー19 state of emergency #PolicingTheCoronaState: https://policing-the-corona-state.blog/

The Anarchist Library has a section devoted to documenting and archiving various anarchist and libertarian literature written about the COVID-19 pandemic: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/category/topic/covid-19

Writing from the web

Obviously the situation with Covid-19 is developing pretty rapidly, but we’ve tried to make sure that the content we’ve chosen will still be worth reading well beyond it’s publication date and some of the older pieces have some great analysis.

• 8 May – On the emergence of a coherent technology based Pandemic Shock Doctrine, with big tech companies and governments conspiring to create a high-tech surveillance future “Humans are biohazards, machines are not.” https://theintercept.com/2020/05/08/andrew-cuomo-eric-schmidt-coronavirus-tech-shock-doctrine/
• 2 June – A global solidarity statement on the four main ways in which mining multinationals are exploiting the pandemic to maximise profits at the expense of people and planet: https://miningwatch.ca/sites/default/files/global_solidarity_statement_on_mining_pandemic_profiteers.pdf
• 12 May – On transformative justice and gender based violence in the context of covid-19: https://freedomnews.org.uk/lessons-from-covid-19-how-transformative-justice-and-mutual-aid-can-help-to-address-harm-in-communities
• 21 May – Some reflections from a group in New Orleans on the importance of interrogating power relations, personal and structural, as part of emancipatory mutual aid: https://roarmag.org/essays/emancipatory-mutual-aid-from-education-to-liberation/
• Spring 2020 – On the specific character of the recent uprisings in the Arab region, their origins in neoliberalism and the Arab Spring and possible effects of Covid-19 on the movements and the regimes they oppose: https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/article/from-one-arab-spring-to-another
• 18 May – On the use of video calls instead of prison visits during the pandemic in the UK and the implications this has for the future: https://freedomnews.org.uk/virtual-panopticon-prison-video-calls-and-family-support-during-the-pandemic-and-beyond/
• 18 May – On Corona, Degrowth, the need for economic systems resilient to crisis, and slowing production by design not disaster: https://theecologist.org/2020/may/18/case-degrowth-time-pandemic
• 20 April – Some feminist degrowth reflections on COVID-19 and the politics of social reproduction, and a call for “just, sustainable and convivial societies brought about by voluntary change” https://www.degrowth.info/en/2020/04/feminist-degrowth-collaborative-fada-reflections-on-the-covid-19-pandemic-and-the-politics-of-social-reproduction/ longer version here: https://www.degrowth.info/en/feminisms-and-degrowth-alliance-fada/collective-research-notebook/
• 22 May – On the rent strikes and attitude of class war that spread through New York during the 1918 influenza pandemic: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/oureconomy/new-york-rent-strikes-during-the-1918-spanish-influenza/
• 5 April – Some note from Mexico on the current situation and the implications for capitalism. “The increasingly acute contradictions of this mode of production .. will not simply give way to the mechanical or messianic end of capitalism. Because in order to see the end of capitalism, it is essential that there will be a social, antagonistic and revolutionary force ..”: https://enoughisenough14.org/2020/04/05/covid19-will-the-capitalist-system-collapse-some-notes-from-mexico-on-current-events/
• 6 May – Uneven Earth produce a regular series of recommended readings focusing on ” environmental justice, radical municipalism, new politics, political theory, and resources for action and education”. March and April’s readings are a compilation of pieces relating to Corona Virus: http://unevenearth.org/2020/05/march-april-readings/
• 4 April – An examination of the relative capacities of nation-states and decentralised societies in responding to crises such as covid-19  “The State is said by some to be a ‘necessary evil’; it must be made unnecessary.”   https://c4ss.org/content/52761
• 20 April – On the vampric nature of capitalism, the expansion of market discipline and authoritarian control during the crisis: https://www.weareplanc.org/blog/corona-capitalism-and-environmental-crisis/
• 11 May – A post-corona degrowth manifesto from the Netherlands that has gained widespread support, It proposes an end to growth economics, redistribution of wealth, transformation of agriculture, consumption and travel and cancellation of debt:  https://www.degrowth.info/en/2020/05/planning-for-post-corona/
• 15 April – DIY Culture #6, a COVID19 special: “a 34 page online special that has contributions from anarchist transport workers, nurses, care workers, writers, creatives, thinkers and activists. The general thrust, is that we cannot return to ‘normal’ following this pandemic, but that we should have some insurrectionary fun along the way as we eradicate the virus that is capitalism”: https://enoughisenough14.org/2020/04/15/diy-culture-6-covid19-special/

• 10 April – From Crimethink on the longer term implications of the pandemic and government responses to it for radical social change. Briefly considers how this plays out in the terrains of: economy, health, housing, social isolation, ecology and totalitarianism. It then presents three alternative programmes to pursue: the adherents of death, the apostles of survival, and the partisans of life: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/crimethinc-and-after-the-virus-the-perils-ahead
• 11 April – Wouldn’t normally link to a Bloomberg article, but these are strange times and this opinion piece outlines the drastically uneven impact of Corona and how it could result in huge social upheaval: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-04-11/coronavirus-this-pandemic-will-lead-to-social-revolutions
• 17 March – Economic analysis on how the crisis is revealing the fragility of neoliberalism and the reckoning now faced by western capitalist societies: https://canadiandimension.com/articles/view/the-unexpected-reckoning-coronavirus-and-capitalism
• 9 April – On solidarity and organising in times of lockdown and how the crisis is shifting the political landscape in terms of class consciousness, the commons and redistribution https://roarmag.org/essays/organizing-under-lockdown-online-activism-local-solidarity/
• 1 April – On the origins of the virus in the circuits of capitals and the appropriation of nature driven by rich countries, the inability of capitalist societies to effectively combat and prevent contagions and the socialisation of resources and ecological harmonisation required to do so. “Big picture, we stop treating nature and community, so full of all we need to survive, as just another competitor to be run off by the market”: https://monthlyreview.org/2020/04/01/covid-19-and-circuits-of-capital/
• 17 April – Some reflections on the social responses to contagion, the similarities to past plagues, and the possibilities opened up by the ruptures to ‘everyday’ life the corona crisis has created: https://communemag.com/letter-on-a-plague-year/
• February – Some in depth analysis looking not just at how capitalism caused the crisis but how the social-economic spheres interface with the biological, and what kind of deeper lessons might be drawn from the entire experience: “..lessons for an era when the destruction wrought by unending accumulation has extended both upward into the global climatic system and downward into the microbiological substrata of life on Earth”  (note this was written in February and that while the analysis is certainly interesting, we at Corporate Watch are certainly not epidemiologists!) : http://chuangcn.org/2020/02/social-contagion/
• 19 March – On the failure of current economic and political systems, impacts on supply chains, and how the slow down due to corona is not ‘degrowth’ but demonstrates its possibility: https://www.degrowth.info/en/2020/03/a-degrowth-perspective-on-the-coronavirus-crisis/
• 12 March – On the links between captial-led agriculture and corona, and how this is all exacerbated due by neoliberalsim etc: http://unevenearth.org/2020/03/where-did-coronavirus-come-from-and-where-will-it-take-us-an-interview-with-rob-wallace-author-of-big-farms-make-big-flu/?preview=true&_thumbnail_id=4111
• 18 March – On the need to break laws collectively and deliberately to survive and escape: “It is not normalcy we seek, but new worlds.” https://itsgoingdown.org/to-survive-this-crisis-and-the-one-we-left-we-must-break-laws/
• 22 March – Thoughts from New York on learning from previous mutual aid efforts, and how networks can prepare for the coming challenges. How can we organise in conditions of social distancing, and how can we stop the state using isolation measures as tools for political de-mobilisation? : https://roarmag.org/essays/from-mutual-aid-to-dual-power-in-the-state-of-emergency/
• 20 March –  Some more from an ER doctor from the same anti-capitalist space in New York: https://itsgoingdown.org/igdcast-doctor-corona/
• 24 March – On the framing of responsibility during the crisis in the UK https://www.weareplanc.org/blog/responsibilising-corona/
• 17 March – On decentralised social support networks in China: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/oureconomy/social-support-networks-springing-coronavirus-stricken-china/
• 27 March – Some thoughts on systemic change in times of crises:  https://code-rood.org/en/2020/03/27/shaking-the-system/
• 12 March – From Milan on distinguishing between two different disasters, the disaster of the virus itself and the disaster wrought by the ways that the existing order responds and does not respond to the pandemic: https://enoughisenough14.org/2020/03/12/against-the-coronavirus-and-the-opportunism-of-the-state-anarchists-in-italy-report-on-the-spread-of-the-virus-and-the-quarantine/
• 26 March – On the abuse of emergency powers by the Duterte regime in the Philippines https://enoughisenough14.org/2020/03/26/the-philippines-genuine-service-to-the-people-needs-no-emergency-powers/
• 24 March – On the US response to corona virus prioritising capitalists and companies profits ahead of the lives of workers providing vital services https://www.leftvoice.org/capitalism-is-a-death-cult-notdying4wallstreet

The post #CoronaCapitalism appeared first on Corporate Watch.

However, the plans have been cancelled, according to information obtained through a Freedom of Information request. When asked about the progress of the prison’s construction, the Foreign Office said: “The UK has decided not to proceed with the proposed construction project”, citing “challenges associated with design and cost”. It did not mention backlash to the project, which was widely criticised in March 2018 when it was first publicly announced.

The cancellation of the Nigerian project is the second time attempts to build prison and deportation infrastructure in former British colonies have stalled. Jamaica had previously rejected David Cameron’s offer of a new prison. Campaigners are using the news to highlight Boris Johnson’s renewed commitment to create 10,000 new prison places and how these connect to broader racism and inequality in the UK.

To learn more about Prison Expansion and broader carceral colonialism, see Corporate Watch’s Prison Island Report: https://corporatewatch.org/product/prison-island/

To get involved in fighting prison expansion see Community Action on Prison Expansion: https://cape-campaign.org/

Caren Holmes is a master’s student in Postcolonial Studies at SOAS University of London

The post British government funding for Nigerian deportation prison scrapped appeared first on Corporate Watch.

Reference to the prison was found in a consultation document released as part of the Scottish Government’s review of the Gender Recognition Act. The consultation closes on 1 March 2018.

Part Seven of the report, focused on non-binary people, considers how “Increasing the protections against discrimination on the basis of a person’s gender identity and the introduction of a new legal sex for people with a non-binary gender identity would have financial impacts for business and service providers, including in the public sector.”

Among these “financial impacts” is the Scottish Prison Service’s estimation that the cost of a new small prison unit for 20-30 people might be between £8.7 million and £10.7 million. Also considered are the costs of changing toilets and changing rooms, and the gendered allocation of NHS beds in certain wards.

The prison service has since said the £11 million tally is “the cost of acquiring a site and building the unit.” This does not include annual running costs, which could top £1 million.

Expanding the Carceral State in Scotland

HMP & YOI Cornton Vale – Dumyat Separation and Reintegration Unit. Source: https://www.prisonsinspectoratescotland.gov.uk

The non-binary prison would add to a growing list of carceral construction projects in the country (i.e., any projects that aim to develop the state’s ability control people through prisons, detention centres, and other institutions and see these as solutions to social and economic problems). Corton Vale, the notorious women’s prison in Stirling is currently being bulldozed and replaced with a smaller prison for 80 women, as well as Community Custody Units across Scotland. The first two locations were announced this September – one in Glasgow and a second in Dundee. 

These new prisons highlight a shift to a carceral welfare model – whereby “rehabilitation” comes through coercion. Sentences below 12 months are not recommended because of the limited time available to “rehabilitate” prisoners. New “Community Custody Units” for women, for example, are designed to lock up around 20 women each in geographically spread-out areas, rather than in one large prison. The location of the mini-prisons has apparently been chosen by identifying the postcodes that women imprisoned in Scotland are most likely to come from. The irony is that these areas are among those hardest-hit by government cuts and austerity.

HMP Highland. Image source: http://www.sps.gov.uk/Corporate/Information/HMPHighlandProposal.aspx

The Scottish state also plans to spend £66 million in 2018 to build the new HMP Highland in Inverness, near the Inverness Retail Park. According to earlier reports more than 200 people could be locked up here at one time, but recent news releases have placed the figure at 130. It will replace the current HMP Inverness, built by prisoners over a century ago, which incarcerates 117 people.

As of 8 December 2017, there are 7,534 people in prison in Scotland, with over a thousand of these untried and/or awaiting deportation. The country has 15 prisons, including two run privately. Prisoner deaths have been growing year on year. Since 2005, more than 289 people have lost their lives in the Scottish prison system. Disturbingly, sixty of these deaths are still unexplained.

Trans Prison Trends

The Scottish government is not the first government to consider building special prisons for trans people. Italy opened the world’s first trans prison in 2010, while more than 30 trans prisoners are locked up in an old women’s prison at Pozzale, near Florence. Their incarceration is the end result of their criminalisation and poverty – most are inside for drug-related offences and prostitution.

In March 2017, the first special wing for trans prisoners was created at Minburi prison in Bangkok, Thailand. Activists said this prison was not for the increased safety of the people inside, but for their “better management”.

The Turkish government has also hit the headlines with its popularly labelled ‘pink prison’ for LGBTQ individuals. Campaigners said Izmar prison would further compound discrimination and effectively segregate and isolate people.

Meanwhile, in the US, the Trans Housing Unit at the Rikers Island Jail Complex in New York that opened in 2010 is being closed. There is talk of new wings for trans prisoners across the country, yet the reality of what is planned is unknown.

Rikers Island Jail Complex. Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:USGS_Rikers_Island.png

If you build it they will come: the reforms feeding the prison industrial complex

One could say that the prisons we have now are the cumulative results of our attempts to reform them. Prison reformists said women were unsafe when they were locked up with men. Now women are the fastest growing population of prisoners – with hundreds upon hundreds of prisons dedicated to them around the world. Likewise, young people are said to have unique needs. So we get more Secure Training Centres and Young Offenders Institutes.

No doubt trans prisoners currently suffer sever discrimination. As Marius Mason, a trans prisoner in a Texas prison says:

“Once incarcerated, trans people face humiliation, physical and sexual abuse, denial of medical needs, and legal reprisals. Many transgender people are placed in solitary confinement for months or years, simply for being trans. Trans women are usually placed in men’s prisons, where there is a massive increased risk of experiencing sexual violence. Just as our lives are violently repressed on the outside, trans people experience extreme suffering and death within the walls of jails, prisons, youth facilities, and immigrant detention centers.”

But the ultimate outcome of trans prisons will be an ever-increasing number of trans prisoners. It is well evidenced that prison expansion does not reduce overcrowding – if you build it, they will come. These trans prisons will become full and their overcrowding will necessitate even more of them.

Pazuzu Gaylord, an organiser with Action for Trans Health highlights that transgender and other LGBTQ people already have disproportionate rates of incarceration, exacerbated by a cycle of parental, educational, employment and housing discrimination that leads to their criminalisation for surviving through sex work, drug use, petty theft and self-defence. They say prisons perpetuate the racist, classist, sexist system we live in and their expansion will not address these forms of oppression.

Following the deaths of four trans women in 14 months in England, Bent Bars (a letter-writing project for LGBTQI prisoners in Britain) demanded that in addition to asking why trans people are being held in the wrong prison, we need to ask why so many trans people are being sent to prison at all.

Likewise, trans prisons will not reform the prison system itself. In the words of the Bent Bars Collective:

“Putting someone in a sex-gender ‘appropriate’ institution may lessen some hardships of being locked up, but it doesn’t address the pervasive issues of violence, harm and inequality that exist across all prisons.”

Solidarity and Survival

While trans prisons may not be the answer, solidarity with trans prisoners in their fight for survival is more urgent than ever. Jess Bradley, Trans Officer for the National Union of Students, has written an article on six things you can do to show solidarity with trans prisoners.

Marius Mason has movingly written:

“The survival of trans and other sex and gender minority people is not a quaint conversation about awareness, but a struggle for us to live in a world so determined to marginalise, dehumanise, and criminalise us – especially trans women, and especially Black, brown, and indigenous trans people.

“We are discriminated against in every area of society including housing, healthcare, employment. Our survival is often precarious and many of us survive by work which is also criminalised – making us even more of a target for police harassment and the crime of ‘Walking While Trans’.

On February 11th, Action for Trans Health and others will return to HMP Doncaster to protest the state-sanctioned murder of trans people. On 30th December 2016 transwoman Jenny Swift was found dead in her cell after enduring incarceration, the withholding of her medication and transmisogynist harassment from guards. A recent inquest into her death found that she had been part of a suicide pact with three other trans prisoners formed because of bullying by prison staff.

January 22 sees the third Trans Prisoner Day of Solidarity and Action. Actions and events will be taking place all over the world. To get involved in the UK contact the Empty Cages Collective and Action for Trans Health to find out what is happening near you.

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A run-down of the Home Office’s “hostile environment” measures against migrants, from NHS charges to the renting ban.

In 2012 Theresa May, then Home Secretary, announced a new approach to immigration: to make Britain a “hostile environment” for people who have “no right to be here”.The introduction of compulsory ID checks in hospitals, due to start this month, is just one element. The plan is to make it ever tougher for people without the right immigration papers to get a job, rent a flat, use a bank, drive a car, get medical treatment, send kids to school, or otherwise live a normal life.

This report outlines 13 of the main hostile environment policies introduced so far, including:

• NHS England will start compulsory ID checks in hospitals this month. “Overseas visitors” will be made to pay for non-emergency treatment; later in the year, the government wants to extend charging to A&E and GP surgeries too.
• Meanwhile, patient details collected when people register with GPs are systematically passed on to Immigration Enforcement who use them to track down “illegals”. Around 6,000 people were traced this way in 2016.
• Similarly, the Department of Education has agreed to hand over names and addresses of 1500 school pupils and their families each month, collected in the “School Census”.
• At the moment, such information sharing requires specific legal agreements. This will change if the Digital Economy Bill passes unamended this year, allowing government departments and corporate contractors to automatically share people’s confidential data.
• Other measures ban unwanted migrants from renting homes, opening bank accounts or getting driving licenses. Migrants are being criminalised with new offences of “working illegally”, “driving in the UK”, and employing or renting to “illegals”.
• Migrants forced onto the streets are being targeted by immigration raids against rough sleepers, coordinated with local councils and homelessness charities.
• Police and Immigration Enforcement are increasingly integrated, led by Operation Nexus in London which embeds immigration offficers in police stations and standardises ID checks. Met Police are also handing over details of victims and witnesses of crimes.
• Local councils are being encouraged to launch immigration enforcement operations with money from a new “Controlling Migration Fund”.
• The introduction highlights three basic themes across all these measures: mass information sharing, criminalisation of migrants, and widespread citizen collaboration.
• The hostile environment relies on collaboration from bosses and workers in the public sector and in private companies, and also from many more of us as “members of the public”. The conclusion looks in more depth at how the government is trying to foster a culture of collaboration – and at some possibilities for resistance.

Download a PDF version of this report here.

Contents

• Introduction: Information, Criminalisation, Collaboration

• 1. Healthcare (1): NHS charges and ID checks

• 2. Healthcare (2): NHS Digital data sharing

• 3. Education (1): the School Census

• 4. Education (2): Higher Education student monitoring

• 5. Housing: no passport, no home

• 6. Homelessness: the rough sleeper round up

• 7. Work: employer collaboration

• 8. Driving: driving licence data sharing

• 9. Bank Accounts

• 10. Marriages

• 11. Police Liaison: Operation Nexus

• 12. Local Authorities: the Controlling Migration Fund

• 13. The Digital Economy Act: towards the One Big Database

• Conclusion: How collaboration works

• Appendix: How to stop Immigration Enforcement getting addresses from GPs?

Introduction: information, criminalisation, collaboration

The “hostile environment” approach extends immigration control beyond the obvious national borders to a range of areas of everyday life including housing, homelessness, healthcare, school, higher education, driving, bank accounts, work and marriage.

The rationale, more or less, is: if the government can’t actually seal tight the external borders, it can push unwanted “illegals” to leave, or deter others from coming in the first place, by making it near impossible to live a normal life.

None of this is really new, but it is escalating fast. We can identify a gear shift in 2012, when the government set up an Inter-Ministerial Group on Migrants’ Access to Benefits and Public Services, tasked with looking for new ways to make migrants’ lives difficult.ⁱ The upshot was two new Immigration Acts, passed in 2014 and 2016, which have drastically cut migrants’ rights, and introduced a list of new criminal offences.

In October 2013, announcing the parliamentary bill that was to become the 2014 Act, Theresa May declared that its aim was: “to create a really hostile environment for illegal migrants”.ⁱⁱ In the formal language of the act itself, the main aim is to “limit … access to services, facilities and employment by reference to immigration status”.ⁱⁱⁱ The Immigration Act 2016 made these measures harsher still, and added some new ones.

However, in many areas the new policies and interventions do not involve new legislation, but internal changes in policy or approach by the Home Office and other government departments. Some of these are formalised in protocols, guidance documents, and Memoranda of Understanding (MoUs) for cooperation between agencies. Others are informal shifts in practice.

As we look at the details of the different measures, we can also note a few core themes that run through them.

First, information. Many of the new measures involve ramping up data collection and data sharing between the Home Office and its “partners”. This can involve gathering personal data on migrants from other government departments (e.g., Department of Education, NHS England); from NGOs (e.g., the CHAIN London rough sleeper database run by the charity St Mungo’s); or from private for-profit companies (e.g., banks and money lenders, including through the CIFAS databases).

The Home Office’s Immigration Enforcement directorate itself has notably poor databases and intelligence gathering. Its intelligence systems typically rely on low grade “tip-offs” from “members of the public”. Its central information system, the Case Information Database (CID), which stores files on all known immigrants to the UK, is notoriously out-of-date and error prone, and new generation replacements are behind schedule. Access to the personal details collected by banks, schools, doctors, homelessness charities or the DVLA is a big boost to the Home Office’s ability to track and arrest “illegals”. While migrants are currently on the frontline of this growing surveillance state, these tools can also be turned against many more people.

NB: we intend to publish soon a further report on the Home Office’s databases, information sharing, and the new generation of “big data” systems it hopes to bring on line.

Second, criminalisation. Just trying to live without the correct documents is becoming a crime. Working or driving a car, or renting a home to an “illegal”, can now lead to prison sentences of up to five years. A range of other harsh penalties, for example automatic evictions and freezing of bank accounts, can also hit anyone without the right to remain.

In the past, migrant campaigners have sometimes insisted “we are not criminals”. But growing numbers of people without the right papers are becoming just that.

Third, collaboration. Control is “outsourced” from the Home Office to other government agencies (e.g., the NHS, schools) or to private bodies (e.g., charities, banks, bosses, landlords).

The Home Office only has a limited number of Immigration Officers, and the general police force is already overstretched. So the government follows the path taken by police states throughout history: it seeks to make ordinary citizens into an army of informers, spies and collaborators. School teachers, doctors, nurses and hospital receptionists, charity workers, registry office staff, bank clerks, as well as employers, landlords and letting agents, are being turned into Immigration Enforcement agents.

In the conclusion we will look in a bit more depth at how the various hostile environment measures are underpinned by collaboration; at different types of collaboration relationships involving government agencies, NGOs and charities, private companies, and individuals; and at different ways the government “incentivises” collaboration. For example, by threatening penalties and criminal prosecutions, by offering profitable contracts, by trying to normalise hostility to migrants, or seeking to convince people they even have a “duty” to collaborate.

1. Healthcare (1): NHS charges

From this month (April 2017), hospitals in England will be required to ID check all patients and make any of those found not to be legal “residents” pay for their treatment.^iv The new NHS regulations will not initially apply to emergency treatment (A&E) or to GP surgeries (primary care).^v But the government says it wants to extend charging to both in future, with more announcements due later this year.^vi Further down the line, it will even look into charging for hospice care, which is part-funded by the NHS alongside charities.^vii

NHS charges for migrants are not wholly new. They were first introduced in 1982, when the Thatcher government introduced a distinction between people classed as “ordinarily resident” in the UK, entitled to free health care, and “overseas visitors” who could be made to pay. But until now charging has been at the hospital’s discretion, and has not been widely put into practice.

The present government intends to change this. In 2014, alongside the new Immigration Act, the Department of Health set up what it calls an Overseas Visitor and Migrant Cost Recovery Programme to encourage hospitals to charge, with a target of making £500 million per year from NHS charges. Now the new regulations will make charging a “statutory requirement” for the first time.

Also for the first time, payments will be demanded upfront before patients are allowed many hospital treatments. If treatment is urgent, patients may not have to pay in advance, but will be presented with a bill after.

Who has to pay?

The Immigration Act 2014 redefined who counts as “ordinarily resident”. Citizens of the European Economic Area (EEA) – the EU countries plus Iceland, Lichtenstein, Norway and Switzerland – are still included so long as they are “exercising their treaty rights”, i.e., are working, looking for work, studying, or are independently wealthy (for more on EEA rules also Section 6 below on homelessness). Non-EEA nationals must be ‘living lawfully in the United Kingdom voluntarily and for settled purposes”. For example, people who have been granted “indefinite leave to remain” are okay; but people on temporary student or work visas are not “settled”, and people without any valid papers are not “lawful”.

The 2014 Act also introduced a “health surcharge”: non-EEA citizens applying for a UK visa for six months or more (e.g., for work or study) must pay this fee before entry, and are then exempted from charges while the visa lasts. The fee is currently £200 per year or £150 for students. There are a few further exemptions: e.g., refugees with temporary leave to remain, or asylum seekers who have not been refused asylum or who are receiving “Section Four” support, do not have to pay.^viii

What must be paid for?

For the moment, accident and emergency (A&E) care and GP services (primary care) are still free for everyone. So is treatment for many contagious diseases, including sexually transmitted diseases and plague; pregnancy care; and treatment to “victims of violence”, including, e.g., torture survivors – so long as they have not “travelled to the UK for the purpose of seeking that treatment.”

The April 2017 regulations will introduce some new charging areas, including secondary care outside of hospitals. But much bigger changes are due to begin later in 2017, as charging will gradually be extended to GP primary care and A&E. The Department of Health’s thinking here is set out in a document published in February 2017, called “Making a Fair Contribution”, which followed a consultation exercise carried out in 2015-16.^ix In the consultation, the government sounded out health professionals, migrant charities and “members of the public” on its proposals, which included: extending charges to all A&E care, to ambulance and paramedic care, and to primary care except for initial consultations with GPs or nurses (which are believed necessary to stop the spread of contagious diseases.)

According to the government, over 50% of those consulted agreed with all of the proposals except for two: charges for A&E and for ambulances. On these, more than half disagreed or “strongly disagreed”. The document concludes that the government will introduce some changes immediately in April, but the less popular ones will be phased in more slowly. On GP charges, it says (on page 12):

“While we believe that primary care has an important role in establishing chargeable status and charging overseas visitors and migrants we will take a phased approach to implementing this over a longer time scale.”

This will involve working “with stakeholders including the Royal College of GPs, the British Medical Association (BMA)’s General Practitioners’ Committee (GPC) and the General Dental Council to consider how best to extend the charging of overseas visitors and migrants into primary care.” In particular:

“We will work with the BMA GPC to consider how we extend charging to primary medical services so that overseas visitors and migrants not exempt in the Charging Regulations will have to pay for these services, (excluding GP/nurse consultations).”

The negative responses on A&E and ambulance charges mean these proposals will be further delayed. But they are still very much on the table. The report concludes, in a section called “areas for further development”:

“Therefore, in the case of A&E care and ambulance services, we are still considering the points raised by respondents and exploring the feasibility of implementing the proposals. We will therefore respond on those points later in the year.”

How the system will work

Routinely checking documents of every patient will be a massive shift in NHS procedure and culture. Just who will be responsible for performing the checks and demanding the charges? How will staff be made to comply?

Similar measures have already been tested in pilot schemes. The main one has been at Peterborough and Stamford Hospitals NHS Trust, which has trialled document checks on all patients and upfront charges since 2013. ^x In Peterborough, patients must bring two forms of document, including a photo ID, to prove identity and address when registering for non-emergency treatment. Another pilot started in 2016 for maternity services at St George’s hospital in Tooting, South London.^xi

A cadre of designated bureaucrats called Overseas Visitor Managers (OVMs) will play a central role. Currently, in hospitals where some charging already takes place, the basic procedure is often that “frontline” staff, particularly nurses and admin staff, should “flag” potentially chargeable patients to OVMs for assessment. But if checking and charging is to scale up, either trusts will have to employ much bigger OVM teams, or responsibility will have to be devolved much more widely through hospital staff.

The centralised patient databases run by NHS Digital (see the next section) will also play a big role in generalising charging. According to a recent parliamentary Public Accounts Committee (PAC) report: “The Department has been working with NHS Digital to make changes to IT systems, including the summary care record application, to help trusts identify whether a patient is likely to be chargeable or entitled to free NHS care.”^xii

In the modern NHS, hospitals are run by semi-independent structures called NHS Trusts or NHS Foundation Trusts, the latter being the “better performing” ones that are rewarded with more autonomy and funding opportunities. They are subject to continual assessment and financial rewards or penalties. To ensure compliance with the “hostile environment”, it is likely that trusts will also become scored on performing ID checks and collecting charges. Such “incentives” are proposed in the same recent Parliamentary report.^xiii It is notable that Peterborough and Stamford was in the midst of an acute financial crisis, owing to massive PFI debt, and receiving special government bail-outs, when it took on the ID checking pilot in 2013.^xiv

The government is well aware that ID checking and charging patients does not sit easy with many health professionals. It recognises that it needs to create what it calls a “cultural change” where doctors and nurses will become happy immigration enforcers. In the conclusion to this report we will look a bit further at some of its moves to achieve this through propaganda campaigns within hospitals.

See also …

NHS charging has so far caused the most controversy of all hostile environment policies. The campaign group “Docs not Cops” is working to highlight the issue (http://www.docsnotcops.co.uk/).

Doctors of the World, which has long provided free healthcare without ID checks to excluded people in its clinics, has been a loud voice against anti-migrant health policies (https://www.doctorsoftheworld.org.uk/).

2. Healthcare (2): NHS Digital intelligence gathering

Immigration policing in the NHS is a double attack. The more hidden aspect is how patient data is being transferred in massive quantities from the NHS to the Home Office’s Immigration Enforcement directorate. The NHS collects data on millions of individuals who willingly hand over addresses and phone numbers, details of family members, and other personal “demographic” information when they register with a GP, perhaps trusting that it is safeguarded by medical confidentiality. This information is gold dust for Immigration Enforcement, which uses it to locate and arrest “illegals”.

The data is automatically fed by GP surgery computer systems to a national database called the Personal Demographics Service (PDS), run by an “arms length” business unit called NHS Digital (previously the Health and Social Care Information Centre). A recent Freedom of Information disclosure showed that, in the first 11 months of 2016, the Home Office made 8127 information requests from NHS Digital; 5854 of these led to people being traced.^xv

And this collaboration is just getting going. On 1 January 2017 a new “Memorandum of Understanding” (MoU) came into force between the Home Office and NHS Digital. This standardises direct data transfer between the two organisations so that patients’ addresses and other personal information are now handed over without GPs‘ permission.

NHS Digital’s data goldmine

The Personal Demographics Service (PDS) database is one of the most complete collections of personal information on people in England and Wales.^xvi Anyone who has ever used NHS services in England and Wales and been given an NHS number is recorded, and records are updated and “synchronised” every time you access another NHS service.^xvii It is widely accessible by NHS staff across the country.

The “demographics” collected include name, date of birth, gender^xviii, current and previous addresses, place of birth, “ethnicity category”, details of GP practice and preferred pharmacy, and details of relatives and other close contacts, cross-referenced to their own database entries. It also carries alerts about individuals flagged as “violent”. The NHS number is the key element of the system, acting as a unique identifier for individual patients.

The PDS does not contain medical records but is used as the basic identification tool that underpins the NHS Care Records System (CRS). The whole system of identification and care records together is often called the “Spine”.

Sharing of NHS medical records has been controversial, particularly when the recent care.data project was hit by worries about private companies’ use of clinical information.^xix In response to these concerns, patients are given some (rather vague) “opt outs” on sharing of their medical data. This is reflected by a field in the PDS which records if patients have said they “express dissent” to their Care Records being shared. But there is no such opt out from the non-medical PDS.^xx

The Memorandum of Understanding

The January 2017 memorandum of understanding sets out the protocol by which Immigration Enforcement goes to NHS Digital with “tracing requests” on named individuals.

In the current legal framework, data collected by government departments is intended for a particular purpose: e.g., the purpose of NHS data is medical care. It is not lawful to share data for any other purpose, even amongst government departments, unless some special circumstance or overriding concern applies. (NB: see Section 13 on how this may soon change.) So the memorandum sets out a legal basis for data sharing by arguing that the Health and Social Care Act 2012 allows “disclosure of information”, “in connection with the investigation of a criminal offence”, and that sharing this information is in “the public interest”.^xxi Every trace request has to be individually signed by an Immigration Officer affirming that the information requested is lawfully required.

The trace request then contains details on the target taken from the Home Office’s main immigration computer system, the Case Information Database (CID). NHS Digital searches against these on their databases and replies with personal information from their records, including: names, date of birth, gender, last known address, primary care (GP) details and date of NHS registration. The reply should be via “secure email” within 20 days, using a pro forma template set out in the memorandum.^xxii

The NHS Digital unit in charge of sending data to the Home Office is called the PDS National Back Office (NBO), based in Southport.^xxiii The same unit also works with the Home Office on data for the Immigration Health Surcharge.

In the past, NHS Digital strenuously denied passing on individuals’ addresses (as opposed to just GP areas) to the Home Office, unless this was demanded by a court order.^xxiv Doctors of the World and the National Aids Trust, in a briefing on the memorandum, argue:

“The MOU marks a departure from the principle that clinicians and the NHS respect patient confidentiality. Unless required by law the General Medical Council (GMC) only permits clinicians to share patient information when there is a risk of death or serious harm, or a public interest test on the individual circumstances has been carried out. Immigration offences do not present a risk of death or serious harm, and the MOU does not include case-by-case assessment of the public interest.”^xxv

The data shared by NHS Direct does not currently involve information about nationality, ethnicity, or birthplace. Birth place and “ethnic category” data are stored on PDS, but these entries are not demanded under the current memorandum. What Immigration Enforcement are looking for are current location information, i.e., addresses. The people targeted here are those already flagged as “immigration offenders”, for example, because their asylum claim has been rejected or they have overstayed a visa, and where the Home Office doesn’t have their current contact information.

Recently, some GPs and campaigners have pledged that they will not ask questions about people’s nationality or immigration status. This is an important stand, and will be very relevant in future as the government seeks to roll out ID checks and charges to primary care (see Section 1 above). But it will not address the main existing form of NHS Digital collaboration, which is focused on sharing addresses.

NB: We have set out a few more thoughts on this last point in an appendix to this report.

3. Education (1): the schools census

Since December 2015, the Department of Education (DfE) has had a Memorandum of Understanding with the Home Office to pass over an anticipated 1500 pupil records every month for immigration enforcement purposes.^xxvi The memorandum states directly that it aims to: “create a hostile environment for those who seek to benefit from the abuse of immigration control.” (Section 15.1.2).

As with the NHS agreement, first the Home Office sends a list of names they want to trace – in this case, a monthly batch. These may be names of children or of their family members. The DfE searches its National Pupil Database and sends back information including the family’s latest address, within a target of 10 days.

The National Pupil Database (NPD) is a central database of all state school pupils in the UK. School teachers collect personal data from parents and children three times a year, each school term, in the School Census. The personal census data includes items such as: name, date of birth, address, family members, ethnicity, and first language. Schools and other bodies such as social services also feed in further data to pupils’ records, for example test results, and records of absences and exclusions.

It is a statutory obligation for schools to complete the census – but not for parents or children to answer all the questions. The census is collected on one given day each term: e.g., in 2016-17 on the third Thursday in October, January and May.^xxvii The DfE unit responsible for replying to Home Office requests is the National Pupil Database and Transparency Team.

Although the memorandum anticipates about 1500 requests each month, in practice the numbers seem to have been lower. In response to a Freedom of Information request by Jen Persson, the DfE said it had received 599 trace requests from Immigration Enforcement in September through December 2016 – so more like 150 a month. The DfE only found matches in its database for 151 of these.^xxviii

The new questions

In September 2016, additional questions were added to the Schools Census asking for pupils’ nationality and country of birth. Education ministers have denied that data from these questions are shared with the Home Office,^xxix though there is no good reason to take their word on this: before the publication of the Memorandum of Understanding, they denied that any School Census data was shared at all. It may not be happening yet, but in future this information could certainly be useful to the Home Office to flag up potential “immigration offenders” they are not already targeting.

The guidelines on the new questions state that schools should record the answers as given by the pupil or guardian. The guidance explicitly states that schools are not allowed to ask for ID to check the answers.^xxx Leaked cabinet papers published last December show that the Home Office had indeed wanted to introduce ID checking in schools but this was resisted by the Department of Education.^xxxi Despite these instructions, there are numerous reports of schools in fact asking to see ID documents. Pupils or parents may refuse to answer, in which case schools should mark “refused”, and not put their own answers down.^xxxii

There have been calls to boycott these particular questions on the Schools Census. Like with GPs pledging not to ask for ID documents, this is an important stand. But it is worth remembering that it does not address the main use of pupil data by Immigration Enforcement at the moment: to track addresses of people they already know about.

See also …

The new Schools Census questions and the forced release of the memorandum have caused some controversy amongst teachers and parents. The campaign group Schools ABC (https://www.schoolsabc.net/) has been raising awareness of this issue and has called for a boycott of the questions on nationality and place of birth.

4. Education (2): Higher Education visa monitoring

Higher Education was one of the first areas where the Home Office outsourced border control to other agencies, making universities and colleges responsible for vetting non-UK students. Here we briefly recap some main issues in this sector.

Student visas are known as Tier 4 visas, under the wider “Points Based” visa system which was first introduced in 2009.^xxxiii To get a Tier 4 visa, a student must show that they have sufficient funds for their study and living expenses, and must be sponsored by an educational institution which holds a Tier 4 Sponsor Licence.^xxxiv The government’s rhetoric is that education is a route for illicit migration where “bogus students” either enrol at a sham college or drop out of their courses after arriving: their real interest is in entering the country to work … or perhaps to prepare terrorist plots.^xxxv

Foreign students are now central to many universities’ and other institutions’ income so they are anxious not to lose sponsorship status. To keep it, they must commit to collaboration with Immigration Enforcement. This includes agreeing to “support immigration control” and to:

“co-operate with the Home Office by allowing its staff immediate access to any of its sites on request (whether or not visits are prearranged) and complying with requests for information, including in connection with the prevention or detection of crime, the administration of illegal working civil penalties and/or the apprehension or prosecution of immigration offenders.”^xxxvi

It also involvesintensive ongoing monitoring of foreign students. Students details, including addresses and other personal information, are entered on an online system called the Sponsorship Management System (SMS), and must be kept continually updated. The Home Office directorate in charge of this database, and of the Tier 4 visa system in general, is UK Visas & Immigration (UKVI) rather than Immigration Enforcement and in particular, the UKVI Sponsor Management Unit (SMU), based at Vulcan House in Sheffield.

Sponsoring institutions are required to continually monitor and report students’ attendance. In general, they are expected to withdraw sponsorship and report to the Home Office if a student misses “10 consecutive expected contact points”, e.g., lessons, lectures, tutorials, supervisions, exams, or coursework submissions.^xxxvii

The Home Office does not specify just what internal monitoring procedures institutions must put in place. A certain amount of vagueness seems to work well for the Home Office:the burden is on institutions to prove that their systems are satisfactory, and precisely because the requirements are not spelled out colleges are likely to go well beyond the basics. For example, according to a 2012 article by the then NUS international student officer:

“At Coventry University ‘all undergraduate students are required to Check-In on 3 days per week.‘ Checking in is done by ‘present[ing] your Student ID Card to the member of staff at any monitoring station.‘ The University of the Arts London and the University of Glamorgan requires all its international students to ‘check-in‘ once a week. The University of East London has introduced a ‘three-strikes‘ system where if a student misses ‘3 compulsory elements of a module‘ or ‘whose overall attendance falls below 75‘ will be de-registered from the module. Other universities have introduced similar physical checks albeit not of the same quantity. Greenwich and UWE require monthly check-ins.”^xxxviii

In August 2012, the Home Office made a show of suspending London Metropolitan University’s “highly trusted” status. It regained the license in April 2013, but this served to scare institutions into tightening up their surveillance.

In many institutions, the “frontline” role of monitoring attendance is mainly carried out by lecturers and teachers taking class registers. Attendance registers will often be taken for all students, not just foreign students, which helps avoid an appearance of “discrimination”. Teachers may not even be aware that a main reason for taking registers is to comply with Home Office sponsorship requirements: instead, the university may say that the main aim is to help with “pastoral care”.^xxxix Many institutions will have dedicated “international student” teams in charge of assessing this data and liaising with the Home Office.

There are also similar pressures on institutions to monitor international staff. For example, according to a report by the University and Colleges Union (UCU):

“At Bangor University, unauthorised absences of international staff for more than 10 days are reported by Human Resources. East Anglia University reports international staff failing to turn up for their first day of work, along with any reason for their non-attendance.”^xl

See also …

Both the main university teachers’ union (UCU) and students union (NUS) have issued statements against elements of this policy since it began. But there has not been much active campaigning on the issue in the last few years.

5. Housing: no passport no home

People who are not British or European citizens, or who have not been granted “leave to remain”, are now banned from renting a home. Or as the government puts it, they do not have the “right to rent”. The Immigration Act 2014 orders that landlords must check prospective tenants’ ID documents, or call a Home Office hotline to check people without the necessary papers. Renting to someone without the right immigration status can mean a civil penalty of up to £3000 (£1000 on the first occasion) for the landlord. The penalty will not apply, though, if the landlord can show evidence that they made the checks correctly and have kept copies of the documents.^xli

The Immigration Act 2016 made things heavier still. As well as civil penalties, landlords or their agents can now also be charged with a criminal offence punishable by up to five years in prison. In this case, the prosecution will have to prove that they knew or had “reason to believe” that the tenant was illegal. The 2016 Act also allows landlords to evict existing tenants who do not have a “right to rent”, without any court order, and the Home Office can order them to do so.

Landlords can delegate their responsibility to letting agents, and landlords or agents are allowed to charge prospective tenants fees for checking their papers. The law also applies to lodgers in someone’s home, so long as money changes hands (the civil penalties for renting to lodgers are smaller, between £80 to £500). A few types of properties are exempt from the checks, including hostels, refuges, and student halls of residence.

Landlords need to check documents of all prospective tenants, not just those they suspect of being foreign (as that would break discrimination rules). A wide range of documents can be presented and small landlords are unlikely to be familiar with the procedures. A survey by the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants (JCWI) of the Home Office’s initial “right to rent” pilot scheme in the West Midlands found that “42% of landlords are unlikely to rent to those without British passports. Over 25% would be less likely to rent to someone with a foreign name or foreign accent.”^xlii

The new regime is a boon for letting agents, who can profit by offering landlords their experience in document checking. Some local authorities are also looking to cash in by offering “right to rent check” services. The laws also, of course, create a good black market business opportunity for those willing to take on the risk of housing “illegals” in return for inflated rents.

The civil and criminal structures of the “right to rent” closely mirror the Home Office’s procedures for dealing with “illegal working” (see Section 7 below). In that field, it is common practice for Immigration Enforcement to approach bosses and employment agencies for information on “illegals”, offering reduced or waived penalties for collaboration such as setting up “arrests by appointment”. We may soon see similar moves in housing, e.g., involving letting agents in setting up sting operations against prospective tenants on their books.

See also:

The Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants (JCWI) has produced useful briefings on the “Right to Rent” scheme (https://www.jcwi.org.uk/hostile-environment-undocumented-migrants). Also see the “Homes Not Borders” campaign website https://homesnotborders.net/.

6. Homelessness: rounding up foreign rough-sleepers

If the renting ban pushes more undocumented people to sleep on the streets, the Home Office’s Immigration Compliance and Enforcement (ICE) teams will be waiting for them. Rough sleepers are now a target group for ICE patrols, which rely on close collaboration from local councils, police, and charity “outreach” teams.

Here we summarise some key points from the recent Corporate Watch report on this topic, “The Round Up”.^xliii That investigation focused on London, which has by far the highest concentration of street homelessness in the UK. Similar developments have also been reported in Bristol, Brighton, and other cities with large numbers of rough sleepers.

Immigration Enforcement rough sleeping patrols largely target European nationals. In London, almost half (47%) of all rough sleepers are non-British Europeans, compared to 41% British nationals, with smaller numbers from Africa (5.5%) and Asia (4.9%). Particularly large numbers are from Romania (19.5%), Poland (8.7%), and other East and Central European countries which joined the EU in the 2000s.^xliv Elsewhere in England, up to 85% of rough sleepers are British.

European Union and other “European Economic Area” (EEA) citizens normally have a right to remain in the UK for 90 days, and indefinitely after that so long as they “exercise their treaty rights”: i.e., are working, looking for work studying, or are independently wealthy. However, in May 2016, the Home Office published a new policy which defines sleeping rough as an “abuse” of treaty rights, making people liable for detention and deportation the first time they are found sleeping on the street.^xlv This policy was written into new legislation (Home Office rules) in February 2017.^xlvi

Under these Home Office guidelines, ICE officers have the power to immediately issue a “decision to remove” notice to European rough sleepers, and put them into detention. However, they are supposed to assess whether detention is “proportional”. Another option, for example, is that individuals may be supported by homelessness charities to leave “voluntarily”. They may also be issued a “minded to remove” letter ordering them to attend a Home Office interview.

A notable feature of this initiative is the collusion of homelessness NGOs and charities, as well as local authorities including the Mayor of London and Greater London Authority (GLA), and local London boroughs. For local authorities, “reconnection” of European migrants is an easy way to make a quick impact on visible homelessness and help meet policy targets

In central London, local boroughs contract charities to run street outreach services, the first point of contact with rough sleepers. The biggest player is St Mungo’s, which runs outreach teams for Westminster, the borough with by far the highest concentration of rough sleepers, and most other central councils. A charity called “Change, Grow, Live” (CGL) runs outreach in Camden and Lambeth. Another, called Thames Reach, runs a mobile outreach programme for most of outer London, contracted by the GLA. St Mungo’s also has a GLA programme called “Routes Home”, whose role is to “support” migrant rough sleepers identified by the outreach workers to accept “voluntary reconnection”. 10% of its fee for this contract is dependent on the number of rough sleepers removed from the UK.^xlvii

All of these charities routinely work together with Home Office Immigration Enforcement. This collaboration involves three main routes:

• Accompanying ICE officers on joint patrols. Freedom of Information (FOI) responses showed that there were 141 such joint “visits” organised by the GLA and 12 other councils in 2016.^xlviii Other local authorities, including Westminster, did not respond to FOI requests, and so the full figure will be considerably higher.
• Passing location information on foreign rough sleepers through the “CHAIN” database. This is a London-wide database, commissioned by the GLA and run by St Mungo’s, into which outreach teams upload data every night. The GLA then passes CHAIN information onto ICE.^xlix
• Liaising with ICE to target individuals who refuse “voluntary reconnection”. The outreach teams have agreements in place to hand over information on individuals to ICE for “enforcement” if they have refused to leave voluntarily.

In contrast with some other “hostile environment” policies, the Home Office’s “partners” in this sector have themselves been strong advocates of the tougher regime. Westminster Council has said that it “intensely lobbied” for the move to immediate deportation of EU rough sleepers, pushing the policy through a two month pilot with St Mungo’s called Operation Adoze, which involved 127 deportations.^l Much of the new “partnership” approach was developed by a GLA-led body called the Mayor’s Rough Sleepers Group (MRSG), in which managers from borough councils, St Mungo’s and Thames Reach were active members.^li

See also …

This section summarises our full report on this issue (https://corporatewatch.org/news/2017/mar/05/rough-sleeper-immigration-raids-charity-collaboration-st-mungos-thames-reach). There is a new campaign to support targeted rough sleepers coordinated by North East London Migrant Action (NELMA) and supported by Housing Action Southwark and Lambeth (HASL), Haringey Housing Action Group (HHAG) and others.

7. Work: employer collaboration

“Illegal working” has been targeted by the Home Office since long before the current “hostile environment” approach, and is still a main focus of Immigration Enforcement raids. The Corporate Watch report “Snitches, Stings and Leaks” examines workplace raids in detail.^lii Here we summarise some key pointsfrom that report.

Immigration Compliance and Enforcement (ICE) teams carry out around 6,000 workplace raids a year. Raids are supposed to be “intelligence led”, i.e., based on specific information about the presence of “immigration offenders”. In reality, they are largely based on around 50,000 low grade tip-offs from “members of the public”, or are “fishing expeditions”. The most common targets are South Asian restaurants and takeaways, which are easy pickings for the squads.

While none of this is new, the recent Immigration Acts have escalated workplace enforcement. The 2006 Immigration Act made it a criminal offence to knowingly employ an “illegal worker”. And whether or not the employer could be proved to have knowledge, they could be charged “civil penalties” without any trial. The civil penalty system was souped up in the 2014 Act, and again in the 2016 Act, which also escalated the criminal sanctions.^liii

For the first time, someone can now be imprisoned just for “illegal working”. The maximum penalty is six months, plus an unlimited fine. And any earnings from “illegal work” can be seized. Employers now face up to five years prison for “employing an illegal worker”, if the prosecution can show that they either knew or just had “reasonable grounds to believe” that the employee did not have a “right to work”.

This increased penalty system goes along with an increasing emphasis on employer collaboration by ICE teams. Penalties can be reduced or even waived on a first occasion, if employers agree to cooperate with investigations and hand over workers’ details when they are first approached.

In 2014, the Home Office ran a London pilot scheme called “Operation Skybreaker”, which has since been rolled out nationwide. This new approach involves routinely conducting “educational visits” to employers ahead of raids “to encourage them to comply with employment requirements.”

During these visits, ICE officers may use the threat of penalties to try to persuade bosses to inform on and set up their workers. For example, they may be asked to hand over workers’ home addresses, or even to set up “arrests by appointment” in the workplace, as in the notorious sting operation that took place at Byron Burgers in 2016.^liv Also, larger or more public-facing companies may be approached to inform on their less visible contractors, such as cleaning agencies, who are more likely to use cut-rate “illegal” labour.

Another trend is the increasing role of multi-agency operations, where ICE teams work alongside other government agencies including Local Authority departments (e.g., alcohol or taxi licensing, environmental health, planning for building sites, street market regulation, neighbourhood “wardens”), HMRC, the Security Industry Authority (SIA) that registers security guards, transport police, etc. These liaisons can involve both intelligence sharing and full-on joint raids.

See also:

The Anti Raids Network (https://network23.org/antiraids/) spreads alerts and information about immigration raids in workplaces and elsewhere.

8. Driving Licences

Many of the “hostile environment” measures involve the Home Office accessing other organisations’ data, particularly to track down current addresses of migrants they are targeting. Another invaluable information partner for Immigration Enforcement is the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Authority (DVLA), which collects detailed personal and location data on drivers and vehicle owners.

This is another long-standing collaboration: according to a report by the Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration (ICIBI), the Home Office has had an officer “embedded at DVLA” since 2005.^lv And it is another one that is ramping up under the “hostile environment”.

The 2014 Immigration Act gave the DVLA the power to refuse new driving licence applications to people who are not “normally and lawfully resident” in the UK. This wrote into law what had already been practice since at least 2010, and involves wording similar to the NHS charging rules discussed above. It also introduced a new power to revoke existing licences of people who are not “lawful residents”. The 2016 Act added another new criminal offence: “driving unlawfully in the UK”, even with a licence, is now punishable by up to five years in prison. This act also gave ICE new powers to search people and buildings for driving licences they are not entitled to.

Again, data sharing is at the heart of the Home Office/DVLA collaboration, formulated through a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU). The arrangement goes two ways. The DVLA asks officers to check the Home Office CID database for the immigration status of licence applicants. And Immigration Enforcement officers are given “read only” access to the DVLA’s main database, called the Driver Validation Service (DVS).

Again, there is a double “hostile environment” aim. On the one hand, unwanted migrants are cut off from another right – the right to drive – but also from the use of a driving licence as an ID document that can help access other services. Secondly, the arrangement may help ICE identify and target “illegals” who make the mistake of applying for a licence. This is highlighted by the ICIBI report:

“In some instances, driving licence applications had revealed illegal migrants not previously known to the Home Office, or had provided an up to date address for an individual with whom the Home Office had lost contact. In some cases, the applicant had submitted a valid travel document with their application and this had been retained by ISD as the absence of a valid travel document is a barrier to removal. Some of these migrants received visits from local ICE teams, and some had since either been subject to an enforced removal or had made a voluntary return.”^lvi

9. Bank Accounts

Before 2014, banks and building societies were legally obliged to verify customers’ identities and check for “money laundering or terrorist financing”, but not required to look at immigration status. This changed with the 2014 Immigration Act. Since then, banks are required to check people applying for a current account against a Home Office list of “disqualified persons”, who are known immigration offenders (e.g., illegal entrants, visa overstayers, European citizens with deportation orders, etc.). The 2016 Act adds that existing accounts of “disqualified” people can be seized or closed.

The “disqualified persons” list is maintained by a private organisation called CIFAS.^lvii This is a membership organisation^lviii mainly comprised of banks and corporates which runs the UK financial industry’s main National Fraud Database. Banks and other creditors (e.g., car dealers, phone companies) already check CIFAS databases for fraud alerts when opening customer accounts. Now they can check customers’ immigration status at the same time.

Banks must refuse accounts if there is a three point or “best practice match” of name, address, and date of birth against the database; if there is only a “Same Individual At Address” (SIAA) match they have discretion. They can check using the standalone “CIFAS Immigration Portal” (CIP), or access the database via commercial credit check services run by Callcredit, Equifax, Experian, and Synectics Solutions.^lix

According to the Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration (ICIBI):

“The Home Office shares data with Cifas on a weekly basis in the form of updates (additions and deletions) to the list of ‘disqualified persons’ , and the list is updated by Cifas on the same day. At the time of the inspection, the list contained the details of around 200,000 individuals, including permutations of names, dates of birth and addresses, and the weekly updates affected around 2,000 individuals.”^lx

The weekly updates are “extracted automatically” from the main Home Office Case Information Database (CID). CIFAS on its website states that anyone on the list “has exhausted their legal right to appeal in the UK and is either an illegal overstayer or an absconder … they are criminals with no right to remain in the UK.” ^lxi But according to ICIBI the categories are:

“individuals refused leave to remain; absconders; immigration offenders – e.g. illegal entrants, illegal workers, overstayers – who have been encountered and served with notice of liability for removal; and individuals for whom a deportation order is being pursued. The dataset includes any known aliases used and previous addresses.”^lxii

So the list will also include, for example, refugees who have been denied asylum. Also, according to the ICIBI inspection report, 10% of the sample they checked should not have been on the list. 5% still had outstanding appeals or applications; and 5% actually had leave to remain.^lxiii

As with other hostile environment agreements, as well as depriving migrants of a right or service, this system could help ICE track down targets’ locations. Every month, CIFAS sends the Home Office a list of all matches, giving details of people on the disqualified list who have tried to open an account, including the addresses and other information they have submitted to banks. However, in its current form this information is less useful for ICE’s tracking purposes than other sources – because any matches are against the same address the Home Office already has.

10. Marriages

Another staple of Immigration Enforcement for years has been targeting alleged “sham” marriages. In the past, the ICE approach involved handcuff-wielding thugs crashing weddings followed by UK Border Force TV cameras. In the “hostile environment” era, the Home Office has a less spectacular but more systematic approach.

The 2014 Immigration Act extended the official notice period couples have to give for a marriage to 28 days, from 15 previously. Registry offices are required to inform the Home Office of all planned marriages involving people of “non-exempt” immigration status that might be suspected “sham marriages”. The Home Office then decides whether to investigate further.

If Immigration Enforcement decides to investigate, it can extend the notice period to 70 days. So long as a couple complies with the investigation, by submitting documents and attending interviews, they can marry after the 70 days. If the investigators then decide a marriage is “sham”, the wedding may still go ahead, and in fact couples may not even be informed that the marriage is viewed as a fake. But any later immigration application based on it will be refused.

According to the Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration (ICIBI):

“The inspection found that the different approach had not been fully understood by all registrars, and the fact that ICE teams no longer routinely attended register offices had created an impression with some registrars that the Home Office was less active in relation to sham marriage.”^lxiv

The Home Office unit set up a specialist team called the “Marriage Referral Assessment Unit” (MRAU), based in Liverpool, to evaluate sham marriages. However, according to the ICIBI report, there have been issues with the unit’s performance and the job of judging couples’ sincerity may return to local ICE teams.

11. Police liaison: Operation Nexus

The hostile environment approach is all about reducing ICE’s workload and extending its reach through “partnership working”. Another key partner is the police.

Historically, police and Immigration Enforcement, despite often working together on joint operations, have not always had good relationships: in the eyes of real cops, ICE teams are basically jumped-up amateurs. This lack of cooperation may be reflected in information sharing arrangements. In January 2016, the Home Office asked the Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration (ICIBI) to review “the extent to which the police are identifying and flagging foreign nationals arrested to the Home Office and checking status”.^lxv Police said they arrested over 185,000 foreign nationals between April 2015 and March 2016; but only around half were checked for immigration status.

The Home Office review of this area may suggest a coming push to better integrate police and ICE checks. Anecdotally, there does seem to be a shift taking place towards much more systematic collaboration. This includes recent stories of the Metropolitan Police handing over victims and witnesses of crime to Immigration Enforcement.^lxvi

Coordination is particularly advancing in London, under a scheme started in October 2012 called Operation Nexus. In this scheme, Metropolitan Police are required to pass details of all “foreign nationals or suspected foreign nationals” they “encounter or arrest” to a central Home Office unit called the Command and Control Unit (CCU).^lxvii Staff in this central unit then check their details against the Home Office’s databases, primarily the main Case Information Database (CID). If there is a “match” with a known “immigration offender”, the case is then referred to several ICE Immigration Officers (IOs) who are embedded as “police liaison officers” in a number of area “hub” police stations for this purpose.^lxviii A group of other IOs and police work together in a dedicated Joint Operations Centre (JOC).

Outside London, the review found that referrals to the CCU for immigration checks were as low as 15% in West Yorkshire, although more cases were referred straight to embedded IOs. One other issue the Inspector found was that many cops outside London hadn’t been taught that they should also check European citizens. The report mentions several times a Home Office priority to also target EEA nationals who are “not exercising their treaty rights”.

In general, police and IOs currently do not have full access to each others’ databases. As of October 2016, only the police working in the Joint Operations Centre could access the Home Office CID database themselves. Home Office fingerprint databases were not available at all police stations. Police could access the Passport Authority’s DVA database; IOs couldn’t access it directly, but have to get the CCU to do so for them, and each check has to be requested individually. IOs could access the main cop database, the Police National Computer (PNC).^lxix

Police also routinely make “ACRO” criminal records checks on all arrestees. Where arrestees are foreign nationals, this can involve sending off criminal record requests to their countries of origin, and the responses may still take days or even weeks to come back. IOs can also make ACRO requests – but legally police and ICE are not allowed to share the results with each other (whether they do in practice may be another question). ACRO results can only be entered on the Police National Computer in the case of serious, usually violent, offences.^lxx

We could expect all of this to change in months or years to come, as we approach the Home Office dream of one big government database uniting police and immigration files, and much more besides. (NB: we will look more at this issue in a separate report.)

12. Local Authorities: Controlling Migration Fund

Local councils are another group of important partners. These authorities often conduct joint operations with ICE teams and police, e.g., involving departments that manage alcohol or taxi licensing, environmental health, planning for building sites, street market regulation, neighbourhood “wardens”, and more. They are also key in the targeting of rough sleepers, as they commission and manage many homelessness services including street outreach teams.

The Home Office is keen to foster these relationships. In November 2016, it announced a fund called the “Controlling Migration Fund” which local authorities in England can bid to for help with projects aimed at “mitigating the impacts of migration on local communities”.^lxxi It’s clear that the beneficiaries of the fund are meant to be “locals” as opposed to “migrants”. The amount is in fact small change, £140 million over three years. But £40 million of that is specifically earmarked for “enforcement” projects to develop collaborations between councils and ICE teams.

The fund’s prospectus highlights two particular enforcement targets: foreign national rough sleepers, and “rogue landlords” who are breaking the new “right to rent” legislation. But it also invites councils to come up with new ideas in “an entirely different area”.

It is still early days, and there is no available information overall on what bids have been submitted so far. There is no particular deadline, but many councils report that they have been contacted by the Home Office and encouraged to submit immediate bids.

In responses to Freedom of Information requests sent in January, out of all London boroughs only Haringey Council stated openly that it was “considering a bid” to the fund for targeting rough sleepers. But others are also likely to be working on such schemes.^lxxii For example, a February 2017 document from the Borough of Redbridge in East London says that it is investigating a range of options for enforcement targets, including rough sleepers, “rogue landlords”, and also sex workers.^lxxiii Outside London, Nottingham City Council is making a bid that includes ESOL classes and support for voluntary organisations, but also “a variety of engagement, cohesion & enforcement activities in communities”.^lxxiv

13. The Digital Economy Bill: towards the One Big Database

The last measure we will look at in this report is not in fact a Home Office “hostile environment” policy, but goes much wider than this.

Many of the hostile environment measures we have looked at are about the Home Office accessing data from other government departments, or from charities or private companies. At the moment, there are a few obstacles in the way of data flowing freely between these “partners”. For example, even units in the same department may use quite incompatible software systems. But also, there are still relatively tight legal restrictions on how data can be shared.

As we write, the House of Lords is having one of the final parliamentary debates on a new law that sets out to change all that, the Digital Economy Bill. Most publicity on the Digital Economy Bill has focused on its inept attempts to control pornography^lxxv; but its potential to free up government data gathering is much more significant.

In the current legal framework, data collected by government departments is intended for a particular purpose. E.g., School Census data is meant to help planning in the education system. It is not lawful to share it for any other purpose, unless some special circumstance or “public interest” need applies. In bureaucrat language, an information-sharing memorandum establishes an “information sharing gateway” between two departments. It must be for a specific reason, and there must be a legal argument for why that reason is important enough to override confidentiality.

Part 5 of the Bill is on “digital government”. Its first clause, Clause 38, creates a general purpose “single gateway to enable public authorities, specified by regulation, to share personal information” from their databases.^lxxvi To be precise, Clause 38(1) provides that “a specified person may disclose information held by the person in connection with any of the person’s functions to another specified person for the purposes of a […] specified objective”.^lxxvii

But who are the “specified persons”, and what are the “specified objectives”? This is the thing: they are not actually specified in the new law. Instead, they are left open to be decided later by secondary legislation. I.e., the government (or devolved regional authorities) can just add to a list of “specified persons” as it wishes later on, without this having to be approved by parliament.

What the Bill does say is that “specified persons” can be any “person who exercises functions of a public nature”, including a person “providing services to a public authority” (under clause 38(4)(b)). I.e.: they can also include private sector contractors.

Currently, it might just be possible to make a legal challenge to a data sharing memorandum such as the NHS or Schools Census agreement, e.g., arguing that it is not in the “public interest”. If the Digital Economy Bill passes without amendment, all the government needs to do is write a rule saying that the Home Office and the Department of Health – or Atos, Capita, G4S, Google, or another private contractor – are “specified persons” entitled to share their databases.

The Bill passed the House of Commons without amendment on this clause in November 2016.^lxxviii In January 2017, a House of Lords committee called for substantial amendments, particularly to remove the inclusion of private contractors.^lxxix The Lords is now debating the bill’s “third reading”, after which it will go back to the Commons for final debates on amendments.

See also:

There is a lot more to say about the Home Office’s plans to dramatically escalate data sharing in the future. We plan to discuss this further in another report.

Conclusion: how collaboration works

This report aims to make a small step towards understanding how the hostile environment works, and so stimulate thinking about how to fight it effectively. People on the frontline will know a lot more about how things work in their own fields; but it may help to have an overview and see how many of the same patterns repeat.

Why do people collaborate with a police state … and why do some people resist? We can think about some of the different roles that people are asked to play in the hostile environment; the different incentives that encourage them to conform; and so where the hold of collaboration may be broken.

Besides recapping from the sections above, we will look at one interesting document. This is a report commissioned by the Department of Health from a private consultancy, Ipsos MORI Social Research Institute, on its project to get hospitals to ID check and charge “overseas visitors”.^lxxx If you can wallow through the post-Blairite newspeak, this report is a fascinating study into how the government goes about destroying a culture of care, to create instead a culture of collaboration. In its own words:

“As well as aiming to increase awareness regarding the rules and processes for charging overseas patients, the Cost Recovery Programme also set out to support a culture in which all NHS staff are aware of their responsibilities to identify and recover costs from overseas visitors and migrants. It aims for an attitudinal shift to a point where all NHS staff feel a responsibility for recovering money from chargeable visitors and migrants and, where medically possible, do not treat patients until the eligibility for free NHS care has been established.” (page 40).

Collaborating roles

The hostile environment means depriving people of basic rights and services, blocking people’s possibilities of life. One part of this is what we can call enforcement action. In the most obvious sense, “immigration enforcement” means ICE teams (or others such as police, security guards, or fascist vigilantes) using or threatening force: arresting, detaining and deporting people. But hospitals refusing to give someone medical treatment, or landlords refusing to rent someone a home, are also direct forms of immigration control, which may have similarly damaging consequences.

Denying people homes or healthcare causes immediate suffering. But it also helps create an environment of hostility which impedes every aspect of people’s lives, and goes way beyond particular acts of force. The main impact of a workplace raid is not just a few arrests or a broken door, but spreading fear amongst many more workers who know they may be next. The impact of hospital ID checks is that many more migrants may never seek treatment in the first place.

By “collaboration” we mean people who are not professional Home Office immigration enforcers acting in ways that support the hostile environment. In the measures surveyed in this report, we see two main kinds of collaborative actions:

(i) Controlling.I.e., directly blocking migrants’ possibilities of life. E.g., refusing someone medical care, refusing to employ someone or rent to them, refusing someone a driving licence or bank account.

(ii) Informing. I.e., passing on information which can help ICE or others who actually carry out enforcement. E.g., collecting the Schools Census, registering patients’ details, collecting details for bank account or driving licence applications, taking a student register, recording locations of foreign national rough sleepers. In these cases, the information is fed into databases that may later be accessed by Immigration Enforcement. But there are also cases of more direct informing, e.g., bosses, landlords, bank staff, registrars reporting a suspected “illegal” to the Home Office. Or just “members of the public” grassing up their colleagues or neighbours in one of the 50,000 tip offs submitted every year.

In the second case, actual enforcement or control is carried out by other people – but it coudn’t happen without the information supplied. There may be various links in the data chain: e.g., a teacher fills out a School Census form; which is passed on to school admin staff; who pass it on to the DfE’s central data unit (the “National Pupil Database and Transparency Team”); who pass it to the Home Office. Those at the start of the chain may have no idea where the information they pass on will end up.

Collaboration of both kinds involves workers in various roles and sectors. We can identify:

Frontline roles. People who deal directly with migrants, provide or block services, and/or gather their information. Including those in care roles such as teachers and classroom assistants, nurses, doctors, paramedics, homelessness outreach workers. Also receptionists in hospitals or GP surgeries, or registrars, or bank clerks. Also employers, landlords, or their agents.

Admin roles. People who collect information from frontline workers, organise and circulate it. Data workers in schools, universities, hospitals, the DVLA, credit check agencies, NHS Digital, etc.

Managerial roles. People who make strategies, targets and directives, arrange collaboration agreements and sign memoranda, who give the orders. From senior bureaucrats in government departments down to headteachers, charity bosses, local council executives, university assistant vice-chancellors and foreign student managers, local health commissioners, hospital trust boards, hospital accountants, hospital “Overseas Visitor Managers” (OVMs), etc.

Technical roles. Programmers who build the databases, IT geeks who maintain them. Management consultants who advise on how to achieve “attitudinal shift”. And others who lend their expertise to making control and information systems function.

All these roles can be found in public sector institutions, e.g., NHS hospitals or state schools; or in NGOs and “third sector” organisations, e.g., homelessness charities or universities; or in profit-making companies, e.g., banks and letting agents. In the modern market state, where NHS clinics are contracted to Virgin Care and schools become “academies”, these divisions are often fluid or intersecting.

Finally, we can also consider the roles we all play as “members of the public”.

Firstly, any citizen, or indeed other migrants, can also collaborate by passing on information on migrants. We know that one of the main sources of Immigration Enforcement intelligence remains tip-offs from “members of the public”, i.e., people informing on their colleagues and neighbours. This too can happen unknowingly or with good intentions. E.g., citizens may inform a charity about people sleeping rough, believing this will help them, and never imagining that this information is passed to Immigration Enforcement.

Secondly, there is a broad sense in which we can collaborate by giving information just about ourselves. The Schools Census or NHS registration data require widespread participation by citizens in this data gathering. If many people stopped answering Schools Census questions, or giving their addresses to GPs, these systems could not be used to track down “illegals”.

Incentives to collaborate

People act from many different motives. Often a whole mix of different motives will lead us to act in a certain way, and often our motives clash and pull us in different directions at once.

One motive leading people to collaborate with the hostile environment may be downright malice, hatred and fear of migrants. Racist xenophobia is a constant and virulent presence in our lives, bombarding us in every politician’s speech and TV news broadcast, from newspapers, billboards, social media, talk in the street or the playground. The norms of stranger-hating shape our environment, and make it much easier to ignore the consequences of our actions and inaction. But, for most people, hatred or fear of foreigners is not strong enough, on its own, to guarantee collaboration and override our empathy for others.

To make the hostile environment happen, government tries to set up a range of incentives which foster collaboration and deter resistance. We can group these into a few broad categories:

Punishments: criminal sanctions.The 2014 and 2016 Immigration Acts escalate the criminalisation of migrants with new offences including “illegal working”. They also criminalise landlords and employers who don’t collaborate in refusing homes or jobs to migrants.

Punishments: financial penalties. Alongside the new criminal sanctions, civil penalties are still the mainstay of enforced immigration collaboration. In workplace enforcement, the civil penalties system is used to encourage bosses and employment agencies to inform on or set up workers, e.g., handing over their home addresses or arranging “arrests by appointment” as in the Byron Burgers case, in order to win reduced penalties. This approach now serves as a model being rolled out to the “right to rent” and possibly more areas in future. In other sectors, the Home Office doesn’t directly fine non-collaborators, but, e.g., removing a licence to teach foreign students can have an even greater financial impact. And for many contractors or workers, refusing to collaborate could mean losing crucial income, promotion prospects, or your job.

Rewards: money, contracts, andother opportunities. Conversely, being prepared to collaborate can open up lucrative opportunities for individuals or organisations. Canny bureaucrats in government departments will be quick to latch on the new big thing. Management consultants, letting agents or councils offering right to rent checks, and many others stand to gain from the hostile environment. For some, like the software engineers working on the new generation of Home Office databases, it can even offer opportunities for creative excitement as they get to play with innovative new “big data” systems.

Inertia. For many other workers, it will be more a matter of keeping heads down and “just doing my job”. The habit of obedience, and the fear of asking questions or standing out, are some of the most powerful motivations of all.

Doing good.There are also those who genuinely believe, or at least tell themselves insistently, they are doing the right thing. Perhaps they are patriots who believe they are working for the nation. Or maybe they believe they are doing the best thing for migrants too: see the justifications given by charity bosses at St Mungo’s and Thames Reach who claim that “reconnecting” non-British rough sleepers with the streets of home is in their own best interest.^lxxxi

Towards a culture of collaboration in the NHS

The Ipsos MORI study on hospital charging shows a government department mobilising a full range of motivations in its quest to create an anti-migrant “cultural change within the NHS”. First of all, financial incentives are the base level. In the “Non-EEA incentive scheme”, hospitals are allowed to bill non-Europeans 150% of the normal “national tariff” set for NHS charges. When a charge is collected, half goes to the local commissioning body which allocates NHS funds, but the other half – so 75% of the actual tariff – is now kept directly by the hospital trust.

And along with the carrot comes a stick. The commissioners “do not have to pay for services provided to chargeable patients if the Trust has failed to take reasonable steps to identify and recover charges from that patient”. And, in future, penalties for any hospital bosses who hold out will become more severe: both because the systems for identifying chargeable patients will become increasingly efficient, and because from this month charging will be a legal duty.

These rewards and penalties impact on hospitals as a whole, and will be felt most directly by senior managers. Their career prospects are directly linked to the hospital’s financial success and to the approval of their NHS higher-ups. The more incentives bite them, the more they will be encouraged to pass them on to the frontline staff who will have to actually ID check patients. To help them, a whole new middle-management profession of “Overseas Visitor Managers” (OVMs) has been created to oversee charging, and to “educate” hospital staff on its necessity.

So far, hospitals have been allowed to operate very different charging systems. Often OVMs do most of the work: “frontline clinical and administrative staff are only engaged to the point of flagging cases to the OVM that need investigation whilst OVMs themselves have retained responsibility for interpreting complex rules, and making decisions on how to proceed.” (Page 44). But if ID checks and charging are to become routine, this will require much greater participation from frontline staff. This needs resources: staff will have to come off other duties to “investigate” and make charging decisions themselves, and will need more training to do so.

Furthermore, according to the Ipsos MORI report, financial incentives are not enough to get staff on board with ID checking: they also need to believe that it is right. In the report’s wording, the programme’s success is linked to “driving cultural change across staff groups” so that staff come to believe they have a ‘duty to charge’, and “understand and support the principles of fairness and entitlement underpinning the Cost Recovery Programme”, seeing it as “legitimate and worthwhile at all levels” (Page 35).

The report claims that most hospital staff surveyed do already support the “broad/overarching principles of the Cost Recovery Programme”.

“In particular, there was a very strong level of agreement, across all staff groups, that charging overseas visitors and migrants for NHS services is fair. At least two thirds in each group agree, and indeed, almost nine in ten Trust chairs and board members (88%) and OVMs (86%) agree, as do 84% of administrative staff. In addition, at least half, and often much more, of each staff group disagreed that overseas visitors and migrants should have the same access to free healthcare as UK residents.” (Page 35).

But broad support in a survey is different from active participation. And the report is concerned that a “significant minority” disagreed. 28% of hospital doctors and 26% of hospital nurses thought that “overseas visitors and migrants should have the same access to free healthcare as UK residents.”

Some complained about migrants’ “human rights”. Some even “refused to be involved in identifying and flagging potentially chargeable patients because they saw their role as being only to treat the patients”, not to follow the “‘funding- led’ attitude driving cost recovery”. The report mentions one OVM complaining about senior managers taking down their educational posters. Few staff actively opposed the policy, but more were half-hearted: “this tended to take the form of ambivalence or a ‘reluctance to get involved’”. Even those who did participate were unlikely to see ID checking patients as a priority in their already very busy schedules.

Even more worrying for the programme, the report found that rather than getting stronger, “buy in” for the “duty to charge” actually seemed to be dropping over its two years.

“In particular, the proportion of hospital doctors who agree that charging overseas visitors and migrants for NHS services is fair has fallen from 85% in the baseline survey to 68% at the follow-up survey, while a similar picture is also evident amongst primary care clinicians, CCG Leads and Boards, and Trust Chairs and Boards. […] The overall decline in support for the principles underpinning the Cost Recovery Programme among some groups raises the possibility that some Trusts will face ongoing difficulty in making the changes required to improve the recovery of costs.” (Pages 36-7).

To counter this, the report suggests that “buy in” of frontline staff was best when OVM had made the most efforts “to engage with them and explain the reasons behind cost recovery and the benefits it could bring to their Trust. ” Across all staff groups:

“there was a perception that increased communication around the impact of cost recovery would help to encourage staff buy-in at all levels. This particularly related to sharing information on the amount of money recovered and what this might equate to in terms of benefits to the Trust (e.g. being able to purchase a new piece of equipment or employ more nurses).”

So the strategy is to counter values based around care with a corporate ethos based around money-saving. But then money-saving must stop being seen as some abstract concern of accountants, and instead appear as a real and concrete imperative, a vital mission for the hospital “team”, which all staff need to feel part of.

Sealed compartments

On the whole, it is easier to carry out hostile environment measures the more you are insulated from the consequences of your hostile actions on other people. Frontline clinical staff are one of the hardest cases for collaboration: they actually have to see, even touch, the human beings who are targets, directly encounter their pain.

It is heartening that “buy-in” amongst both frontline staff and managers actually seemed to be dropping over the life of the pilot programme. Why would that be? The report doesn’t have a clear answer, but makes this suggestion:

“One point to consider in understanding this decrease, supported by anecdotal evidence from the case study visits and interviews with OVMs, is that over time staff have become increasingly aware of the challenges of cost recovery and the difficulties faced by some patients who are not eligible for free NHS care. In particular, OVMs and senior staff stressed the vulnerability of some patients and the sense of empathy they felt for them; although this did not fundamentally change their views on charging, it did cause them to hold somewhat conflicted feelings and provided a possible explanation for a lack of support among some frontline staff.”(Pages 35-5).

Empathy. It is one thing to read a poster about cost savings, another to look into a sick and distressed person’s eyes. Many doctors and nurses may agree with the “fairness” of charges in the abstract, but this belief is challenged as they see what it actually means in practice.

Hostility flows more easily when flows of information and action are dislocated into compartments, chains of multiple distinct links. This is the case for many admin workers who process the key data: that address could mean a death or a broken family, but you see only words and numbers. The GPs who hand over patient data to NHS Digital are also frontline doctors – but, crucially, they don’t know what use this information is put to. Similarly, the teachers filling out Schools Census forms, or outreach workers inputing rough sleeper locations into the CHAIN database.

In the purest form of insulation, these unknowing collaborators may not even realise that Immigration Enforcement can access this data. In other cases, you may know that some of the data you enter is passed to the Home Office, but you won’t ever know which files, or what then becomes of them. It’s easy enough, then, to put it out of mind. And of course many of these databases have other benign purposes: having that address or next of kin on file could be vital in a medical emergency.

Empathy may be broken by distance. But there is also something else that a hostile environment has to fight against. Ethos. While on the one hand doctors and nurses have to learn a certain clinical detachment, they are also taught a certain ethos of care, a certain ideal of dignity and compassion. This also comes through in some comments in the Ipsos MORI report: clinicians are not bureaucrats, docs are not cops, they have their own role, to “treat patients”.

If the hostile environment is to be successful, it will have to fight both empathy and ethos. It will have to create systems that keep us in compartments, links in machine-link chains, where we are not able to see the other’s eyes or feel their pain. And it will have to shatter our surviving values and cultures of care and commitment.

Resistance strategies

The Hostile Environment needs the collaboration of millions of people.

• So it breaks when people start to refuse, and that refusal spreads. Refusal often just means small everyday things, like refusing to sign a form, hand over an address, or look away when a raid happens. Resistance can identify effective acts of refusal, and help them spread.

Government encourages collaboration through a range of means including: spreading hatred and fear; putting in place legal, financial, and other rewards and penalties; trying to get us to “buy in” to values of cost-saving, informing, or unquestioning compliance with authority.

• Resistance may promote different values, cultures of care and dignity, or mistrust and refusal of authority. Resistance can support those facing legal or other penalties. Resistance can target those profiting from hostility. Resistance can mock the corporate bullshit of things like hospital money-saving schemes pushed by highly paid management consultants.

The Hostile Environment works by insulating us into many separate compartments, where we are “just doing our job”, or “getting on with our lives”. We are isolated from the consequences of our actions, and isolated from each other.

• Resistance can make connections: show people that their actions have consequences; show people that they are not alone in refusing, and link them up.

Many hostile environment measures involve chains of data sharing and enforcement action involving multiple government departments and units, contractors, NGOs, etc.

• Resistance can identify and target weak links in these chains.

The hostile environment succeeds to the extent it becomes “the new normal”. When it is engrained in our habits, everyday ways of living and working, so we don’t even see or question it any more. This is already the case in some aspects: e.g., it is now presumed normal to pass on our personal information to the state without question, or to show ID almost everywhere we go. New hostile environment measures build on this previous normalisation of surveillance, data sharing, and conformity over recent decades, and ramp it up further.

• But in other areas, hostility still has a long way to go. The Ipsos MORI report on the hostile environment programme in hospitals is encouraging. The large majority of hospital staff are still not involved themselves in ID checking; a “significant minority” is actively opposed; many more just don’t see it as part of their job or as a priority; this leaves a small number of middle managers (OVMs) to implement the system with inadequate resources. The government will struggle to shift the “culture and practices” of NHS hospitals and get widespread “buy in” to the hostile environment there. It will need to invest more resources and more time to do this.

The more these measures become normalised, the harder they will be to counter. This means the time to act is now.

Appendix: How to stop Immigration Enforcement getting addresses from GPs?

Some GP surgeries have pledged that they will not ask patients for ID documents or ask them about their nationality. This is an important stand. But it will not stop the main existing use of GP patient information by Immigration Enforcement, which is to get up-to-date addresses of people they are already targeting as “illegals”. How could that be stopped? The data flows in a chain: from patients to GP surgeries; from GP surgeries to NHS Digital; and from NHS Digital to Immigration Enforcement. If any of these links break, the chain breaks.

1) If patients don’t give addresses to GPs

GP surgeries routinely asks patients for their address when registering, usually by asking new patients to fill out the standard “GMS1” form.^lxxxii But do you actually have to give an address? In fact, although it is common practice, there is no actual requirement for patients to give an address.^lxxxiii And the official registration guidance for GPs from NHS England states:^lxxxiv

“Where necessary, (e.g. homeless patients), the practice may use the practice address to register them if they wish. If possible, practices should try to ensure they have a way of contacting the patient if they need to (for example with test results).”

GPs can refuse patients who do not live within their “practice area” – although they also have discretion to take patients who do not.^lxxxv They can ask for you to show ID documents to prove your identity and address. But they are not meant to refuse registration if you do not. This is also clearly stated in the NHS England guidance:

“If a patient cannot produce any supportive documentation but states that they reside within the practice boundary then practices should accept the registration.”

“When applying to become a patient there is no regulatory requirement to prove identity, address, immigration status or the provision of an NHS number in order to register.”

“Inability by a patient to provide identification or proof of address would not be considered reasonable grounds to refuse to register a patient.”

We can expect the government to try to change this. As it seeks to roll out “overseas visitor” charging into GP surgeries, an obvious next step is to make it compulsory for GPs to demand ID documents on registration – and it would make a lot of sense if proof of address is demanded at the same time. But it hasn’t happened yet.

2) If GPs don’t give addresses to NHS Digital

When GP receptionists register a new patient, they enter information into their own local computer system. However, GP computer systems are integrated with the national PDS database as standard, so that all data automatically updates the national system run by NHS Digital.

GP surgeries are contractually obliged to share patient data, including care records as well as registration records, under the standard NHS England contract. And they are also obliged, under the same contract, to use computer systems from an approved list, all of which are designed to facilitate data sharing.^lxxxvi

However, as far as we are aware, there is no specific contractual obligation on GPs to collect address data or input this into a particular system – just as there is no obligation for patients to give this information (the same goes for information on “place of birth”, “ethnic category”, etc.).

For example, it could be possible for GPs to store contact addresses of patients on a separate local system, without updating this into the main computer system linked to PDS (the address field in PDS can have a zero entry; or perhaps all patients’ addresses could be given as the practice address). Would this be against GPs’ contracts? We are not aware of this issue ever having been raised or challenged.

3) If NHS Digital doesn’t give addresses to the Home Office

In the past, NHS Digital claimed that it did not give addresses to the Home Office. It said that it only passed on a patient’s “primary care area”. Immigration Enforcement would then have to directly contact GPs in that area to ask for addresses, and it was up to GP surgeries whether they complied.

This changed with the January 2017 memorandum, in which NHS Digital agreed to routinely hand over addresses to the Home Office. The memorandum was signed by the chief executive of NHS Digital, Andy Williams. For the moment, then, there are clear orders from the top that NHS Digital will collaborate.

Strong legal challenges or campaign pressure would be needed to reverse this decision.

End notes

The post The Hostile Environment: turning the UK into a nation of border cops appeared first on Corporate Watch.

Summary

Several nights a week, immigration patrols are out targeting rough sleepers in London, now a prime focus for raids under Theresa May’s “hostile environment” policy.

The arrests are carried out by Home Office “Immigration Compliance and Enforcement” (ICE) teams. But they rely on the active collaboration of the Mayor, local councils, and homelessness charities. Charity outreach workers set out to help homeless people. But through a creeping process of changes they are being turned into informers, while some of the city’s most vulnerable people are disappeared into the nightmare of indefinite detention and deportation.

This investigation shows how:

• Outreach teams from charities St Mungo’s, Thames Reach, and Change, Grow, Live (CGL) conduct regular joint “visits” with Immigration Enforcement officers, as often as fortnightly in central boroughs. Freedom of Information (FOI) responses show 141 such patrols organised by the GLA and 12 London boroughs last year. This figure does not include Westminster, the biggest concentration of London homelessness, where patrols are likely to be even more frequent.

• Joint visits in just eight of these areas led to 133 rough sleepers being detained, while 127 people were deported in under a year in Westminster alone.

• Charity bosses say their role is to persuade non-UK rough sleepers to leave “voluntarily”. But the FOI figures show that detention and enforced deportation is more common; in any case, so-called “voluntary” departures are carried out under the threat of force.

• Outreach teams also routinely pass on locations of non-UK rough sleepers to ICE, including through the London-wide CHAIN database, and through local co-operation agreements.

• The GLA has contracted St Mungo’s and Thames Reach under “payment by numbers” schemes where fees depend on the number of rough sleepers they get out of the country.

• EU and other European Economic Area (EEA) nationals are the main targets, as they make up nearly half of London rough sleepers. Migrants from Romania, Poland, and other East European countries are particularly affected.

• In May 2016, the Home Office toughened the rules so that European rough sleepers can be arrested for deportation if found sleeping rough on just one night.

• Tough policy on migrant rough sleepers was “intensely lobbied” for by Westminster Council, and encouraged by the “Mayor’s Rough Sleeping Group”, which included senior charity managers from St Mungo’s, Thames Reach, Homeless Link, and also Crisis.1

• Rough sleeper deportations are at the cutting edge of Theresa May’s “hostile environment” approach where immigration controls are spreading across schools, hospitals, and housing.

The “hostile environment” is based on collaboration. But it can be broken by solidarity and resistance. We are already seeing examples of refusal by some homelessness workers and campaigners; the conclusion gives some ideas for how it could spread.

Click here for a PDF version of the report.

Can you help?

We are continuing to collect information and evidence about rough sleeper patrols.

If you are a homelessness worker, rough sleeper, or have any information that you’d like to share with Corporate Watch, email us at contact[at]corporatewatch.org or call 020 7426 0005. We will respect your confidentiality.

If you have any immediate information about ICE raids, we suggest you contact Anti Raids Network: email: antiraids@riseup.net twitter: @antiraids

About this report

This investigation has used three main kinds of sources:

• Freedom of Information (FOI) responses, which for the first time give some figures on rough sleeper immigration patrols. Requests were refused by the Home Office, but answered by the majority of London borough councils.2

• Official policy statements and documents, which were accessed through FOI requests or were already in the public domain.

• Personal interviews with homelessness workers, (former) rough sleepers, and other eyewitnesses.

We have included excerpts from some of these interviews between the sections of the report. Some are in the form of direct quotations, and some as excerpts from interview notes. All have been anonymised to maintain interviewees’ confidentiality.

A few words

In official documents, the Home Office uses the term “deportation” only for the minority of cases where people have been convicted of criminal offences. It officially describes all other deportations as “removals”. In the homelessness sector, an even nicer sounding word, “reconnection”, is common. But in this investigation we use the common word “deportation” to refer to all cases where people are taken out of the country by government agencies and their contractors.

Contents

1. Rough sleeping in London

2. Joint visits: outreach workers and ICE patrolling together

3. Data sharing: the CHAIN database and local co-operation agreements

4. Just what is “reconnection”?

5. Homelessness as abuse: the May 2016 policy

6. “Intense lobbying”: Operation Adoze and the Mayor’s Rough Sleeping Group

7. Paid by numbers: the rough sleeper deportation Social Impact Bond

8. Conclusion: how does collaboration happen?

Appendix: a response from Thames Reach

Eyewitness account: a passer-by, December 2016

“I was walking to Charing Cross Station to catch the last train home, it must have been a bit after 11PM. There are always a lot of homeless people sleeping round there at night, on Adelaide Street, near the shelter at St Martin’s church. Then I saw there were three vans parked up there, Immigration Enforcement. I went back up onto Chandos Place, I think, and that’s where I saw a whole load of them, there must have been fifteen or twenty, Immigration Officers and Police together. They were just in a mob surrounding a couple of homeless people. One guy was shouting that it wasn’t right. I started challenging them, but they seemed to have finished whatever they were doing, they started walking back to their vans. There were two other guys with them, dressed in normal clothes, they didn’t look like police, more casual. When I tried to talk to them and ask what they were doing they wouldn’t meet my eye. They looked away, almost like they were ashamed.”

1. Rough sleeping in London

First, a snapshot of London street homelessness. 8,096 people were recorded sleeping rough in London in the year up to April 2016. This figure comes from the “CHAIN” rough sleeper database, a system updated and used by homelessness workers across London, funded by the GLA and managed by St Mungo’s.  As any Londoner with their eyes open knows, rough-sleeping is on the increase, and the CHAIN figures show a 7% rise on the year before. By far the biggest number is in Westminster, where 2,657 people were seen sleeping out in 2015-16. Street homelessness is clustered around the central boroughs, with Camden (641), Lambeth (445) and the City of London (440) next on the list.

Outside London, rough sleepers are predominantly British nationals. In London, less than half are British (41.2% , from the same CHAIN figures). Almost half (47.3%) come from other European countries, and in particular from central and eastern Europe, above all Romania (19.5%) and Poland (8.7%). Overwhelmingly (46.2% of the total count), the European rough sleepers are from countries in the “European Economic Area” (EEA), which includes all EU countries plus Iceland, Lichtenstein, Norway and Switzerland. In normal circumstances, these Europeans have a right to live and work in the UK. There are also smaller numbers of African (5.5%), Asian (4.9%), and American (1.2%) people sleeping rough in London.

Across London, councils commission specialist homelessness charities to run their rough sleeper outreach teams. The central London boroughs with major street homelessness generally contract outreach providers directly. The biggest player by far is St Mungo’s, which runs outreach services for Westminster and other central boroughs. St Mungo’s also runs a number of other key services contracted by the GLA, such as the central “No Second Night Out” (NSN0) hubs where first-time rough-sleepers may be brought, and the “Routes Home” project, which aims to “reconnect” foreign national rough sleepers with their countries of origin (discussed more below).

Outside the centre of London, many councils with lower numbers of rough sleepers sign up for a pan-London outreach service commissioned by the GLA. This is called “London Street Rescue”, and is contracted to another charity called Thames Reach. Basically it involves three teams in vans responding to reports of rough sleepers all around the city’s periphery.

Another charity called “Change, Grow, Live” (CGL), runs street outreach services across the UK and in two central London boroughs, Camden and Lambeth.These are run under the label “Safer Streets”. There are also a number of other charities involved in more specialist outreach services across London.

Eyewitness account: arrested near Charing Cross

“I had been sleeping near Charing Cross on my own for about a month. I was never contacted by any outreach workers before the Immigration Officers came, they arrested me on the spot and took me to detention. I told them I was working for 18 months before, but it didn’t matter. Now I am in detention, they say they are going to deport me back to [an Eastern European country]. I have nowhere to live there.”

2. Joint visits: outreach workers and ICE patrolling together

The Freedom of Information requests asked the GLA and borough councils how many times in the last year their outreach teams had conducted joint visits to rough sleepers together with Immigration Enforcement. They also asked how many people had returned “voluntarily” to other countries as a result of these visits, and how many people had been detained.

Many councils did not answer, claiming that they don’t hold this information. Westminster, the council with by far the most rough sleepers and organised rough sleeper services, was amongst these. As we will see below, Westminster has actively lobbied for a toughened “enforcement approach” to European rough sleepers, and in November and December 2015 it ran a key pilot project with the Home Office called Operation Adoze. We know from a Home Office response to a question in parliament that exactly 127 EEA nationals encountered in Westminster during this operation were deported through Operation Adoze, either in those two months or by September 2016. So there is certainly active Immigration Enforcement in Westminster, and active data gathering too.

Twelve other London councils did reply saying that they had carried out joint visits with ICE the year before. They included all the other inner London boroughs with 160 or more rough sleepers. Between them, they counted 133 such visits, so about 11 each, just under one a month, in each borough.

Based on their replies, there seems to be a rough correlation between the number of rough sleepers in a borough and the number of Immigration Enforcement operations. Camden, number two for rough sleepers after Westminster, said that its outreach teams made 24 joint visits with Immigration Enforcement in the previous year, i.e., one a fortnight. Lambeth, with 445 rough sleepers, had 17 joint visits. (These are two areas operated by CGL “Safer Streets” teams.) Tower Hamlets, with 377 rough sleepers, had 16 joint visits. Lewisham (199 rough sleepers) had 15 joint visits, while Kensington & Chelsea (225) and Hammersmith & Fulham (161) each had 14. The outliers were Southwark and Ealing, which had 373 and 219 rough sleepers, but only five and two joint visits respectively.

What about the other boroughs? Many replied that they had not been involved in any joint visits. However, these were mainly outer London boroughs where outreach is run by the GLA through London Street Rescue (Thames Reach). A number of these councils said that they did not hold the data, and several recommended contacting the GLA instead.

A similar FOI request was also made to the GLA. It replied that London Street Rescue (LSR) had made 923 outreach “shifts” altogether during the “2016/17 financial year” in its areas, and Immigration Enforcement had been present on eight shifts.

This number seems very low compared to other areas. However, it is the case that the LSR outreach service is small compared to inner London equivalents. Also, raids in outer London are often focused on bigger “camps” where ten or twenty people may be sleeping together. It could be that outreach teams often don’t visit these camps themselves, but just report their location to ICE and police who then move straight to a larger operation.

Altogether, the FOI responses identify at least 141 occasions where ICE officers went on patrol together with outreach workers. And this number doesn’t include Westminster or the City of London, which are maybe the most heavily patrolled areas of all.

What happens on these “joint visits”? Of the 12 councils that gave numbers, only seven also answered the further questions about “voluntary returns” and detentions: the other five said they “do not hold” this information.3 The GLA also answered these questions, so we have eight respondents altogether, who between them said they had conducted 83 joint visits. We are told that these 83 patrols resulted in 55 people agreeing to “voluntary return”, and 133 people being detained.

The nationalities involved mirror the general demographics of London rough sleeping. For example, the GLA said that it its eight patrols with ICE, London Street Rescue helped nine people sign up for “voluntary return”. They were from Hungary, India, Poland and Romania. And they helped ICE detain 28 people. They were from Romania, Lithuania, Poland, Latvia, Nigeria, Bulgaria, and Slovakia.4

It is worth noting here one point about the FOI data. As we will see, in their official statements Thames Reach, St Mungo’s and other “partners” are keen to emphasise that their work with Immigration Enforcement is directed at what they call “voluntary reconnection”. Detention and enforced deportation is presented as an exceptional last resort. This is not what the figures show. On the contrary, when charity workers and Immigration Enforcement go out together, detention is a standard result.

However, it could be that most arrests take place not on the initial patrol but at a later date. The role of the joint patrols for ICE is then largely one of “intelligence gathering”. One charity worker explained that, in their experience, “joint shifts” generally consisted of two outreach workers accompanied by one ICE officer. The ICE officer would mainly note locations of foreign rough sleepers and issue paperwork such as a “minded to remove” notice which commands people to report for an assessment interview.

Certainly, a lone ICE officer will not make arrests, but will typically come back later with an arrest team. In raids on rough sleepers, as opposed to raids on other groups, ICE will also commonly request police back-up. Actual arrests may take place with or without any outreach workers present. We have heard of cases of both, as some of the eye witness accounts excerpted in this report testify.

Interview summary: a raid in Haringey

20 people, mostly from Poland, were sleeping rough together near Seven Sisters. A large immigration raid took place with ICE and Police late in the evening. Police and Thames Reach had come to the site prior to this, along with a crew from the BBC. 11 people were detained. Only one was released, all others were removed from the UK. Individuals who were not detained immediately were given 30-day notices of removal and required to report to Home Office during that period. ID documents were confiscated.

3. Data sharing: the CHAIN database and local co-operation agreements

Joint patrols are just one part of the picture. Another form of collaboration is less direct and more routine: every night outreach workers gather information on non-UK rough sleepers, and their managers then pass on this information to become Immigration Enforcement “intelligence”.

As the Home Office has so far declined to answer Freedom of Information requests, we don’t know just how much use ICE makes of information collected by local authorities and homelessness charities. We do know that these organisations routinely meet and share information. In particular, every month the GLA passes information from the CHAIN roughsleeper database to Immigration Enforcement.

The agreement to share this data was made between the GLA and the Home Office in May 2015. According to minutes from that month’s meeting of the “Mayor’s Rough Sleeping Group”, where the agreement was discussed, the data is said to be “aggregate and anonymous”, but enough to identify “locations of non-UK rough sleepers”.

And CHAIN is not the only data sharing route: outreach teams routinely hand on “intelligence” at the local level, too. The FOI requests also asked councils about their overall policies on collaboration with the Home Office. A number of replies shed light on this.

Hammersmith and Fulham council disclosed a “local protocol” produced by St Mungo’s for its outreach teams. According to this document, which appears to be from 2015, St Mungo’s outreach workers should assess the nationality of all rough sleepers they encounter and, if they are European citizens, also assess whether they are “exercising their treaty rights”: for example, seeking employment or education. The St Mungo’s document states in bold type the procedure to be followed if a rough sleeper is judged to “not exercise their treaty rights” over a period of time:

“These individuals’ details will be passed on to the ICE by the outreach team. Following this a joint shift will be agreed with outreach, ICE, Parks Police to target/tackle these individuals.”

As we will see below in Section 5, the approach is likely to have got tougher since this document was produced, and European rough sleepers can now be marked for detention immediately.5

The GLA disclosed a guidance document from Thames Reach, issued to its London Street Rescue teams. According to this guidance, outreach teams should assess all rough sleepers, whatever their nationality, and decide on a “Single Service Offer” (SSO), or way of proceeding with that individual, which is recorded on CHAIN.

For a UK national, for example, this could mean “support to access benefits or work and accommodation.” But in 2014 the Government restricted EEA nationals’ access to Job Seeker’s Allowance and then Housing Benefit, meaning that this traditional route off the streets – a hostel place, and benefits to support them into work and stable housing – is no longer open to most European rough sleepers. Instead, as the Thames Reach document shows, the standard offer for non-UK nationals is now “supported reconnection” to “their country of origin”. (See Section 4 below).

If people refuse offers of “supported reconnection”, they will instead be “brought to the attention of HOICE” (Home Office Immigration Compliance and Enforcement). “These clients will be the subject of [a] local authority task and targeting meeting or will be encountered by HOICE staff during joint outreach shifts.”

The Thames Reach guidance is at pains to state that such “enforcement” is a last resort, and ICE will only be involved after people have consistently refused “offers of support”. We also get a similar message from St Mungo’s, via a FOI reply from Islington Council. According to Islington’s reply:

“St Mungo’s would assess any rough sleeper met in the borough. If there was a query over their immigration status they would refer to our in-house legal team for advice. If that offer was not taken up and they did not engage with our service St Mungo’s would then refer to ICE/Home Office. Any EEA national not exercising their treaty rights would be offered a supported reconnection and referred to Specialist team in-house. If the reconnection was refused and there was no engagement with the St Mungo’s service they would be referred to ICE/Home Office.”

As we will see below, since May 2016 Home Office policy is that any EEA national found sleeping rough is “abusing their treaty rights”. The standard “offer” then made to European rough sleepers, particularly since benefits options were removed in 2014, is: leave the country. Thames Reach and St Mungo’s say they aim to persuade people to take up this offer “voluntarily”. If rough sleepers don’t comply, the charities then pass on their details for “enforcement”: i.e., detention and deportation. In either case, the basic outcome is the same, they are out of the UK.

One final point: whatever the charities intend, ICE are not bound to wait until people have refused “voluntary reconnection”. The information they get from joint visits and CHAIN may help them find non-UK rough sleepers even before they are classed as non-complying. Former rough sleepers we interviewed told us they were detained before any “reconnection” process began.

Eyewitness Account: detained in Central London

“I had somewhere to stay, but I had an argument with my partner and that’s why I was sleeping rough in [Central London]. They arrested me and put me here. I have agreed to voluntary return to [Eastern Europe] because I want to get out of detention, if you don’t agree you can stay here for months.”

4. Just what is “reconnection”?

Reading through the councils’ and charities’ official documents, you certainly won’t find any mention of “deportation”, and most likely not “detention” either. The word “removal”, when it is used, generally comes prefixed by “voluntary”. But preferred over all of these is a glorious euphemism: “reconnection”.

We have already seen from the FOI figures that forced detention is actually a much more common outcome of “joint visits” than “voluntary removal”. But we should also mention another two questions. Just how “voluntary” are voluntary reconnections/removals? And just what happens to people who have been “reconnected”?

“Voluntary return” is a Home Office term, meaning that people leave the country unrestrained, without a security escort. Voluntary returns are much preferred by the Home Office for cost reasons. Enforced removals typically involve three security escorts, provided by the contractor Tascor, who must each be paid for their shifts and their plane tickets.

Although actual physical force is not used, “voluntary returns” are also generally coercive: i.e., they are carried out under the threat of violence. “Returnees” are told that they will be removed forcibly if they do not agree to the procedure. Lotte Lewis Smith, in a recently published investigation on “voluntary return” of asylum seekers, documents a typical case:

“‘Hannah’ said the Home Office tried to coerce her and her young child into accepting voluntary return to East Africa by threatening to cut her asylum support when her initial asylum application was refused. Whilst at her local Home Office reporting centre, Hannah said she was approached by an employee who asked if she would consider returning home ‘voluntarily’ and even offered to help pack her bags and order her a taxi to the airport. According to Hannah, she proceeded to threaten her and her son with deportation if she didn’t accept this ‘help’.”

The same approach is used with rough sleepers, encouraged from the top. An internal report of the Mayor’s Rough Sleeping Group, made up of GLA and council officials alongside senior managers from St Mungo’s and Thames Reach (discussed further in Section 6 below), recommends:

“when support is offered, it can be helpful to make clear that, if it is refused, enforcement will be used – for example, when offering reconnection to EU nationals not exercising treaty rights.”

Another point is that detention and “voluntary reconnection” often go together. Many people sign up for “voluntary reconnection” whilst already locked up. The eyewitness account quoted above shows the clear incentive to do this: people may be held indefinitely in the misery of detention centres before escorted removal, and can get out much earlier by agreeing to leave “voluntarily”. Again, Lewis Smith gives an example:

“The UK is the only EU country with no time limit on immigration detention. Since being refused asylum, 19-year-old ‘Aamir’ from Afghanistan has been held at Harmondsworth Immigration Removal Centre, near Heathrow Airport, for eight months. He has no idea when he’ll be released or deported. Without adequate access to legal or psychological support in detention, and no release date, Aamir is considering ‘voluntarily’ returning to Afghanistan […] ‘I can’t sleep or eat. There is no one to talk to. I feel like I’m going crazy,’ he told IRIN. ‘I don’t want to go back to Afghanistan – my whole family is dead there – but I am scared I’ll kill myself if I don’t leave this place soon.’”

The EEA nationals being “reconnected” may not, typically, face such a hostile fate as an Afghan deportee. But what does await them?

In 2009, Thames Reach was awarded the GLA’s contract for running the “London Reconnection Team” (LRT), which arranged “voluntary reconnections” for rough sleepers in London referred by outreach teams or other services. For example, the LRT would generally pay their travel expenses. By February 2016, Thames Reach boasted that it had achieved “over 3,000 reconnections”. However, neither Thames Reach nor the GLA have made any evaluation of what happened to the people “reconnected”.

In April 2016, St Mungo’s took over the London Reconnections Team contract, now renamed “Routes Home”. The terms of this contract make clear that St Mungos must “work in close partnership with the Home Office and the Police”. “Details of all reconnections are expected to be shared with the Home Office”, and St Mungo’s must “ensure that details of clients refusing reconnection are recorded and passed to relevant referral agencies and the Home Office.”

Under the previous contract, Thames Reach had a relationship with a Polish charity called Barka which provided accommodation for Polish returnees. Insiders say this service had some issues, as Barka was a strongly Christian organisation that insisted on teetotalism in its hostels. In any event, this arrangement was ended with the handover to St Mungo’s in 2016.

The contract does demand that St Mungo’s monitors what happens to people after reconnection in one respect: it has a target for numbers of people not returning “to a rough sleeping lifestyle in London” within six months of removal. But there is no need to track what happens to “reconnected individuals” who stay away. There is no record of how many end up back on the streets in Bucharest (Romania) or Warsaw (Poland), where conditions are extremely tough. What matters, it seems, is just that they are not on the streets of London.

One Romanian NGO study, dating from 2009, put the total number of rough sleeper deaths on the streets of Bucharest at around 300 a year. In January and February 2012, during a six week deep-freeze, Eastern Europe saw staggering numbers of deaths of homeless people: more than 200 in Russia, 74 in Romania, 135 in the Ukraine and 82 in Poland. This last winter, between 1st November 2016 and 7th January 2017, 53 people died of hypothermia in Poland.

5. Sleeping rough is abuse: the May 2016 policy

In May 2016, coincidentally or otherwise a month before the Brexit vote, the Home Office made life even tougher for European rough sleepers.

For the moment, people from “European Economic Area” (EEA) countries, still normally have the right to live in the UK. But there are certain limitations on this right. The general rule is that an EEA national can stay for three months without condition, and after that if they are “exercising Treaty rights”. This means: being employed or self-employed, seeking work, studying, or being “self-sufficient”.

However, in May 2016, the Home Office issued new guidance which created an exception for rough sleepers. Sleeping rough, even just for one night, was now defined as an “abuse of Treaty rights”. This means that rough sleepers can be arrested and deported (or, to use the official jargon, “administratively removed”) immediately, even if they are otherwise “exercising Treaty rights” (e.g., working), or have been in the country less than three months. Although ICE officers are supposed to consider someone’s personal circumstances and whether deportation is “proportionate”.

The guidance was slightly amended on 1 February 2017. The issue is reworded as a “misuse of the right to reside”.6 More importantly, the Home Office has back-pedalled a touch on its hardline approach, as the new guidance further expands on the idea of “proportionality”. For example, ICE officers are meant to consider whether someone is “persistently sleeping rough” or, on the other hand, may be “taking steps to find accommodation and exercise Treaty rights”. It would not be proportionate to remove someone if “while there has been a misuse of rights, it appears unlikely it will continue.”

If an Immigration Officer considers that removing a rough sleeper is “proportional”, they can immediately issue removal papers. These consist of a “liability to removal” notice; and, usually simultaneously, a “decision to remove” letter. “Removal directions”, which may contain flight information, are usually served later in detention, with 72 hours notice. For EEA nationals, the “decision to remove” letter should give 30 days notice before deportation, and within that time they have 14 days to appeal. Someone can be arrested and detained as soon as the “decision to remove” notice is served; but if an appeal is lodged, a deportation should be put on hold while it is heard.

In practice, as two of the eyewitness accounts in this report mention, appeal rights are often disregarded or abused by ICE.

Alternatively, if an Immigration Officer wishes to investigate further, they can issue a letter notifying someone that they must come to a “minded to remove” interview.

Just how do ICE officers assess whether removing a rough sleeper is “proportional”? ICE teams are unlikely to have the skills or resources to assess homelessness issues and whether individuals are “taking steps to find accommodation and exercise Treaty rights”. In our view, if any proportionality assessment is made at all, it is likely to be led by the outreach and “reconnections” workers they are liaising with.

But, if so, the new February guidance means that St Mungo’s, Thames Reach and other charity workers will start to play an even more central role in immigration enforcement. It will no longer be a question of just providing intelligence. Decisions about whether or not an individual is detained or deported will increasingly rest in the charities’ hands.

Interview summary: another raid in Haringey

The interviewee was woken up at 12am at his sleeping site in Haringey along with 7 other people. The raid consisted of 12 people including ICE, Police and Thames Reach outreach workers. The interviewee reported that ICE initially came for someone else but came back to serve a 30-day notice of removal and confiscated people’s ID documents. He asked for the papers to make an appeal, which was refused by the Immigration Officers. The interviewee says he doesn’t understand why Thames Reach cooperates with enforcement agencies. The interviewee had been in the UK for 11 years, working intermittently, and has no criminal convictions.

6. “Intense lobbying”: Operation Adoze and the Mayor’s Rough Sleeping Group

The “abuse” policy fits in the context of a range of new tough measures – Theresa May’s “hostile environment” approach – which extend immigration control to new areas of everyday life and seek to turn thousands of workers in housing, schools or hospitals into ICE informants and collaborators.

In October 2013, then Home Secretary Theresa May announced the parliamentary bill that became the Immigration Act 2014. In her own words, the aim of the act was: “to create a really hostile environment for illegal migrants”. In the more formal language of the act itself, the main aim is to “limit … access to services, facilities and employment by reference to immigration status”. The Immigration Act 2016 made these measures harsher still, and added some new ones.

They include introducing questions on nationality and immigration status into the “schools census”, in which teachers are meant to collect immigration data from children as young as five. In healthcare, new hospital charges plus massive information sharing through the “NHS Digital” patient database. And the “right to rent” rules, where landlords and agents are required to check tenants’ passports and refuse housing to “illegal” migrants.

In all these areas, the push is clearly coming from the Home Office. Hospital or school managers may not be putting up much resistance so far, but they don’t seem to be actively calling for these measures. The same can’t be said for the homelessness sector. In London, the GLA and Westminster Council have been particularly willing and active protagonists. And they have been backed by their charity partners such as St Mungo’s and Thames Reach.

In London, escalating collaboration with ICE was encouraged and developed throughout 2015 by a GLA body called the “Mayor’s Rough Sleeping Group” (MRSG). This was chaired in the Boris Johnson era by deputy mayor for housing Richard Blakeway – who now works for housing developer Wilmott Dixon. This group brought together senior officials from the GLA and central London boroughs, the Metropolitan Police and Home Office, plus top managers from St Mungo’s and Thames Reach, as well as other charities including Homeless Link and (on occasion) Crisis.

Minutes show that collaboration around “non-UK rough sleepers” was discussed regularly through 2015 and 2016. For example, the May 2015 meeting discussed the agreement to pass on CHAIN data (see Section 3 above), and established a working group on how to improve joint operations.

This working group drew up a policy paper which made various conclusions, all in favour of greater cooperation with ICE as part of “the use of enforcement in tackling rough sleeping”. To quote a couple of representative passages, it advised that:

“The Police and ICE are not the only agents of enforcement and it is important that different agencies support enforcement work along a spectrum of activity. Outreach workers, as well as Safer Neighbourhood Teams and Community Safety Officers, have an important part to play.”

“There was consensus among participants that partnership working, above and beyond the commitment of resources, is essential to effective use of enforcement. Information-sharing was identified as being of particular importance.”

The paper was presented to the next MRSG meeting in August 2015. It was immediately followed on the agenda by an item headed “joint working between rough sleeping services and ICE”. This discussion was led by Petra Salva, whose title according to her twitter account is Director of “Rough Sleeper, Migrant & Criminal Justice services” at St Mungo’s. Salva discussed a further “guidance” document that St Mungo’s was drawing up on the topic together with another charity, Providence Row.

But the guidance document was not ready by the next meeting, held in December 2015. The group wanted to wait for the outcome of a pilot scheme called Operation Adoze.

Operation Adoze was in fact the trial of what would become the new “abuse of treaty rights” policy. It was carried out initially just in Westminster, in November and December 2015, involving Home Office Immigration Enforcement, Westminster Council, and St Mungo’s Westminster outreach teams. For the first time, the outreach teams and ICE could immediately target someone sleeping rough for deportation, rather than having to assess whether they were “not exercising their treaty rights” over a sustained period. As mentioned above, 127 people were deported in this operation.

In January 2016, the pilot was extended to a handful of other central boroughs. Then, in March 2016, the government declared it a success, announcing it as national policy in the Budget speech. This announcement was warmly welcomed in a press release from St Mungo’s which celebrated “the success of the Operation Adoze pilot”, applauding the “new approach in which immigration officials work with Local Authorities and outreach workers to connect rough sleepers to services that can return them home”.

After the policy was formally implemented in May 2016, Westminster council also crowed about it, and indeed claimed responsibility, in its audit committee report from 30 June 2016. This states: “after intense lobbying, Operation Adoze (Home Office policy change that was piloted in Westminster) has been announced as a national policy approach.”

Interview summary: sleeping in a car

A man from [a Western European country] had been sleeping in his car on a residential street in South London. It seems residents made a complaint to the council, who then arranged for an ICE visit within two weeks. The man was given a “notice of removal” and told to report to Lunar House, Croydon. He made an appeal, which should have meant that the removal was put on hold. However,when he reported to Lunar House he was arrested and spent nearly 2 months in detention before being removed. His appeal was never heard.

7. Paid by numbers: the rough sleeper deportation Social Impact Bond

Operation Adoze was not the first pilot scheme for rough sleeper deportations. Central boroughs have been carrying out joint patrols with ICE, in one form or another, for several years. The first pilot scheme we are aware of was Operation Ark, in 2010-11. This also took place in Westminster, and also involved St Mungo’s and Thames Reach.

We will just give one further example here, which again involves these two charities. In 2012, St Mungo’s and Thames Reach were commissioned by the GLA to implement an “innovative” pilot project addressed at “entrenched rough sleeping”. The key feature of this project was that it was funded through a new form of private finance initiative called a “Social Impact Bond” (SIB). This is a financial technique largely pioneered in the US by investment bank Goldman Sachs, and promoted in the UK by a consultancy called “Social Finance Ltd” which is sponsored by hedge fund boss and Conservative party donor Andrew Law (see here).

The basic idea is that the scheme is at least partly funded by private investors, and carried out by private contractors; and both get “paid by results” depending on how well specific “social impact” targets are met. In the Rough Sleeper SIB, there were five targets, including the obvious ones of reducing numbers of people still sleeping rough and getting them into secure accommodation. But the second highest paid target, up to 25% of payment, was the number of “reconnections abroad”. In short: St Mungo’s and Thames Reach were paid by the number of people they got out of the country.

It turns out that they didn’t do so well. Their target after two years was a total of 142 “reconnections”: 57 for St Mungo’s, and 85 for Thames Reach. Yet by that point they had only managed to remove 77 people (34 and 43 respectively). Possibly outreach workers working on the project were not as keen to chase deportation targets as their managers.

The majority of these removals appeared to involve the charities persuading people into “voluntary reconnection”. However, a 2015 GLA document on the scheme suggests that the success rate was due to improve in year three thanks to an increasing use of force: “with ten SIB clients having recently been referred to the Home Office for administrative removal, the number of reconnections in this year may well exceed the providers’ in-year target.”

On another hopeful note, in the Government’s evaluation report, both St Mungo’s and Thames Reach said they expected “performance against this outcome to improve due to recent changes in the benefits regime.” The restrictions of Jobseeker’s Allowance and Housing Benefit entitlements for EEA individuals then coming int force should “provide a compelling reason for non-UK nationals who cannot claim asylum to return to their home country.”

The same report, though, noted some challenges faced by outreach workers trying to persuade their clients to “go home”. It noted that “having staff who can speak home languages was identified as an element to building relationships”. But even then there was “some mistrust and anxiety reported amongst non-UK members of the cohort who hope to find work rather than return to their home country.” One St Mungo’s “Navigator” was quoted saying:

“Now I’ve got a lot of reconnections and our clients gossip. They ask me ‘but you are going to get paid for that, you want me to go back, if you get rid of me you are going to get a payment’…. To me that feels like a problem… It’s putting the relationship on edge. They trust me and I don’t want to lose that.”

The private finance aspect of the deportation SIB was developed by the “ethical bank” Triodos Bank. According to their website: “As lead advisers on the deal, Triodos Corporate Finance successfully secured £650,000 of working capital funding from a small group of socially driven institutional and private investors.”

While the Social Impact Bond itself has now ended, elements of its approach have been “mainstreamed” into other rough sleeper services. For example, the GLA London Reconnections Team / Routes Home contract won by St Mungo’s in April 2016 (see Section 4 above) again involves “payment by results”. 10% of the contract fee is awarded if St Mungo’s get 95% of a target number of people out of the country, and if they don’t come back within 6 months.

8. Conclusion: how does collaboration happen?

Targeting and deporting foreign rough sleepers is systematic and routine. It involves the collaboration of many different organisations, and many different individuals.

At the top, the orders come from the Home Office – but also from local authorities. In particular, we have seen how the Mayor and GLA have been instrumental in coordinating “enforcement”, and how Westminster Council “lobbied intensely” for tough new rules. Other councils, too, have enacted and promoted the same policies.

Then there are the charity managers. Bosses at St Mungo’s, Thames Reach, CGL, Homeless Link, and others, are dependent on government, GLA and council funding for their salaries and promotions. But they are not just reluctant parts of this system. Senior managers of all the charities just named were members of forums such as the “Mayor’s Rough Sleeper Group” that helped coordinate it. Some have enthusiastically supported collaboration with ICE. Others, such as Crisis, may not be such active participants: but they have not publicly opposed this collaboration.

Managers set the policies but, of course, they only work if outreach workers actually follow them on the street.

Street outreach workers, we believe, are generally people with empathy and compassion. They didn’t go into their jobs to be cops or border guards, but to support people in need. So how does it happen that they end up as part of a system targeting the most vulnerable for indefinite detention and deportation?

In many authoritarian systems, change is introduced incrementally, through a slow or “creeping” process, so that those involved may not notice how it happens. This is how some homelessness workers describe the shift in the sector since 2010, as new targets and ways of working with Immigration Enforcement have been introduced one by one.

In many systems based on collaboration, it is crucial that people are insulated from the consequences of their actions. They do not see what happens next. In the rough sleeper deportation system, this is true in a number of ways. For example:

• Outreach workers input rough sleeper locations into the CHAIN database: but they may not realise that this information is passed on to ICE arrest teams.

• Outreach workers accompany ICE on joint visits: but they may usually just see ICE officers handing out notices, while actual arrests may be carried out later, out of their sight.

• Outreach workers help arrange “reconnections”: but they may not know what actually happens to people after they’ve left.

• Outreach workers refer rough sleepers who do not accept “voluntary reconnections” onto ICE: but may not know what happens next, e.g., whether individuals are detained. Nor may they have any conception of what the nightmare of indefinite detention and deportation really means.

In all these ways, and more, workers are insulated from the consequences of their collaboration. In addition, they may be led to genuinely believe that their actions are the best ones possible.

For example, one homelessness worker told us how teams began to accept the new focus on “reconnection” outside the UK because it came just as other options were disappearing. The new rules on benefits introduced in 2014 meant that many European citizens lost access to Jobseeker’s Allowance and Housing Benefit, so could no longer use this help to get “back on their feet” in the UK. At the same time, cuts to emergency accommodation were making it harder to find shelter places.

In that situation, it is understandable that outreach workers may think that they are doing the best they can for someone by pushing them to accept “voluntary reconnection”. And if the person doesn’t accept the “offer”? Yes, outreach workers pass on the information that will lead ICE arrest teams to foreign rough sleepers. But what happens with that information, they may feel, is not their responsibility. They can tell themselves that they are just cogs in a bigger system, just “doing my job”.

Finally, it is not only outreach workers who play essential roles in this system. In a sense, we are all implicated. St Mungo’s and other charities need funding from the GLA, but they also need our donations. And when ICE teams round up rough-sleepers right in the centre of London, they can only operate because thousands of citizens around them stand silent or walk on by.

How can we fight it?

Where a system is based on collaboration, it can be broken by resistance and solidarity. Resistance means refusal: refusing to work with ICE or hand over information, refusing to turn a blind eye. Solidarity is crucial because individuals who stand alone in refusing may often be picked off one by one. So let’s talk to colleagues in our workplaces, or friends and neighbours, and find ways to support each other in refusing.

There are already some small signs of resistance to rough sleeper deportations. We have heard of some homeless support agencies and projects that have stopped referring people to outreach teams that collaborate with ICE. We have also heard of some local outreach teams that have resisted collaboration, if only by “going slow” on passing over information.

We can’t put names to these examples. So far, such resistance by homelessness workers takes place “off the radar”. It could be a big step forward if projects start to openly distance themselves from the round-up policy.

Here are just a few thoughts on how resistance could grow. Homelessness workers and organisations could:

• Refuse – or just “forget” – to hand over information to the Home Office on non-UK rough sleepers, including through the CHAIN database.

• Stop cooperating with St Mungo’s, Thames Reach and other collaborating charities until these stop working with the Home Office.

• Make public statements condemning the targeting of foreign rough sleepers and refusing to collaborate.

• Pass on information about raids to the antiraids network. (Email: antiraids@riseup.net twitter: @antiraids).

Individuals could:

• Stop donating or volunteering with organisations that collaborate.

• Communicate with your local council about their role in collaboration.

• Join the new campaign to support targeted rough sleepers coordinated by North East London Migrant Action (NELMA) , and supported by Housing Action Southwark and Lambeth (HASL), Haringey Housing Action Group (HHAG) and others. So far this has included producing legal rights “bust cards” for homeless people in Romanian, Polish, and more languages. Or start something similar in another area.

• Pass on information about raids to the antiraids network. And don’t just stand by if you see a raid in progress! Here are a few ideas of things you can do.
  

 Appendix: response from Thames Reach

We contacted St Mungo’s and Thames Reach for comment before publishing this report. We set out the main factual points and also asked the following questions:

• What steps, if any, do you take to keep in touch with and provide support for people who have been “reconnected” out of the country?
• Do you have any general statements to make about why you cooperate with ICE in these ways. Do you do this for financial reasons? Do you do so reluctantly, under pressure from commissioners, or do you believe that it is the right thing to do?
• How would you answer those who say that providing information which helps ICE arrest, detain and deport non-UK rough sleepers is incompatible with your mission of supporting vulnerable people?
• What would you say to former “clients” who have experienced the misery of the indefinite detention system and forced removal as a result of your cooperation with the Home Office, and cannot understand why outreach workers are involved in this?

St Mungo’s did not answer, but Thames Reach sent us the following reply:

“Thames Reach has worked with vulnerable rough sleepers for over 30 years and our staff witness on a daily basis the dangers of sleeping rough, the detrimental effect it has on people’s health and the potential for destitute people to die on the streets.

In order to work effectively we have developed a wide range of partnerships that enable us to help rough sleepers move away from the streets including partnerships with accommodation providers, migrant charities and the Home Office.

Thames Reach can provide support to help non-UK nationals find legal work so they can successfully make a new life in this country. We also help people access legal support in situations where people have complex immigration issues to resolve.
However, Thames Reach also knows from years of experience that for most destitute non-UK rough sleepers, their best option is to come off the streets and be helped to return home voluntarily.

The cost of their travel is covered, and they are put back in touch with family and friends and connected with accommodation providers and support agencies, including drug and alcohol treatment services and mental health specialists. We stay in touch with individuals to ensure that they are successfully getting their lives back on track.

Rough sleepers from the EEA who are in breach of government residency guidelines because they have not found employment face administrative removal by the Home Office.

If people do not take up a voluntary reconnection and are subject to administrative removal, we will work alongside the Home Office to help put support mechanisms in place for them to ensure that their return home is undertaken safely and with dignity.”

End Notes

The post The Round-Up: rough sleeper immigration raids and charity collaboration appeared first on Corporate Watch.

The Byron Hamburgers “sting” was no one-off. This report, analysing leaked Home Office documents, shows how the 6,000 workplace raids a year rely on “low grade” public informing, employers collaborating to target workers, and Immigration Officers acting without legal warrants.

Summary

In July 2016 restaurant chain Byron Hamburgers caused an outcry after setting up a “sting operation” with Home Office Immigration Enforcement to arrest its own workers. But, as this report shows, this was no one-off. Such operations are part of standard practice in the Home Office’s campaign of around 6,000 workplace raids a year, which is routinely based on “low grade” public informing, employers reporting on workers, and Immigration Officers acting without legal warrants.

This report draws on leaked Home Office intelligence documents from 2014’s “Operation Centurion”, analysed here for the first time, alongside other public and confidential sources. Key points include:

• The bulk of initial intelligence comes from around 50,000 “allegations” per year from “members of the public”. Most tip-offs that actually lead to raids are classed as low grade “uncorroborated” information from “untested sources”.
• 12 times more men than women are arrested in workplace raids; people from Pakistan, Bangladesh and India make up 75% of those arrested. Restaurants and takeaways are the main types of businesses hit.
• Immigration Officers seek to follow up tip-offs by contacting employers and asking them to collaborate ahead of raids. This collaboration may include: handing over staff lists; handing over personal details including home addresses, which are then raided; helping arrange “arrests by appointment”, as in Byron’s case and also mentioned in the leaked “Operation Centurion” files.
• Besides Byron, high profile cases of employer-supported raids have included cleaning contractors Amey and ISS (working for SOAS university), and food delivery service Deliveroo in June 2016. In these three cases, raids occurred while companies were involved in disputes with workers and unions.
• In general, employers are not legally obliged to co-operate in these ways: they can give or withhold “consent”. However, in practice, businesses complain that Immigration Officers often do not give the impression that co-operation is voluntary.
• The main pressure for co-operation is not legal but financial. Businesses are liable for a civil penalty of up to £20,000 per illegal worker found – although only if it was “readily apparent” that workers had no “right to work”, e.g., their documents were obviously fake. But this can be reduced by £5,000 for general “co-operation”, plus another £5,000 for “reporting” workers.
• A December 2015 report by the Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration found that officers had warrants in only 43% of raids. In most cases, they claim that business managers grant “informed consent” to enter – but there is no documentation to support this.
• Officers also claim that they act with “consent” in routinely rounding up andquestioning people who are not named suspects. But the Chief Inspector found: “in the 184 files we sampled there was no record of anyone being ‘invited’ to answer ‘consensual questions’”.

A PDF version of this report is available to download.

Introduction

In July 2016 the posh fast food chain Byron Hamburgers caused an outcry after setting up a “sting operation” with the Home Office to trap its own workers. The workers were called in for workplace meetings, then arrested by “Immigration Enforcement” teams. As Byron was hit with pickets, boycott calls and an actual plague of locusts, mainstream and social media debated the morality and legality of its actions.[i]

But the Byron sting is no one-off. On the contrary, operations of this kind are part of the standard Home Office approach to “illegal working”. This report gives an overview and analysis of the Home Office’s campaign of workplace raids, and shows how it relies on a number of fundamental pillars:

• informing by “members of the public”: around 50,000 public tip-offs a year provide the bulk of initial intelligence;
• employer collaboration: operations standardly involve pressuring employers to help target workers by handing over staff lists, providing personal details which may lead to home raids, or indeed arranging “arrests by appointment” as in the Byron case – none of which are, in general, legal obligations of the employers;
• entry and interrogation without warrants: over 50% of raids are not sanctioned by court warrants; instead immigration officers can avoid scrutiny by claiming that businesses give so-called “consent” on the door.

This report makes use of a valuable source: leaked intelligence documents from the June 2014 “Operation Centurion”. This was a two-week nationwide campaign of immigration raids involving all local Immigration Enforcement teams. Things did not go according to plan: documents summarising Home Office intelligence on 214 workplace targets, from corner shops to major factories or warehouses, were leaked to the Anti Raids Network and others.[ii]ⁱ In some cases the intelligence was specific enough to get advance warning to workers in dozens of potential targets. This is the first time the leaked data have been analysed in any depth.[iii]

Reading the Operation Centurion files alongside other sources – including reports by the Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration (ICIBI), replies to Freedom of Information (FOI) requests, and communication from members of the Anti Raids Network[iv] about their experiences and those of businesses and workers they are in touch with – we can get a good picture of the system as whole. We can see how it is based on informing, employer collaboration, and intimidation of both bosses and workers during raids in ways that go well beyond the Home Office’s official guidance – or indeed, in some cases, the law.

We can also see that, as senior Home Office managers are themselves well aware, this system of suspicion and intimidation has no actual hope of “ending illegal working”. But it works very well at creating a climate of fear and division, which serves politicians to mobilise racist panic and employers to exploit workers.

1. “Immigration Enforcement” – the basics

In the UK, border and migration control is overseen by one government ministry, the Home Office. Its internal workings went through restructuring in 2012-13 in which the old “UK Border Agency” (UKBA) was abolished and replaced by three “directorates”. These are: Border Force (BF), which deals with external frontiers; UK Visas and Immigration (UKVI), which deals with legal migration routes including issuing visas; and Immigration Enforcement (IE), which polices migrants within the territory.

Immigration Enforcement itself has different sub-sections. Our main focus will be on the 19 local Immigration Compliance and Enforcement (ICE) teams. These are the troopers on the ground, the Immigration Officers (IOs) and Assistant Immigration Officers (AIOs) who actually carry out the raids.^[v]

We will also encounter the local Operational Intelligence Teams (OIUs) that work with them, and their Field Intelligence Officers (FIOs). These intel officers are technically part of the Immigration Intelligence (II) division, which also includes strategic intelligence teams at national and regional levels.[vi] Also relevant are the Crime and Financial Investigation teams (CFIs), which deal with more serious immigration-related crimes such as forging passports or forced human trafficking;[vii] and the Civil Penalty Compliance Team (CPCT), which issues financial penalties to employers found breaking immigration rules.

The ICE teams carry out various kinds of operations, e.g., breaking up “sham marriages”; raiding “Houses of Multiple Occupation”; or tracking down and arresting individual asylum seekers, people who have “overstayed” their visas, and other individuals identified as targets to be detained and deported. They have also run high visibility “street stop” operations questioning passers-by on busy streets or outside stations; street-based “crime reduction operations” (CROPs) targeting neighbourhoods alongside police; or, e.g., operations on public transport in collaboration with ticket inspections.

However, street immigration enforcement operations appear to have decreased in the last few years. One reason may be that they provoke public outcry and resistance being blatant cases of “fishing expeditions” based on racial profiling. Like the police and other law enforcement agencies, Immigration Enforcement aims to present itself as “intelligence led”.[viii]ⁱ It claims that its operations target named individual “immigration offenders” previously identified by specific intelligence. This is clearly not the case with street stops, nor in many workplace raids either, as we will see.

Currently, “illegal working” operations are a mainstay of IE activity.[ix] However, we might expect to see some new kinds of operations in the future, as immigration controls extend into ever broader areas of everyday life. For example, the new “Right to Rent” introduced in the 2014 Immigration Act requires landlords to check documents of prospective tenants. It could be that this will lead to an increase on residential raids – e.g., with ICE teams sourcing “illegal renters’” details from letting agents in the same way they approach recruitment agencies for “illegal workers’” home addresses.

Our focus in this report is on workplace raids. These vary from routine corner-shop busts to major operations against big factories or multiple premises, possibly involving a number of ICE teams and also other state agencies. The Home Office classifies operations into “upper, middle or lower tier”, depending on “the number of offenders, suspected criminality and/or politically sensitive issues”.^[x]

Some basic figures on workplace raids

Before looking at the leaked Operation Centurion documents, we can get a useful overall snapshot from a December 2015 ICIBI report on “An Inspection of How the Home Office Tackles Illegal Working” (hereafter, Illegal Working 2015).[xi] According to this, the Home Office carried out a total of 36,381 “illegal working” “visits” across the UK between 2009 and 2014, or roughly 6,000 a year. In just the first nine months of 2014, for example, there were 5,414 “visits”.[xii]ⁱ From the 36,381 visits, there were 29,113 arrests. More than two thirds of visits (24,621, or 68%) don’t lead to any “illegal workers identified” or arrested, but clearly others end with multiple arrests.

Some obvious facts stand out about who is arrested. First, the large majority are male: in fact twelve times more men than women were arrested between September 2012 and January 2014. Secondly, the biggest targets by far are people from South Asia. 75% of all people arrested in that period were from Bangladesh, Pakistan or India, in that order. The top ten nationalities, in full, were: Bangladesh 27%, Pakistan 27%, India 21%, China 10%, Nigeria 3%, Afghanistan 3%, Sri Lanka 3%, Nepal 2%, Vietnam 2%, Albania 2%.

This breakdown of nationalities appears to be related not just to the history of British colonialism, but to the types of businesses that offer easy targets. The ICIBI report sampled 184 visit files, with 179 arrests. “One hundred and seven of the 184 premises visited were high street restaurants and/or takeaways, mostly Indian Subcontinent or Chinese cuisine, with some fried chicken outlets.”

A Freedom Of Information request to which the Home Office replied in 2013 (after appeal) also confirms that “restaurants and takeaways” are primary targets. In 2011 there were 2,591 visits to these businesses, leading to 1,939 arrests; in 2012 there were 2,514 visits, with 2,320 arrests. Comparing these figures with the ICIBI report, in both years 47% of all raids were to “restaurants and takeways”.[xiii]ⁱ

The leaked Operation Centurion documents confirm some of the same basic patterns. Nationalities are mentioned in 45 of the 214 targets listed. Nine of these mention people from Bangladesh, seven mention Indians – there are also two mentions of “Sikhs”, six mention Pakistanis, five Nigerians, three Vietnamese (all nail bars), three Albanians. There are also three references to Brazilians, one to a Chinese-owned business, one to Ukrainians, one to Mauritians, one to “Africans” in general, and one to Eritreans – who are described as “not the best nationality for us” (presumably because it is legally difficult to deport people to the Eritrean dictatorship) “but a new sector nonetheless.”

However, there is also a notable difference in the Op Centurion files: only 11 out of the 214 Centurion targets are restaurants. The top five sectors are construction (29), retail (20), leisure or entertainment (18), care homes (14), and manufacturing, i.e., factories and “sweatshops” (14). Then come restaurants (11), transport (11), garages (10), recruitment agencies (10), hotels (9), offices or “white collar” (9), beauty (8), security (7), food production and packaging (6), cleaning (5), markets (4), agriculture (2), logistics (1), and a charity (1). Several other intel items feature various sectors, or are not really workplace raids at all but, e.g., target rough-sleepers (1), or an individual’s home (1).

Why are the two samples so different on this point? Perhaps, to speculate, as Operation Centurion was intended to be a “showcase” and media spectacle for Immigration Enforcement, teams were instructed to get away from the usual routine of busting the local takeaways and present a more varied range of ops. The ICIBI report suggests that Home Office bosses don’t see the obsession with Asian restaurants as ideal: “some ICE managers told us that more attention should be paid to other sectors.”[xiv] The Home Office response to the inspection report stated that officials had “identified a number of new employment sectors” and were “diversifying the range of our enforcement work”.[xv]

One last summary statistic, this time relating to the immigration status of the arrested people – i.e., what they had “done wrong”. In the ICIBI sample, 45% were “overstayers”, i.e., people who arrived in the UK on a valid visa but then stayed after it had run out; 20% were “illegal entrants”; 13% were “working in breach” of their visa conditions: e.g., people on student visas working full time.

The immigration enforcement process: from tip-off to raid

In the rest of this report we will focus on three key issues, which relate to different stages of the planning and operation of immigration raids. To put these in context, we will first sketch an overview of the raid process as whole. Another ICIBI inspection report, from 2014, outlines how it is supposed to go, in seven stages:

1. The process is supposed to begin with an “allegation or other information regarding illegal working received by the Home Office”. This is the stage we will look at in Section 2, asking: where do these “allegations” come from?
2. The initial lead should then be “researched and enriched” by intelligence officers, including the “Field Intelligence Officers” (FIOs) who may hit the streets to check out businesses. In Section 3, we will see how this intelligence stage often involves approaching employers, and perhaps putting pressure on them to collaborate in targeting workers in different ways.
3. The intelligence officers then present an “intelligence package” detailing the case to the local team’s “Tasking and Coordination Group” (TCG). It is this meeting that decides whether or not to go ahead with a raid.
4. The Tasking Group schedules the operation and assigns it to a lead “Officer in Charge” (OIC).
5. The OIC draws up a plan for the operation. This is meant to include a plan for how and on what legal basis to enter the target premises – the issue we will look at in Section 4. The plan may also involve ICE officers in plainclothes carrying out a “recce” of the site ahead of the actual raid, identifying entry and exit points and other relevant information.[xvi]
6. The team should now go to a magistrate’s court for a warrant to raid the premises, or alternatively apply for an “Assistant Director’s letter” (see Section 4). As we will see, this stage is very often skipped or carried out improperly.
7. The operation is conducted. During the raid, Immigration Officers are meant to search for, interview and potentially arrest people on whom they already have specific intelligence. They may also legally question other people who arouse “suspicion”, under specific circumstances, and if these people consent to being questioned. In practice, as we will see in Section 4, this is not what happens. As the Chief Inspector notes: “The files showed that officers typically gathered everyone on the premises together, regardless of the information known or people’s actions.”

Of course, for many people involved, the raid is not the end of the process but just the beginning.

According to the general IE statistics for 2009-2014, half of all the people arrested in those five years (14,493, so 50%) were eventually “removed” from the country. Many of those, in the process, spent weeks or months languishing in immigration detention centres. The majority were forcibly deported, handcuffed and “escorted” by private security guards. Though some were allowed to “voluntarily remove” themselves, i.e., take themselves to the airport – an outcome the Home Office is keen to increase as it saves a lot of money.

As for the employers, there is the chance of a criminal charge, but the most common outcome is a civil penalty of up to £20,000 per worker (see Section 2 for details). However, the Home Office’s record in actually collecting these fines is underwhelming: “the most recent figures showed that around 31% of debt raised was recovered and that it took an average of 28.4 months to recover it.” In a bid to improve its returns, the Home Office has contracted two private debt collection firms.[xvii]ⁱ

2. Allegations: where does “intelligence” come from?

Debates around immigration raids have sometimes focused on the issue of “racial profiling” vs. so-called “intelligence led” operations. In the wake of the Operation Centurion leak, Labour politician Keith Vaz, as chair of the House of Commons Home Affairs committee, appeared on TV to condemn the way raids appeared to be “fishing expeditions” for particular national groups, rather than being truly “intelligence led”.[xviii]ⁱ And yet there certainly is “intelligence” behind the raids. The Operation Centurion files give a very handy glimpse into how Immigration Enforcement gathers and processes “information flows”, and so finds its victims.

An obvious but key point: there is no way ICE teams can possibly hope to “visit” every business where “illegal workers” might be found. They carry out about 6,000 workforce “visits” a year, ultimately just a tiny sample. But this sample is certainly not selected at random. Managers may hope to direct their teams to targets which will “bag” big arrests. Or maybe, teams will prioritise easy options, like high street restaurants, which don’t need any careful reconnaissance or preparation. Even in this case, though, teams may not just strike the first restaurant they come to, but be led by a a more specific allegation – that is, a tip-off, someone grassing someone up.

In theory, all allegations received by Immigration Enforcement are processed onto a central computer system called the Information Management System (IMS).[xix] A new ICIBI inspection report on “The Intelligence Functions of Border Force and Immigration Enforcement”, published in July 2016, gives us a first glimpse of the nature of these tip-offs. In the twelve months between August 2014 and July 2015, a total of 74,617 allegations were entered on the system. 49,109 came from “the public” – e.g., calls to the Immigration Enforcement hotline, or electronically via a form on the Gov.uk website, or maybe in person to officers. Another 7,540 tip-offs were forwarded from Crimestoppers. 17,818 pieces of information were referred by “other Government departments”. Finally, 150 tip-offs came from MPs – presumably passing on information from constituents.[xx]

On this basis, it looks like the intelligence that “leads” Immigration Enforcement largely consists of snitching from “members of the public”, such as anonymous phone calls or web form entries. However, we need to dig further into a couple of points. First, how much use does Immigration Enforcement make of these public tip-offs? Many are likely to be “low grade” to say the least, and it could be that Intelligence Officers use them sparingly and selectively, filtering out only the most solid intel, or preferring information passed on by the police and other agencies. Second, these figures don’t tell us what proportion of operations come from information first uncovered by IE intelligence officers acting on their own initiative, rather than responding to allegations at all.

The Op Centurion files gives a few hints here. In the leaked documents, 30 entries offer some clue as to where the initial lead on a target came from. Eight mention “allegations”. For example, one entry notes an “allegation of 30 illegally working students” at a cleaning company; in an import company an “allegation has been received that they are employing persons illegally”; a manufacturing company is “alleged to be employing BRA nationals”; in a “middle tier” target “in addition to the allegations of illegal working, there are suggestions of document abuse”.

Another seven cases are referrals from other agencies. Three are from the police. After a worker contacts the police saying they have been trafficked and forced to work at a meat-packing plant, the police contact IE requesting involvement in a joint operation. In Glasgow, an “Immigration offender [is] encountered by police at Possible House of Multiple Occupancy […] Others possibly residing there.” Elsewhere, police propose a joint op also involving trading standards “during a series of test purchases at off licenses and pubs”. Two cases involve the Security Industry Authority (SIA), which licenses security guards. In one, the SIA passes on a lead on a large security company in Luton; in another, ICE are planning to actually “attend an SIA test and check status of candidates”.

Five cases are in fact repeat visits to old targets, including two to firms that haven’t paid old penalties, while another mentions “previous excellent results from enforcement visit”. Two other cases dig up unspecified “old intel”. In two cases, Immigration Enforcement has approached a company to provide information on its cleaning contractors, which then become targets.

If this sample is anything to go by, many ops do seem to start with some kind of tip-off. There is just one mention in the documents of a team “cold calling” to do speculative intelligence gathering, in this case around hotels in Wandsworth, South London. Although there is another reference to “markets being scoped/developed”, which might involve teams starting from scratch in a targeted area.

This picture is also supported by the ICIBI report on Illegal Working from December 2015. Here the inspector looks at a sample of 184 cases, which are evaluated according to the National Intelligence Model (NIM) “5x5x5” rating system – a standard model used by the police and other UK law enforcement agencies. In this system a piece of information is classified on three scales: the source is rated from A (always reliable) to E (untested); the particular information is evaluated from 1 (known to be true) to 5 (suspected to be false); and another scale from 1 to 5 indicates who can have access to the information.

In 127 cases, information is said to come from rated “sources”. But one fact leaps out: 98 of these are rated as E4: “untested source, information not known personally to source, and cannot be corroborated”; 19 were rated B2 “mostly reliable source, information known to source but not to officer”; one was rated B3 “Mostly reliable source, information not known personally to source, but corroborated”; eight were rated E3 “untested source, information not known personally to source, but corroborated.” In the other 57 cases the source evaluation was “not known, intelligence rating not shown or not clear in file”.

And there is further confirmation from the July 2016 ICIBI report on “Intelligence Functions” (para 6.11), which adds:

“In interviews and focus groups, staff commented that IE was overly reliant on allegations received from members of the public, and did not gather enough intelligence through enforcement teams and Field Intelligence Officers (FIOs). As a result, it was reactive rather than proactive. Their views echoed the 2014 Deloitte report, which found ‘some reliance on public allegations which are not the most efficient way for IE to direct its activity’.”

In conclusion, taken together, all the evidence suggests that Immigration Enforcement “intelligence” very largely consists of uncorroborated tip-offs from unknown “members of the public”.

However, we should add one last point. Immigration Enforcement has strong political, and indeed legal, reasons to represent itself as “intelligence led”, as not conducting “fishing expeditions”. For this reason, we might expect that available data under-represent operations carried out on the basis of no allegations at all. This would also hold for the Operation Centurion leaked documents. If ICE teams are regularly “cold calling” high street takeaways, this may not get written up as such even in internal case notes, and above all not for a showcase operation. However, it could be that many of the 57 cases in the ICIBI sample without any source ratings were just this kind of “speculative” operation.

So our general conclusion might be: most IE intelligence comes from uncorroborated public informing; whilst some operations may not be based on any intelligence at all.

3. Employer collaboration

In the Byron’s Hamburgers case, Immigration Enforcement arranged with the company to carry out a “sting operation” on its workers. Managers called in targeted staff for early morning meetings, described as about “Health & Safety”, or “a new kind of hamburger”. When they arrived they were met by ICE immigration officers, who made 35 arrests in different restaurants.[xxi]

A few weeks before, on 2 June, Immigration Enforcement raided the London training centre of Deliveroo, the food delivery courier company, whose workers have recently been protesting about a cut in wages.[xxii]ⁱ The raid was a joint operation with police (focusing on drugs) and the Department of Work and Pensions, and ended with three arrests for immigration offences. Workers present said that Deliveroo management actively assisted the raid and, according to one online report, Immigration Officers arrived with “a list of names with photos of Deliveroo drivers they were looking for”.[xxiii]ⁱ In a media statement the next day, a Deliveroo spokeswoman confirmed that: “we have worked with the Metropolitan Police to assist in a documentation check at our Angel office yesterday.”[xxiv]

Two earlier high-profile cases occurred in May 2007 and 2009, both involving contract cleaning companies – Amey and ISS. In December 2006, Amey took over the cleaning contract at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in Middlessex, and with it a workforce of 36 cleaners. The new contractor moved to “rationalise” staff numbers. The cleaners, who were seeking trade union recognition rights, resisted. Amey’s next move, as told by union rep Julio Mayor, was as follows:

“they summoned all the workers to a closed area under the pretext of a training session. 15 minutes after we had assembled, about 60 police and immigration officials arrived and took away six people undocumented in the UK. Part of the policy of Amey was to get rid of the workers who were working there before they won the contract and they used every tool they had. All the workers were Latin American.”^[xxv]

In June 2009, ISS, the cleaning contractor for the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at the University of London, made a very similar move against its largely unionised staff. “Cleaning staff were told to attend an ‘emergency staff meeting’ at 6.30am […] Within minutes the meeting was raided by at least twenty immigration officers. The cleaners were locked in the room and escorted one-by-one into another classroom where they were interrogated.” Two members of university management were also reportedly present.^[xxvi]

How common are these kinds of operations? Unsurprisingly, official data doesn’t reveal this. The Amey and ISS cases came to light because some of the workers targeted were active trade unionists and campaigners who raised a public outcry. The case of Byron, too, was initially reported in Spanish speaking media, then raised by black activist groups on social media, and only picked up by mainstream UK press weeks later after the “#boycottbyron” hashtag went viral on twitter. We can suppose that there are more cases of this kind, which do not receive media attention.

The Op Centurion documents contain some evidence of this. But more than that, they show how sting operations are just one form of a much wider issue: the whole Immigration Enforcement approach to “illegal working” in fact rests on employer collaboration, which may take various forms and degrees. The most basic is informing on workers. In fact, we read the following bare statement in the Home Office’s official staff guidance on “Illegal Working Operations”:

“The majority of reports about suspected illegal working come from employers.”^[xxvii]

How does that square with the evidence discussed above that the bulk of information starts with “members of the public”. One possibility is that employers are also included as “members of the public” in the figures, and the bulk of the 50,000 tip-offs come straight from bosses. We cannot rule this out, as the available figures do not break down sources further into types of informants. But another possibility, which perhaps fits better with the overall picture, is this: public tip-offs, anonymous or otherwise, are often the first lead; next, Immigration Enforcement typically follows these up by approaching employers, threatening penalties if the tip-off turns out right, and demanding more specific details on “suspected illegals”. Very often, the employer agrees to turn informant. Sometimes, they also agree to more, such as helping to set up a sting. So, even if the initial informants are not employers, they then play a key role in developing these leads.

Going through the Op Centurion files, 18 entries explicitly mention discussions between Immigration Enforcement and employers. The IE staff involved in these discussions may be ICE immigration officers, or intelligence staff such as “Field Intelligence Officers” (FIOs). As many of the Op Centurion files concern cases in early development, some of the references are to initial plans to “contact” or “engage” employers. The fact that contact often seems to be initiated by Immigration Enforcement supports the pattern we just sketched. For example, Midlands ICE teams plan to visit “markets and engage with managers there and do some intelligence gathering there”. In London, “contact to be made with Berkeley Homes over a large construction site in Greenwich”. In another case, “contact made with Holiday Inn […], awaiting return contact from HR”.

In other cases, the entries report that relationships have been established and the company is co-operating. This co-operation may involve a number of features. The most immediate, and common, is handing over staff files and other information on workers. E.g.: “Contact made with Coral Bookmakers and William Hill bookmakers for sites across South London, 900+ staff files are being checked and it is conservatively anticipated there will be at least 5 offenders across the sites.” Or in a care home: “staff list of 95 obtained and 8 offenders traced.” One entry mentions the “British Horse Racing Association” “providing staff details (which we have not yet received)” on stable workers. (Another entry describes the “Horse Racing Association” as “keen to engage with HOIE [Home Office Immigration Enforcement] and we are taking this forward”.)

Three of the entries that mention employer contact concern recruitment agencies. One case note reads as if possibly the initial approach came from the company: intelligence officers are planning to visit the agency after “they noticed an increase in Africans submitting ITA[lian] ID cards and [passports].” Another interesting entry refers to a visit by FIOs to a recruitment agency where “12 offenders were identified”. It ends: “residential visits to be tasked”. That is, it seems, the agency is passing on home addresses of people on its books looking for work, so that ICE can then raid their houses.

As well as passing information on workers, employers may also point the finger at other employers. Two cases are mentioned in the files: in both, Immigration Enforcement is “contacting” or “in communication” with companies – a car auction site and a cinema chain – about their cleaning contractors.

Finally, we come to two entries that may indeed refer to Byron-style operations where arrests are set up “by appointment” with bosses. One from the South East team reads: “FIOs are liaising with cleaning companies with a view to arrests by appointment being made.” The other is from the South Central team: “FIO looking at a mid size warehouse […] which is owned by a Chinese national. FIO’s are still liaising with cleaning companies with a view to arrests by appointment being made.” Given the very similar wording, these two entries may indeed be talking about the same operation: apparently a large operation against a number of companies, and across at least two local ICE areas.

There is one entry in the documents about an employer, or in fact an employers’ association, not cooperating. Officers contacted the association “to establish information flows however this is looking unlikely due to a reluctance to work with Immigration Enforcement”. This is the only case of non-cooperation noted in the documents. Of course, other potential cases may not have made it into the files for precisely that reason.

The Op Centurion files suggest that it is very often Immigration Enforcement, acting on a prior tip-off, who initiate contact with employers. This seems to make sense: under most circumstances, why would it be in an employers’ interest to “bring down heat” on themselves? After all, one of the perks of “illegal” labour is that it’s not hard to fire workers.

Under most circumstances, that is. We can also think of exceptions. For example, an employer might be unwilling to do their own dirty work of firing workers, perhaps because of social or family connections to workers. Or some employers may be keen to have help in taking on a “difficult” workforce, perhaps where workers are organising. This, of course, is exactly the situation in which Amey and ISS set their stings –and more recently, in which Deliveroo worked with police and Immigration Enforcement. It would be worth investigating further the specific use of these tactics in relation to workplace disputes.

“Educating” employers

In the two years since Operation Centurion, there is strong reason to believe that employer collaboration has become still more central to Immigration Enforcement practice. In the second half of 2014, the Home Office ran a programme called “Operation Skybreaker” to pilot a new enforcement approach in the ten areas of highest “known” illegal immigration – all in London. The new model has since been rolled out nationally. The theory was about “moving from a model that seeks predominantly to arrest and remove individuals, to a model that seeks also to prevent illegal migration, drive compliance with the entirety of the immigration rules and tackle the underlying causes of illegal migration including criminal activity’.^xxviii

In practice, the main change was the introduction of so-called “educational visits” in advance of raids. “Before making an enforcement visit to a business to follow up information received about individuals suspected of working there illegally, IE would first visit the business to encourage them to comply with employment requirements.”^xxix

These visits serve a number of objectives. One is about public image: Immigration Enforcement is now a friendly resource informing employers of their rights and responsibilities, “encouraging” rather than punishing. Another is about scaring workers into voluntary return, much cheaper than forced deportation. But, as the Anti Raids Network has highlighted, there is also another very important, if less publicised, role of these visits: to approach employers about collaboration, whilst gathering more intelligence.^xxx Indeed, the Home Office’s evaluation of Operation Skybreaker specifically states that “Intelligence generated” from educational visits in the pilot “led to 65 arrests”.^xxxi

Whereas actual arrests have to be formally documented, there seems to be little recording of what happens in “educational visits” – the ICIBI report notes that “the recording of engagement with local businesses and stakeholders needed more effective management.” Nonetheless, the ICIBI reports give some ideas of standard forms of “engagement”. The most basic one is demanding to see records of employers’ “right to work” checks: the Op Skybreaker evaluation noted that half of businesses failed to show these.

It’s worth pointing out here that there is no legal requirement for businesses to show “right to work” check records on demand during an “educational visit”. (In fact, as the ICIBI report notes, some police forces advise employers not to keep them on the premises.) The legal purpose of “Right to work” check records is to serve as evidence, after a raid that discovers “illegal working”, that an employer did not employ these workers knowingly or negligently, and so avoid a penalty. Clearly, however, they serve another function for Immigration Enforcement: a way to get information on workers in advance of planning a raid.

Are firms forced to collaborate?

This last point brings up an important question. In the Byron Hamburgers case, many of the chain’s media defenders argued that it had no legal choice but to co-operate with Immigration Enforcement in setting a trap for its workers. As we will now see, this is not the case. The choice was not legal but financial. Also, it would only need to be faced at all if Byron’s had knowingly or negligently employed “illegal workers”.

The relevant basic points are these:^xxxii

• It is a criminal offence to employ someone if the employer “knows or has reasonable cause to believe that the person has no right to do the work in question”.^xxxiii For example, an employer could be convicted if the court finds that they “deliberately ignored information or circumstances” about the worker’s status.

• In addition, an employer is also liable to pay a civil penalty for employing someone who doesn’t have the legal right to do the work. This is separate from the criminal matter – Immigration Enforcement can impose a civil penalty simply by issuing a notice, without having to go before a court and prove that the employer “knew or had reasonable cause to believe”.^xxxiv

• But the employer can get out of paying the penalty if they can show evidence that they have a statutory excuse. Namely: that they have “correctly carried out the prescribed right to work checks using acceptable documents”. Carrying out the checks correctly involves, amongst other things: checking the worker’s ID documents before employment starts, and again at intervals if the worker has time-limited work permission; and not accepting these documents if it is “reasonably apparent” that they are false or do not belong to the worker.^xxxv There is a Home Office “statutory excuse checksheet” which states clearly what evidence Immigration Officers should look for when judging whether employers made the checks correctly. Basically this amounts to two things: a clear copy of the relevant pages of the worker’s passport or other acceptable ID document; and a record of the date when it was checked (for example, by dating the ID document copies).^xxxvi

• If the employer fails to show it has done the checks correctly, and so does have to pay a penalty, this can be reduced on certain grounds, including reporting illegal workers and further co-operating with Immigration Enforcement. The maximum penalty is £20,000, or £15,000 if the company has not been found employing an illegal worker during the last three years. But the following reductions can be applied:^xxxvii
• £5,000 for reporting the suspected illegal workers to Immigration Enforcement;
• £5,000 for “actively co-operating”, which means doing all of the following four things: “providing Home Office officials with access to your premises, recruitment and employment records and document checking systems when requested; responding promptly, honestly and accurately to our questions and information requests; making yourself available to our officials during the course of our investigations if required; and fully and promptly disclosing any evidence you have which may assist us in our investigations”;
• £5,000 for “evidence of effective document checking practices” (but only applicable if not found to have employed illegal workers in the last three years);
• 30% further reduction for paying within 20 days (again, only applicable if not caught in last three years).So if this is the first offence in three years, and if the company reports its workers, co-operates fully with all further demands, and shows effective document checking, it can have all penalties waived. If it can’t show effective document checking, it can get its penalties down to £3,500 by informing, co-operating fully, and then paying promptly.

If it has been caught in the last three years, it can get its penalties halved to a minimum of £10,000 by reporting illegal workers and then fully co-operating with further Immigration Enforcement demands. This may have been the situation faced by Byron, as the company had been caught employing at least one illegal worker in 2015.^xxxviii

We can note a few points:

• An employer only faces a penalty for accepting false documents if they are obviously fake. For example, the Independent Chief Inspector specifically discusses a case where the CPCT penalty team: “considered that the identity documents provided by many of those arrested were fraudulent, but determined that this was not ‘readily apparent’ so canceled all but one civil penalty.”^xxxix As the Inspector puts it,“employers are either negligent in respect of their obligations to check their employees’ ‘right to work’ or complicit in hiding such work from the authorities.”^xl To pick up some of the discussion of the Byron Hamburgers’ case: the company should not have faced any penalties if it had just been “tricked” by cleverly forged documents.
• There is no general legal requirement for companies to hand over documents requested by Immigration Enforcement in advance of a raid. Companies may choose to do so in order to provide evidence that they have correctly applied right to work checks. This will only be relevant if Immigration Enforcement in fact finds illegal workers, and so the employer needs a statutory excuse. So, if a firm is confident that it has no illegal staff, it is within its rights to refuse to give information Immigration Enforcement. (In fact, it is within its rights to do this even if it does have illegal workers – although it won’t then be able to use a “statutory excuse” if Immigration Enforcement catches them. And probably this would not look good if a court case did result.) As we will see below, Immigration Enforcement acknowledge this fact by (at least sometimes) asking employers to sign “consent forms” authorising access to staff records.
• If a company does provide documents to show a statutory excuse, it only needs to provide those that are directly relevant: i.e., ID document copies, with records of the dates when these were checked. It does not have to hand over further personal information such as workers’ home addresses.
• But while there is no legal obligation to hand over these documents ahead of a raid, or otherwise co-operate, there are financial incentives – unless a firm is fully confident that no illegal staff will be found.

Multi agency ops

One way Immigration Enforcement might increase its ability to persuade employers to collaborate is by working together with other agencies who have greater powers or can add other forms of sanction. We looked above at some examples of intelligence sharing between agencies, and also saw statistics that suggest this is a major source of “leads” for IE operations. As well as sharing intel, agencies often work together on larger operations, and the Government is encouraging further development of such teamwork.^xli

In the Operation Centurion documents, 25 cases mention Immigration Enforcement working with at least one other state agency in some capacity, from sharing intelligence to full on multi-agency “joint operations”. In ten cases this includes police, including one case with the British Transport Police (BTP) relating to railway workers. HMRC is involved in four cases, the Security Industry Authority (SIA) in three, and the Department for Work and Pensions in two.

Besides the police, the most common partners are various Local Authority departments. These include: environmental health and food hygiene (to coordinate joint operations against restaurant and food preparation businesses), market regulation, liquor licensing (targeting restaurants and shops), taxi licensing (intelligence gathering or joint operations against taxi firms), and planning (to gather information on large building sites).

The Op Centurion documents also show a number of extra-large collaborations, including one that musters a veritable army of multi-agency officials to target an unlucky group of restaurants in the West Country: “Approaches have/will be made with HMRC for a physical presence, Liquor licensing, Council food hygiene, Police and we are exploring any others we can bring in. Contact with the Police Area Deputy Commander and he has already tasked us some personnel and custody/support.”

Members of the Anti Raids Network have suggested that these multi-agency operations can also serve purposes that go beyond immediate “law enforcement” objectives. For example, a report on a series of raids of Deptford High Street in South East London links immigration raids co-ordinated with Lewisham council departments to the gentrification of the area and the “Deptford Project” development scheme.^xlii

Conclusion: pressure to collaborate

We have seen from the Operation Centurion documents a few basic forms of employer collaboration. The most common appears to be handing over “staff records”, which may sometimes include detailed personal information such as home addresses.

In September 2014, the Anti Raids Network published a copy of a “consent form” that Immigration Enforcement had presented to a business during Operation Skybreaker, demanding that they sign. This form was headed “Authorisation for Immigration Officers to review Staff Records”. It gives permission to Immigration Enforcement to enter the premises and to “check staff records; establish compliance with record-keeping procedure; take copies of staff records – if required; provide resources to assist employers to conduct Right to Work checks”. It states that the visit would not involve arresting or questioning staff. The gathered “information may be shared by the Home Office with other government departments and law enforcement agencies”.^xliii

The form also states clearly, above where business owners are asked to sign:

“I am aware that I am not obliged to provide consent. I can refuse to answer any questions and ask the officers to leave at any time for any reason”.

As this makes clear, Immigration Enforcement is well aware that companies are not legally obliged to hand over personal information on workers in these visits. However, Immigration Enforcement officers have certain leverage that they may apply in order to persuade employers to co-operate – and indeed to “report” suspicions about any workers:

• the most direct threat is that if companies refuse to do so they will not be treated as “co-operating”, and so will face full penalties if a raid finds illegal workers;

• in addition, Immigration Enforcement could threaten to involve other agencies (licensing, food hygiene, etc.), whom employers may have cause to fear on other grounds;

• Immigration Enforcement may also threaten that non-cooperation will be viewed negatively in the case of an eventual criminal prosecution. This threat has become more serious with the 2016 Immigration Act, under which it is now a crime not just to employ workers you know to be illegal, but if you had “reasonable cause to believe” them to be; ^xliv

• finally, the threat of being raided, in itself, may have some effect: even if no “illegals” are discovered, a raid can involve inconvenience, humiliation, and lost business. Whereas “arrests by appointment” can be arranged to minimise problems for the business, e.g., before opening hours as in Byron’s case.

Anecdotally, members of the Anti Raids Network have confirmed that this is what often happens at an Immigration Enforcement “educational visit”. Intelligence officers or ICE teams call into a business, or sometimes telephone. They ask for full staff lists, and may demand further information on specific individuals. The threat, made implicitly or explicitly, is that if firms do not hand over all information requested they are likely to face a hostile raid. Non-cooperation will lead to higher penalties, and possibly criminal charges, if “illegals” are discovered. Penalties can be brought down potentially as low as zero if employers indeed “report” suspect workers. It may take a particularly confident employer to resist these pressures.

On the subject of consent forms, the Anti Raids Network has written:

“During our outreach, we have found that a lot of people have been signing consent forms. However, when we’ve told people that there is no obligation to sign, many said that they were unaware that it was voluntary, while others said ‘you can’t do anything to stop them – they do whatever they want’. In practice of course, it is very hard to refuse – regardless of whether this is your legal right.”^xlv

We also saw in the Operation Centurion documents signs that officers may suggest more involved forms of collaboration such as helping to arrange “arrests by appointment”. There is no explicit mention of this as an officially recommended approach in any of the public documents we have seen. We may suppose that collaborating in this way helped Amey, Byron and others to be classed as “co-operating”, and so have several thousand pounds knocked off their fines. Perhaps the fines were waived altogether, even for firms recently caught employing illegal workers – but if so, this is going against the official published guidance, which clearly states a minimum of £10,000 for such firms.^xlvi

Here we reach the limit of what we can learn from public or leaked Home Office documents. To research this question further, an obvious next step would be to interview employers and workers who have been subject to Home Office “educational visits”.

4. Fabricating consent

In many vampire stories, the undead can enter a building only when invited in by the occupiers. Immigration Enforcement often work on a similar principle.

In the ICIBI December 2015 report on Illegal Working operations, the Inspector looked at how raids were carried out for the sample of 184 cases. This included how ICE teams gained entry to targeted premises. In 79 cases, the teams had court warrants. In three cases, the power of entry was not clear in the records. In the large majority, 102 visits, the Immigration Officers entered without a warrant claiming that they had “informed consent” to do so.

Before we look at what “informed consent” amounts to, it is worth comparing these figures with others from a previous ICIBI report which attracted some attention. In 2014, the Independent Chief Inspector published, “An inspection of the use of the power to enter business premises without a search warrant”.^xlvii More specifically, this report focused on the use of a particular power granted by Section 28CA of the Immigration Act 1971, called the “AD Letter”, in which under certain circumstances Immigration Officers can legally enter a business without a search warrant if authorised by a Home Office Assistant Director (usually, the head of a local ICE team).

This report noted that there were 3,568 illegal working visits nationwide between 1 April and 31 August 2013. In only 33% of these (1,178), ICE teams had search warrants. In 24% (860) they used AD letters instead.^xlviii The report then looked at a sample of 59 cases and concluded that “only 17 of the cases we sampled (29%) justified using this power. In 35 cases (59%), we disagreed with the

AD decision and in a further seven cases (12%) there was insufficient information to enable us to form an opinion.”^xlix In essence, an AD letter is supposed to be a last resort substitute for a court warrant in urgent cases – yet in 95% of the sampled cases, officers had just not considered getting a warrant. According to South London ICE staff, “the use of the power without a search warrant was routine because it was easier to get a signature from the AD than it was to attend a Magistrates’ Court.”^l

In his forward to the report, the chief inspector summed up:

“In almost two-thirds of the cases I examined, I disagreed with the decision made by an Assistant Director to authorise the use of this power. This was because of weak justifications or because the need for swift action was not supported by the evidence. I was also very concerned to find six cases where the power appeared to have been used unlawfully, primarily because either the authorising officer was not at the appropriate grade or the power was not used within the time-frame set out in the legislation.”

Following the inspectorate’s strong condemnation, it is notable that the sample in the December 2015 report shows not a single use of an AD letter. It appears that, at least for now, ICE teams have back-pedalled away from this power. The “Illegal Working 2015” report observes: “Senior IE managers confirmed that the use of this power was now much more tightly controlled to ensure compliance with the legislation.”^li

However, this doesn’t mean that ICE teams are now following the regular channel of applying to a magistrate’s court for a warrant in most cases. In the sample in the December 2015 report, teams only had valid warrants in 43% of raids (79 cases) – an improvement on the 33% counted in the 2013 figures, but still not the norm. Instead, it appears, where teams once wielded an AD letter they will often now rely on claiming “informed consent”.

Informed consent, according to Immigration Enforcement guidance, means “a person’s agreement to allow something to happen after the person has been informed of all the risks involved and the alternatives”. ^lii The Chief Inspector’s report further clarifies that “the guidance requires ‘fully informed’ consent in writing by a person ‘entitled to grant entry’”.

How often does this happen? We can’t know for sure – but we suspect not very often. As the inspection report notes, there is not much of a paper trail on how “informed consent” was established. The records seen by the Chief Inspector “did not note specific enquiries to comply with the requirement to establish that the person consenting to entry must be ‘entitled to grant entry’. In most premises visited, English was not always the first language of those encountered.” In general: “Files rarely documented how officers confirmed that consent was ‘fully informed’ as required.” ^liii There seems to be no requirement for teams to keep signed consent letters on file and available for inspection. There is then no way for the genuineness of “consent” to be proved or disproved, or for the officers involved in gaining “consent” to be held to account. Moving away from AD letters to reliance on “informed consent” has in fact made ICE operations even less accountable and open to scrutiny than before.

The report features a particular case study in which the team “decided to gain entry by informed consent” and subsequently “noted in the case file that ‘verbal authority’ to enter was given and then withdrawn as soon as the name of the person they were seeking was disclosed”. After the Chief Inspector raised concerns about this case, commenting that “ ‘verbal authority’ is not a recognised term”, the Home Office responded that:

“The ICE team has recognised this is a case where an application for a search warrant would have been appropriate, but there is no record of why an application wasn’t made;

• where practicable, consent must be given in writing before a search begins. We would not have expected the search to begin before the written consent was obtained;

• we have recognised that clarification of the procedure to be followed to obtain informed consent was required and this was published to staff in December 2014.”^liv

Anecdotally, we are told by the Anti Raids Network that it is very common for raids to take place in the following way: ICE officers turn up at the door and ask to speak to the manager, while other officers may already have sealed off other exits to prevent people from leaving the building; the officers then ask the manager (or an available worker) for verbal consent to enter the premises, or at best to sign a paper granting written consent on the spot.

This is clearly not sufficient for “informed consent” in any meaningful sense, or as recommended by the Home Offfice’s own guidance. To highlight a few obvious issues:

• permission to enter is not sought in advance of the raid;
• instead, it is granted in the heat of the moment, during a fraught situation in which a team arrives with intimidating force;
• it is unlikely in this situation that the person approached is “informed of all the risks involved and the alternatives”;
• particularly as, often, ICE officers do not communicate in a language the person clearly understands;
• in addition, the ICE team may not properly establish that the person they are talking to is actually entitled to grant informed consent;
• and permission may often not be sought or given in writing.

Finally, we can note that this situation with respect to consent to enter is mirrors the common failure of Immigration Enforcement to gain consent for questioning. The law and Home Office guidance allows Immigration Enforcement to enter premises in pursuit of specific named individuals suspected of immigration offences – again, this is key to the claim of “intelligence led” operations. Officers do not have a general power to question anyone who is not the named offender. They may, however, “invite” other people to answer “consensual questions” if “they had brought themselves to attention, such as by ‘behaviour (for example an attempt to conceal himself or leave hurriedly)’.”^lv

Once again, the ICIBI report on “Illegal Working Operations” shows that Immigration Officers routinely break the rules. The report states succinctly:

“In the 184 files we sampled there was no record of anyone being ‘invited’ to answer ‘consensual questions’. The files showed that officers typically gathered everyone on the premises together, regardless of the information known or people’s actions.”^lvi

I.e., although most raids do appear to be initially targeted based on some form of (low grade) “intelligence”, once inside the building they typically become a general round-up.

However, we can suppose there are also some occasions where Immigration Enforcement do genuinely have employers’ “informed consent” to enter premises. This was clearly the case in the sting operations set up with Amey, ISS and Byron. More generally, establishing “informed consent” may be one possible objective of pre-raid “educational visits” – although, it seems clear, ICE teams are not too bothered if in the end it is lacking.

Again, the obvious way to investigate further the actual circumstances under which “consent” is claimed would be to survey employers and workers about their experiences both in raids and in pre-raid visits.

Immigration van blocked during resistance to raid on East Street Market, 21 June 2015

Conclusion: what are raids for?

“A senior Home Office manager told us that there was a general awareness within IE that enforcement visits encountered and removed only a small proportion of offenders and that IE would never have the resources to resolve the overall problem. They described it as ‘not a realistic working model’. Another senior manager commented: ‘It’s a business model that hasn’t moved on’.”^lvii

It most often starts with a tip-off, an “allegation”. Or, sometimes, with a referral from police or other agencies, or maybea speculative “cold call”. Astandard next step is then to approach employers and seek their collaboration. Typically, employers are asked to hand over lists and details of workers, in order to identify “illegals” who can then be targeted at work or at their home addresses. Sometimes, this collaboration may lead to “arrests by appointment”, as in the sting operations infamously launched with cleaning contractors Amey and ISS or recently with Byron’s Hamburgers.

Employers are not legally obliged to collaborate in any of these ways – though if they don’t, they may face higher financial penalties if illegal workers are found on their premises. ICE teams don’t need employers’ collaboration, and are seemingly happy to claim “informed consent” to enter, or consent to question unnamed individuals, with no justification whatsoever. But employer collaboration certainly makes their work much easier: it provides the “majority of reports about suspected illegal working”, and will increase arrest numbers both at workplaces and at workers’ homes.

And yet, even with maximum co-operation, Immigration Enforcement catches only a tiny proportion of people working illegally. As we saw, each year the Home Office carries out around 6,000 workplace raids, and makes around 5,000 arrests, half of which lead to deportations.

For obvious reasons, there are no reliable figures on numbers of illegal workers. The most widely quoted research on “irregular migrant” numbers in the UK remain those from a study carried out by the London School of Economics (LSE) in 2009, which gives an estimate of 618,000, in a range of 417,000 to 863,000.^lviii Not all of this number are working: the estimated figure includes underage children, the elderly, and other dependents, as well as a supposed higher proportion of unemployed adults than the norm. However, there are also other “illegal workers” who would not be counted in the LSE estimates: e.g., asylum seekers or people on student visas who are not “irregular” as residents but do not have the right to work.

Any number we use would be a simple guess. But even supposing “illegal workers” to be as few as 250,000, this would mean that only around 2% are arrested in a year, and only 1% deported.

Immigration Enforcement does not stop or deter those must work as a necessity, work to survive. Or work to save or send money to family and loved ones, in a world where even the sub-minimum wages paid to many “illegals” in the UK (the illegal “discount” referred to by Shahram Khosravi^lix) are generally far above wages in its former colonies or its warzones. But it does mean that anyone living in the world of migrants will know people who have been raided, who have been arrested, who have been detained and deported. So the reality and the fear of Immigration Enforcement seeps into life every day, to be always a shadow cast around the corner.

Immigration Enforcement does not stop people working illegally – but it makes them work fearfully. Immigration Enforcement helps maintain a segregated “two tier workforce” in which hundreds of thousands of workers have no access to the rights or safeguards available to other workers. The fear of Immigration Enforcement keeps workers in the lower tier scattered, unseen and unheard. The threat of Immigration Enforcement provides the ultimate human resources tool to stop workers becoming “difficult” and organising to demand improved rights or conditions – as seen in the cases of Amey or ISS.

This is not an issue just of a peripheral minority. Illegal working is at the heart of the economy. Illegal workers are not just in the restaurants or street markets that make easy and symbolic targets for ICE raids. They are the base level of the driving sectors of the UK economy: building workers, office cleaners, food pickers and packers, warehouse lifters, drivers and couriers, the menials in every service industry. The “discount” on illegal workers makes a fundamental contribution to every business model. Every blue chip company relies on illegal labour. Which is not, for them, illegal – so long as these workers are not directly employed. Only the base level contractors or sub-contractors who immediately hire cleaners or labourers are liable for “right to work checks” and penalties.^lx As we saw, one Immigration Enforcement tactic is to approach higher tier companies for information on contractors. Raids are, usually, kept at base level leaving the “respectable” companies unscathed.

To summarise, we can say that Immigration Enforcement does not work to end illegality, but it does work to maintain it in a segregated “lower tier”. The main way it does this is by spreading fear and division. Raids are exemplary punishments – propaganda tools.

Furthermore, the propaganda of Immigration Enforcement has a double focus. On the one hand, it targets illegals. On the other, it targets the legal population. Hence the press releases, high-profile operations, tabloid exclusives, camera crews invited on raids, and former initiatives such as the “racist van” billboards^lxi and “UK Border Force” TV show^lxii, etc. – the spectacle of enforcement. The illegals should fear Immigration Enforcement; the legals should fear the illegals, as they fear for their jobs, their homes, their “way of life”.

Home Office managers know that they will “never have the resources to resolve the overall problem”.Conscientious officials may well yearn to resolve the problem, whilst privately admitting that they best they can hope for is to achieve a few minor efficiency gains. But while the “problem” continues, business profitsfrom scared and discounted labour, and politicians and journalists make careers being tough on immigration.

i https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/jul/31/bugging-byron-activists-release-cockroaches-and-locusts-at-burger-chain

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This is an interview with Pete Simpson, an anarchist activist who was prosecuted and remanded in prison for violent disorder and assault of police officers after an occupation of HSBC bank, as part of the 2015 Mayday commemoration in Cardiff. Pete and fellow activist Josh Howe were found not guilty by a jury in Cardiff in January 2016.

After Pete and Josh’s arrest in May 2015 they were remanded for several days in Cardiff prison. The judge only agreed to release them on the condition that they move away from their homes in Cardiff, sign regularly at a police station, keep to a strict curfew and wear a tag. These conditions can only be described as political, aimed at restricting Pete and his co-defendant’s ability to be involved in political activism. Throughout the trial the police and prosecution tried to use the anarchist character of the protest against the defendants.

Bail conditions (i.e. conditions you are forced to comply with in order for the court to release you from prison or police custody) are only supposed to be used to prevent further ‘offending’ and stop people from absconding. However, the use of draconian bail conditions against Pete and Josh, and others like them, amount to a punishment by the courts against people who have not been convicted of any crime. Bail conditions are increasingly being used to prevent people from being involved social movements that threaten capitalism and the state, particularly people involved in direct action networks.

We interviewed Pete about his arrest and prosecution:

Corporate Watch: Can you tell us about the day you were arrested?

Pete Simpson: It was on 2 May 2015, a break-away demonstration was held after a TUC May Day march. That day is a traditional part of the broad left in Cardiff and has anarchist origins. It was damp that year but spirits were high. The main march was about 120 people, but people from a few groups were part of the breakaway that split off to occupy HSBC bank. Twenty or so people followed the banner into the bank and occupied for about half an hour.

CW: Why HSBC?

PS: The newspapers had recently reported that only one person had been investigated by HMRC for the bank’s tax avoidance. HSBC bank is also a symbol of capitalism, as with any bank. The protest was against capitalism and austerity.

CW: Can you described what happened inside?

All the customers had left the bank so there were only demonstrators and bank staff left and it became clear that the bank was shutting down because of the protest. The police weren’t attempting to get people to leave, and people started congregating in the foyer as there was no need to stay in the bank. We had no other plan but to head towards the exit – feeling that the protest was done and it was time to go. For a few moments we were standing with the banner, waiting for the right moment to leave. Josh wanted to rejoin the protest. He said that he came through a gap where there were three police stood by the door. The next thing I knew, people fell into the banner and a police officer was on top of him. Two of the cops that were there were grabbing people and I saw one cop throwing three punches in a row whilst holding a person by the shoulder, punching their kidneys. The same cop grabbed another guy and threw him to the ground without supporting his fall.
A police officer had Josh’s neck under his arm and Josh was saying that he couldn’t breathe. There was another cop also putting his weight on Josh.

I reached out towards Josh. The police officer turned round and elbowed me in the face, throwing me up against the wall and strangling me. Straight after that, the other officer came over and hit me with a ‘knee-strike’ in the part of the leg just above the knee. It’s apparently something they are trained to do to make someone fall to the ground, but they grabbed both of my shoulders and threw me to the ground anyway, head first. Then bent me in the middle somehow. My forehead hit the ground. My leg was suddenly really injured.

They attempted to arrest me. I didn’t think they should so I stood firm and got into a position where it was hard for them to put the handcuffs on. When the taser arrived I must have panicked a little bit as I said “alright, don’t taser me” and then I was handcuffed. At the court case a lot was made out of this, about me supposedly resisting.

I was aware that they were arresting me but I didn’t hear what for. I had a carpet burn on the side of my face and my leg was in a lot of pain. I couldn’t walk for 48 hours. They had to drag me towards the van. I was lifted up and put in the cage in the back of the van, on my side, with my hands handcuffed behind me, all in front of lots of people who had by now gathered outside the bank.

I was kept at Cardiff Bay Police Station until the Monday. I got interviewed at 1am for four charges: one count of violent disorder, three counts of assault PC and one charge of causing actual bodily harm of a Police Officer.

CW: What happened at the bail hearing?

PS: We gave our name and addresses. At the time I was in process of moving out of my address, which was an anarchist social centre, but had no other address to give so I gave it as my address as it was where I had been staying. That was referred to as a “squat” and they said that it wasn’t a legitimate address. There were a lot of people there in the public gallery. Two people had volunteered alternative bail addresses in Cardiff but they said they didn’t want us bailed to Cardiff. We both got remanded to prison at that hearing on 4th May.

CW: How did you feel when you were remanded?

PS: I was a little worried that it would take months before we were free again, but usually I am an optimist, and was hoping that we would get bail relatively quickly. What they had said about me wasn’t true, and I didn’t know what I could be guilty of but I knew that I certainly wasn’t guilty of violent disorder as I had just been stood in the bank foyer waiting to leave, and I felt that this would become apparent at some point. But I didn’t know how long it would take.

I spoke to a solicitor early on and they said they thought they could help me to get out by applying for bail. But I didn’t know when there would be a hearing. It’s very difficult to speak to anyone on the outside when you are in prison so I had very little way of finding out. I didn’t even have the phone numbers of the solicitors. The solicitors couldn’t call me and they didn’t manage to see me as this can be difficult with the way the prison works.

I think I managed to find coping mechanisms which made it more OK in prison than it would have been. I pretended it was a shit holiday and that it must be raining or something so that I had to stay inside. I pretended that I had a choice and this made it easier. Letters of support from people made it also much more bearable and felt like I wasn’t that far away. I thought that my family would be worried about me. The injustice of it was that it was me that was attacked and yet I was in prison. It reinforced how unequal and extreme the system can be when it comes to ordinary people. I was the victim, yet also somehow the guilty one. The police were seemingly above the law. They had the handcuffs and the power and there has still not been an investigation into their violent disorder on that day.

I needed to know someone’s name, date of birth, address and phone number and vice-versa for them to be allowed to see me in prison. People were spending hours on the phone trying to get through to make appointments to visit. Others emailed to try to book appointments. They were told no, sorry, it’s full. It was really bizarre that it could keep happening, but I had no visits. People kept writing to me to say that they wanted to visit.

CW: What do you think the police’s motivation for the violence was?

PS: I’ve never been able to work that out. Either they panicked or they felt that they weren’t in control of the situation. They weren’t used to protest situations, basically, and out of their depth when it came to people challenging their authority. They didn’t keep level heads at all. In court they had the audacity to say that they were ‘afraid for their lives’ when they clearly couldn’t have been, or they are more afraid of us than they let on.

CW: Was there any reason why they would have been afraid for their lives?

PS: I can’t see how. People were shouting but it was basically saying ‘stop attacking people’ rather than ‘we’re going to attack you’ or anything like that.

CW: What was the Crown Prosecution Service’s (CPS) motivation for asking the court to remand you?

It was probably a political decision. The picture that they painted was of something like the London/August Riots. They said that the police had lost control because of the level of aggression. But actually the police had lost control before there was any aggression, and perhaps they just wanted to cover this up with what happened to us throughout.

The prosecutor said ‘there is a thin blue line protecting us from mob violence in Britain’. They said that the customers were distressed but they couldn’t show that at all. They made so much up in the court case, but in the end the jury saw through it.

CW: How long did you spend in prison the first time around?

PS: 11 nights in Cardiff, a category B prison. Our solicitors made separate bail applications, so Josh was in there 2 days less.

CW: What were your bail conditions after you were granted bail?

PS: There were several conditions imposed on me. I was not to enter any HSBC globally. I was placed on an electronic tag and bailed to an address in Swansea under house curfew from 9pm to 7am. I was not to enter Cardiff, and not to speak to Josh. For some months I also had to sign almost daily at a police station.

Those conditions were never dropped until I was remanded again on the 16th December for allegedly breaking them. I went to court several times to try to vary these conditions but was unsuccessful.

Judge Crowther, who dealt with the bail hearings, said some things with a contempt in his mind for protest. He said things like if bail conditions weren’t imposed then I was at risk of protesting more.  He said at one point ‘why do these protesters target the banks and not lobby the government?’

CW:  Why were you remanded again in December?  

PS: When I tried to change my bail address to an address in London, the person providing my address allegedly implied I was already staying there. The judge took that to mean that I had breached my bail. And I was remanded in prison until the trial. That was for three further weeks.

The bail conditions felt like a punishment. In the mind of the judge I was guilty because the police had said it. Therefore I needed punishing. That’s what it felt like at the time. I wasn’t able to put a case forward or even the CCTV evidence. Not even give an account myself of what had happened. I was never asked anything directly until I gave evidence to say that I hadn’t breached my bail, but this wasn’t believed, even though there was no real evidence to say that I had. Everything else was asked through my solicitor. The CCTV would have exonerated me at any point but the courts didn’t watch it until the trial.

CW: When you got to court, the case unravelled. Is that right?

PS: Yes, as each police witness gave evidence it didn’t match with what they said in their statements, or the CCTV. There was huge amount of inconsistency.

CW: Did the prosecutor use political language to describe you?

PS: He began by presenting it as a ‘legitimate protest’ that had gone wrong and developed into disorder. That was the opener. He said that the protest was hijacked by an ‘anti-police agenda’, that protest is fine but we can’t have ‘mob violence in the streets of Britain’. He asked the jury rhetorically ‘is it likely that the police would lie about violence being used on them?’

CW: Did the prosecution or CPS make anything out of you being an anarchist?

PS: Yes. They had presented evidence that we were giving out South Wales Anarchists leaflets. They made many references to it. The black flags that people had brought to the protest were also part of the evidence. They held up the flags in court, six or seven bundled together. They also asked me what I personally understood by the term ‘Anarchism’.

CW: Was there a police presence at the court?

There were two cops sat outside the trial, I think from South Wales police.

CW: Is there anything else you want to say about your arrest and trial?

There were so many little things added together that made it difficult: the pressure of having to come home at 9pm everyday because of the bail conditions. My bail address was visited by the police several times and they had originally said ‘are you sure you want him here?’ and ‘will your family be safe, he was in prison for being violent’ to the person I was due to stay with.

I then had to move back into my family home in Doncaster, where I had moved out of 12 years before, and had to sign at the police station for at least a month in Doncaster, before the court lifted that requirement. I started volunteering in a community cafe used by rough sleepers and had to go and sign in the middle of the day and leave the cafe for some time to do so. Some days it felt like all I was able to do that day was go and sign. It was a 45 minute cycle from where I lived to get to the place where I had to sign.

Having a tag was an intrusion into my life. The tag company is Serco in London and EMS almost everywhere else. Workers from the tagging company turned up at night when my friend’s daughter had accidently switched the monitoring box off. It felt really unnecessary. The tag box had ended up in her daughter’s room due to a mix up of where I was supposed to be staying. She was seven at the time. She didn’t understand what the box was and why people had to come to the house. It added a lot of stress that wasn’t necessary. It was also a constant stress that if I was even a minute late it could lead to me being put back in prison. They didn’t really explain what limits I had, they just said, ‘don’t be late or it could be really serious’. I missed a train one evening and I had to explain that it wasn’t my fault that I was 17 minutes late, I just couldn’t cycle from the station in time. The same judge, Judge Crowther, later accused me of ‘missing the train on purpose’ and said that he was minded then to put me back on remand.

The bail conditions and tag made it hugely difficult for me. I effectively didn’t have a summer last year. I couldn’t go to any summer gatherings, activist camps or travel very far at all. I wanted to be supporting stuff all the time, all the stuff that I would normally be doing to try to change the system and fight for freedom. I was basically denied a social, and active, normal, life. I often thought about people going out in an evening and sometimes it was really difficult just to hear about it. I could never imagine just how controlling the state can be when people get to challenge its links to big business like we did that day.

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