THE government is showing increasing enthusiasm for one of its main privatisation contractors, the Mitie Group.  

It probably helps that it has a Tory Lord, Baroness Couttie, as a director. Baroness Couttie, also known as Philippa Roe, is currently a Tory whip in the Lords and was a long-running Tory leader of Westminster Council.

Mitie’s government business is growing and the company has won many contracts running Covid-19 testing services. It is also picking up criticism from inspectors.

Mitie runs the Kent Intake Unit (KIU) in Dover. It is a supposedly short-term facility to hold asylum-seekers who crossed the Channel in inflatable boats.

In December last year, Chief Inspector of Prisons, Charlie Taylor, a Conservative appointee, described Mitie’s facilities as “completely unsatisfactory,” a place where “detainees, including large numbers of unaccompanied children, continued to experience very poor treatment and conditions.” 

Taylor was reporting what his inspectors found: despite promised improvements KIU was “still not fit for purpose.” Overall, the picture was of a cheaply run, shabby, understaffed place. Many hundreds of asylum-seekers are processed through KIU, and it is a grim experience. 

Inspectors said: “The main KIU holding room could comfortably hold a small number of people for a few hours but was wholly unsuitable for the capacity of 56. 

“Exhausted detainees slept on the floor on thin mats in between rows of fixed seating. Some were there for several days, unable to go outside or rest properly.”

KIU is also dangerous as “some young and vulnerable children were also held for long periods in the holding rooms.”

Worse, “unrelated men, women, families and unaccompanied children were regularly held together in the same facility, which had at times resulted in significant safeguarding concerns.” 

For example, “during the inspection, a 49-year-old male ex-prisoner was held overnight in the KIU with several children, including a girl and boy assessed to be 17 and 14 years old respectively. The man had been assessed to have a medium risk of harm to the public.”

Mitie went through the motions of segregating young inmates. It had a “separate small area for children and families” at KIU, but it was far too small, so “unaccompanied children and families were routinely held in the holding room with unrelated adults, often overnight. While holding rooms was [sic] supervised by Mitie staff, at busy times it was impossible for them to see all detainees.”

Generally staff were “friendly” and tried to do their best, but there were too few, with too little training, in too small a space to do the job properly. 

When faced with a 14-year-old with severe mental health problems who was self-harming, the too few poorly trained staff responded badly. 

The inspectors described video of the event as “disturbing” as “an officer kicked the boy with some force, before dragging him to the ground with one arm around his neck.

“Throughout the incident there were too few staff to restrain him safely, and there was repeated use of unauthorised and potentially dangerous techniques with no paramedics on site to conduct a prompt check of any injuries.” 

There was “no supervision of the incident” and social services were not informed. Even though the boy complained about the officers, he was not interviewed after the event.  

The inspectors say that “one of the staff involved no longer worked for Mitie and the other two remained suspended” — but really the big question is about having enough, properly trained staff, not focusing entirely on the individuals in the incident.

Mitie seemed to want to give the appearances of a well-run centre, without the resources. During induction “nothing was said about access to legal advice” to inmates, but legal advice was formally on the “induction checklist.” 

Similarly there was one single shower, but it had “barely been used” because Mitie was not “encouraging” about using it.  

There was also a “complaints box,” except it was “unmarked” and detainees were not told how to use it. Unsurprisingly no complaints had been received.

Official inspectors found that Mitie is doing a bad job, an understaffed, poorly trained job in inadequate facilities, on a high-profile contract. Will this hurt the firm? I doubt it.

The Home Office directly runs the Tug Haven reception centre in Dover in parallel to Mitie’s KIU. 

Tug Haven also “processes” asylum-seekers who crossed the Channel in boats. Inspectors found Tug Haven is as grim and unfit as Mitie’s KIU, so arguably Mitie is doing just what the Home Office wants, by running a bad service for newly arrived asylum-seekers.

Worryingly, one of Mitie’s newest contracts with the government is to run the Derwentside Immigration Removal Centre for Women. It will detain around 80 women the Home Office is trying to deport. Such detainees are often held for long, indeterminate “sentences” while their potential removal drags through the courts.

Derwentside is a new detention centre, based on the site of the old Medomsley/Hassockfield youth jail in County Durham. Under its previous two names, the prison site was notorious for the abuse of children, leading to prosecutions of the jailers.

Mitie is promising Derwentside “will maintain the standards and high expectations for the detention of women,” that it will detain women with “dignity, decency, and respect” in a “safe and healthy environment.” 

But the generally grim conditions in immigration removal centres — like Yarl’s Wood, which Derwentside will replace — added to the recently exposed poor conditions inside Mitie’s KIU do not bode well.

Last June Mitie was also given the contract to run the Dungavel Immigration Removal Centre in Scotland. Mitie took over the contract from prisons privatiser the Geo Group, in a 10-year, £95.8 million contract. 

Signing a contract for a decade shows the government is not really interested in much “competition” for this work — it just wants to farm it out, long-term, to a narrow group of favoured contractors.