A consultation document released by the Home Office shows that officers could be permitted to handcuff children as a last resort during removals as part of a migration shake-up
Campaigners have voiced their fury after it emerged the Home Office is considering allowing children be handcuffed during deportations.
A consultation document published as part of plans to remove families with no legal right to be in the UK says the measure is being weighed up if youngsters do not comply. It comes after Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood announced plans to offer families up to £10,000 a person – capped at £40,000 per family – to voluntarily leave.
If they say no, they would face forcible removal. Louise Calvey, executive director of Asylum Matters, told The Mirror: “No child should be in handcuffs for being forced to flee and being denied safe means to do so. It’s utterly traumatising, dehumanising and terrifying and no marker of any form of civilised country.
“The 2010 Coalition Government committed to ending the practice of child detention, this government is seeking to expand and embed it.”
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The consultation document, seen by The Mirror, said that nearly a quarter of failed enforced returns are due to disruption involving families. In the majority of cases, it states, this involves a child. Each enforced removal of a family, it says, costs an average of £96,000.
The document states: “Consequently, we will strengthen our approach to enforced family returns, ensuring fewer such returns fail by enabling officers to, as a last resort, use physical interventions to safely and effectively address non-compliance involving a child.”
It said officers would be expected to use the minimum level of physical contact required. Pain-inducing techniques and approaches that would affect a person’s breathing would be banned.
The proposal said officers would be allowed to use physical force – including handcuffs in the most serious cases – against children. It says: “This will apply to cases in which a child is directly involved, such as a child wilfully and aggressively refusing to board a plane or not leaving a vehicle at a parent’s request, as well as cases in which a child is indirectly involved, such as a parent refusing to release a child’s hand.”
Griff Ferris, a from the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants, told The Guardian: “The levels of violence and dehumanisation that this government will go to to persecute migrants is frightening.
“We can never let this be normalised. Stand up for people in your local communities, join your local anti-raids group and boycott the corporations profiting from border regimes, deportations and detention.”
Ms Mahmood announced a pilot has been launched which will see families offered up to £10,000 a person to leave if they have no right to be in the UK. The Home Office estimates it costs £158,000 to accommodate a family of three for a year in a hotel, and said its plans would save up to £20million a year.
A Home Office spokeswoman said: “A forced return will always be a last resort. But we must enforce our rules, and will return those with no right to be in this country, as long as their home country is safe to return to.
“We are now consulting on how to do so in a humane and effective way. Similar legal arrangements around children already exist across the public sector.”
In a speech on Thursday, Ms Mahmood said that the Government’s approach would be humane. She said: “We are now consulting on precisely how the removal of families with children must take place, in a way that is humane and effective.
“For too long, families who have failed their claims have known that we were not enforcing our rules, which created a perverse incentive to make a channel crossing with children in a small boat.
“It is now on the parents in these families, who can safely return to the home they came from, to do the right thing, by accepting an incentive payment, rather than face an enforced return.”
The move was put forward among a raft of immigration and asylum reforms which sparked an outcry. Measures include making refugee status temporary and doubling the wait to qualify for indefinite leave to remain (ILR).
Labour MP Imran Hussain told The Mirror: “Cruelty towards immigrants and refugees is not Labour values. A growing hostile environment, fuelled by national figures on the right, risks dragging us away from the very principles that should define our party.”
And backbencher Nadia Whittome added: “These are cruel policies that will harm refugees and migrants. Instead of positively reforming the Tories’ failed, draconian asylum and immigration system, we are doubling-down along the same path in a futile attempt to attract Reform voters.
“While some of these proposals can be implemented via secondary legislation, it is likely that MPs will get to vote on others.
“The Home Secretary has set herself on a collision course with many MPs in our party who firmly disagree with the government’s direction of travel on these issues.”