BRITAIN should introduce a 28-day limit on immigration detention to mitigate the “brutality” faced by those indefinitely detained whose lives are being “destroyed,” campaigners said yesterday.

Martha Spurrier, director of civil rights group Liberty, told the BBC Sunday Politics that Britain was the only country in Europe not to place a time limit on immigration detention and that a fixed limit was “the humane and civilised thing to do.”

She added that the “bogeyman idea of a flood of people who are going to go underground” if they are not indefinitely detained “just is not a reality.”

Last week, HM Inspectorate of Prisons released a damning report on Britain’s largest immigration removal centre, the Harmondsworth facility next to Heathrow Airport, where one man had been locked up for four-and-a-half years.

Inspectors said that many areas in Hardmondsworth were dirty, some were mouse-infested and bedbugs were endemic.

Shadow home secretary Diane Abbott told the same programme that the “shameful conditions” revealed in the Harmondsworth report showed that Britain had a “broken immigration detention system.”

Ms Spurrier urged the government to impose a 28-day limit on detention, warning that “the human cost of detention is so great and the fact that we have no time limit means that the Home Office allow these cases to drag and drag and people’s lives are destroyed.”

She added: “Detaining people, infringing their rights to liberty, destroying their mental and physical health in the process, that is not necessary, it is not effective and it is not just.”