A PUBLIC inquiry into alleged abuse of detainees at Brook House has been urged to investigate “systemic failures” across Britain’s detention system. 

The probe, set up last year, is investigating what happened at the immigration removal centre, run by G4S at the time, after a BBC Panorama documentary exposed alleged abuse by employees against detainees. 

Footage obtained by a former G4S employee in 2017 showed colleagues physically and verbally abusing detainees, with one member of staff strangling a man.

The delayed inquiry is still to finalise the scope of its investigation. 

Campaigners and detainees argue that the inquiry should investigate immigration policy more widely, including any connection between the Home Office’s policy of indefinite detention and mistreatment. 

But the Home Office and G4S are pushing for a narrower scope, limited to the mistreatment which occurred during the time the BBC documentary was filmed. 

In a preliminary hearing today called to determine the scope, inquiry chairwoman Kate Eves said: “I will also say again that it is my view that the principle focus of the inquiry will be the treatment and mistreatment of detainees once they had arrived at Brook House.”

Ms Eves added that recommendations made as a result must prevent mistreatment across Britain’s detention centres, so must not “only have relevance to the specific time and place of the mistreatment shown on Panorama.”

After the broadcast of the BBC documentary, two former detainees, identified as MA and BB, successfully argued that a full independent investigation into “systematic and institutional failures” was needed. 

Stephanie Harrison QC said that her clients wanted the inquiry to investigate the Home Office’s breaches of detention law, including unlawful detentions, “over many years,” and how this has constituted mistreatment. 

She highlighted the case of MA who was found to have been subjected to inhuman and degrading treatment as a result of being wrongfully detained in Brook House. 

As an adult at risk, MA should not have been detained under immigration laws, and as a result suffered severe harm to his mental health which breached his human rights, Ms Harrison said. 

“There is no circumstances in which what was happening in Brook House is unique to Brook House and it reflects the wider systemic issues that have been identified on a number of occasions by previous investigations,” she said. 

Home Office lawyer Julian Black claimed that looking at “decades of practice or wider political themes” would “inevitably undermine” a key aspect of the inquiry, which is to “make a timely diagnosis.”

But Ms Harrison argued that it would be “fundamentally wrong” for the inquiry to seek to “narrow its scope and exclude matters because it is concerned now that it will be prolonged.”

The inquiry plans to start taking witness statements in January and hear evidence from June 14, a year after originally planned. 

Ms Eves said that she would make a decision on the scope “in due course.”