THE Home Office paid out more than £9 million in compensation last year for wrongfully detaining hundreds of people, according to its latest financial report. 

Figures for the year up to March 2021 reveal that there were 330 cases of wrongful detention triggering compensation payments of £9.3m, jumping from 272 cases the previous year resulting in payments of £6.9m. 

This is more than double the sum forked out in 2015 when 171 people won compensation claims worth a total of £4.1m.

The department’s six previous annual reports show a year-on-year increase in the number of people being wrongfully detained, with the exception of the 12 months up to March 2020 when there were 272 cases, a drop from the 312 recorded the previous year.

Campaigners said that the rising cases “demonstrate the Home Office’s unwillingness to learn lessons from its previous mistakes to avoid breaking the law in future.”

Bail for Immigration Detention (BiD) research and policy co-ordinator Rudy Schulkind said: “The Home Office claims to use detention as a last resort but these figures show that all too often it is breaking the law in its decisions to detain, at great expense to the taxpayer. 

“Yet the human cost of this system cannot be measured and those 330 people will never get back the time they were unlawfully locked up.”
 
Freedom from Torture chief executive Sonya Sceats said: “These figures are a powerful reminder of this government’s tendency to ‘detain first and ask questions later.’

“We know from our clinical services that torture survivors are among those wrongly detained and that it often takes years of therapy to repair the damage of such a retraumatising experience.”

But campaigners warned that the government’s new “anti-refugee Bill” will make the situation worse. 

The Nationality and Borders Bill, introduced to Parliament last week, will seek to detain and deport asylum-seekers who arrive in Britain via irregular routes. 

Detention Action director Bella Sankey said: “This money has sponsored extreme human misery, self-harm, suicide attempts and an institutional mental health crisis. 

“But it is a fraction of the human and financial waste that will result if Priti Patel's Nationality and Borders Bill passes, paving the way for a mass expansion of detention, including in offshore centres.”

A Home Office spokesperson said: “The Home Office is committed to learning lessons from any case where we concede or the courts deem unlawful.