MINISTERS have been warned against plans to build Greek-style refugee reception centres in Britain after a shocking report laid bare the human cost of the policy. 

A year after Greece’s first “closed-controlled access centre” opened in Samos, Doctors without Borders (MSF) warned that every asylum-seeker held there is “suffering from psychological distress.” 

The Zervou centre, which began housing refugees in September last year, had received a visit from former home secretary Priti Patel the previous July, raising fears that she planned to create similar structures in this country. 

The facility was built to replace an overcrowded open camp on the Aegean island.

Asylum-seekers are held there while their claims are processed and can only leave with an identity document, which can take over 25 days to process, meaning that new arrivals are effectively detained there, MSF said. 

Doctors described the site as an “improvement in some ways” on the previous camp, but they added that the centre still “fails to receive people in humane and dignified conditions.”

The “highly securitised” nature of the camp, surrounded by two layers of barbed-wire fences, exacerbates asylum-seekers’ mental health conditions, MSF said in its report published on Wednesday. 

MSF medical co-ordinator in Greece Elise Loyens said that people suffered from body pains, dissociation, depression and sleep disorders.

“People feel humiliated living under these conditions,” she said, while one MSF patient described being held in the centre as “mental punishment.”

Refugees are also denied proper access to healthcare and legal support to help with their asylum claims, the report noted. 

The NGO’s experience of working in the centre “underlines the danger of closed camps” more widely, MSF head of mission Nicholas Papachrysostomou added. 

In light of the findings, MSF has warned Home Secretary Suella Braverman to steer clear of seeking to replicate such “prison-like” and “inhumane” structures in Britain. 

MSF advocacy officer Sophie McCann said: “The UK government has long said that it wants to replicate the Greek government’s migration policies in this country and we are now seeing the devastating, even lethal, effects of that approach taking shape in Britain.

“The UK government must immediately abandon their deterrence policies and instead open up safe routes for people inside and outside of Europe to reach the UK.”

The warning comes amid the ongoing scandal at the Manston migrant processing centre in Kent, which has been used to detain thousands of new arrivals in the past few months. 

Provisions to build large-scale “reception centres” with “basic and simple” accommodation for asylum-seekers included in the Nationality and Borders Act earlier this year. 

The camps are not the only Greek policy that Tory ministers have drawn inspiration from. 

In July, Armed Forces Minister James Heappey admitted that Ms Patel and former prime minister Boris Johnson had been encouraged to introduce pushbacks in the English Channel by Greece’s “successful” use of the tactic, despite it being linked to numerous deaths. 

Britain has since abandoned the idea.