Home Office told to ‘get a grip’ over issues at Manston migrant centre after report reveals ‘failings’
The Home Office has been told to “get a grip” over the issues at the Manston migrant processing centre – as a new report reveals detainees were not allowed to close toilet doors fully and had to sleep on the floor.
Some migrants have not been allowed access to mobile phones to inform their families if they were safe, while other “exhausted detainees” have waited more than 30 hours to be processed, the report from HM Inspectorate of Prisons found.
Manston is a non-residential facility that holds detainees for a maximum of 24 hours while their initial immigration paperwork is processed.
The site is only designed to hold 1,000 people but there are currently around 4,000 migrants there – more than any UK prison population.
While there is access to food, water, showers and toilets, there are no beds and there is no access to fresh air or exercise.
Home Secretary Suella Braverman has faced criticism for the facility’s overcrowding and has been accused of ignoring legal advice that said migrants should be sent to hotels from Manston.
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But on Monday she said she “never ignored legal advice” and since she was appointed by Liz Truss in early September has “worked hard to find accommodation to relieve pressure at Manston”.
However, she said illegal migration is “out of control” citing an “invasion on our south coast”.
She also said the sheer numbers arriving via the Channel is making it impossible to provide accommodation for them.
Following the report’s publication, Chief Inspector of Prisons Charlie Taylor has urged the government department and its contractors to speed up the processing of migrants and make “suitable provisions” so people can be moved off the site near Ramsgate in Kent as quickly as possible.
The inspection, which was carried out at the facility in July, warns that serious challenges remained for migrants crossing the Channel and arriving in Kent.
A new report warns that serious challenges remain for migrants crossing the Channel
“The Home Office and contractors need to get a grip, they need to speed up the processing of migrants, they need to make suitable provisions so people can be moved off-site as quickly as possible and housed in humane and decent conditions,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.
Migrants are taken to sites at Western Jet Foil in Dover and Lydd Airport in Romney Marsh for health checks when they first arrive in Kent after crossing the Channel from Calais.
The Lydd Airport site was unoccupied when the inspection took place.
It reported “failings” in procedures at Manston that “undermine the resilience of the centre for dealing with increasing volumes of detainees”.
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However, it found the accommodation was suitable for short-term detention and noted efforts by staff to “create a calm and even welcoming atmosphere”.
While Manston was found to have a “good amount” of accommodation available, at the time of the inspection, “much of it was out of use because there were not enough staff”.
Other “signs of strain” included “exhausted detainees” sleeping on the floor, including some who had been waiting more than 30 hours to be processed.
It comes as Conservative backbencher Sir Roger Gale told Sky News overcrowding at the facility – where outbreaks of MRSA and diphtheria have been reported – is “wholly unacceptable”.
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‘Breach of humane conditions’ at Manston
The prisons watchdog also found:
• Victims of trafficking and vulnerable detainees such as those with disabilities were “not always assessed or recorded appropriately”, with some not identified as “adults at risk”
• Some detainees were banned from using mobile phones to let their families know they were safe and, in parts of the site, others were “inexplicably” not allowed to close toilet doors fully
• Translation services were not always used so that detainees understood the situation.
A shower area is seen inside an immigration processing centre in Manston
Mr Taylor said the inspection, which included two other migrant processing centres on the south coast, unveiled a number of “risks” about the facilities.
He added that recent information from “a number of credible sources”, including other watchdogs, suggested the current situation had “significantly deteriorated”.
In a bid to combat the problems, he plans a “swift return” to Manston for another inspection when he would “expect to see substantial improvements”.
“In the meantime, the Home Office and its contractors need to get a grip and urgently act on the findings of this report to make sure all detainees are held in safe, decent and humane conditions,” he said.
The Home Office has been contacted for comment.
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Ramesh lives in fear every day. A police siren is enough to alarm him.
He’s one of up to 400,000 visa overstayers in the UK, one lawyer we spoke to believes.
It’s only an estimate because the Home Office has stopped collecting figures – which were unreliable in the first place.
Britain is being laughed at, one man told us, “because they know it’s a soft country”.
‘Ramesh’ came to the UK from India
We meet Ramesh (not his real name) at a Gurdwara, a Sikh place of worship, where he goes for food and support.
He insists he can’t return to India where he claims he was involved in political activism.
Ramesh says he came to the UK on a student visa in 2023, but it was cancelled when he failed to continue his studies after being involved in a serious accident.
He tells us he is doing cash-in-hand work for people who he knows through the community where he is living and is currently working on a house extension where he gets paid as little as £50 for nine hours labouring.
“It’s very difficult for me to live in the UK without my Indian or Pakistani community – also because there are a lot of Pakistani people who give me work in their houses for cleaning and for household things,” he adds.
‘What will become of people like us?’
Anike has lived in limbo for 12 years.
Now living in Greater Manchester, she came to the UK from Nigeria when her sister Esther was diagnosed with a brain tumour – she had a multi-entry visa but was supposed to leave after three months.
Esther had serious complications from brain surgery and says she is reliant on her sister for care.
Immigration officials are in touch with her because she has to digitally sign in every month.
Anike has had seven failed applications for leave to remain on compassionate grounds refused but is now desperate to have her status settled – afraid of the shifting public mood over migration.
“Everybody is thinking ‘what will become of people like us?'” she adds.
‘It’s a shambles’
The government can’t say with any degree of accuracy how many visa overstayers there are in Britain – no data has been collated for five-and-a-half years.
But piecing together multiple accounts from community leaders and lawyers the picture we’ve built is stark.
Immigration lawyer Harjap Singh Bhangal told us he believed there could be several hundred thousand visa overstayers currently in Britain.
He says: “At this time, there’s definitely in excess of about 200,000 people overstaying in the UK. It might even be closer to 300,000, it could even be 400,000.”
Asked what evidence he has for this he replies: “Every day I see at least one overstayer, any immigration lawyers like me see overstayers and that is the bulk of the work for immigration lawyers.
“The Home Office doesn’t have any accurate data because we don’t have exit controls. It’s a shambles. It’s an institution where every wall in the building is cracked.”
The number of those who are overstaying visas and working cash in hand is also virtually impossible to measure.
‘They know Britain is a soft country’
“They’re laughing at us because they know Britain is a soft country, where you won’t be picked up easily,” says the local man we’ve arranged to meet as part of our investigation.
We’re in Kingsbury in northwest London – an area which people say has been transformed over the past five years as post-Brexit visa opportunities opened up for people coming from South Asia.
‘Mini-Mumbai’
The man we’re talking to lives in the community and helps with events here. He doesn’t want to be identified but raises serious questions about visa abuse.
“Since the last five years, a huge amount of people have come in this country on this visiting visa, and they come with one thing in mind – to overstay and work in cash,” he says.
“This area is easy to live in because they know they can survive. It looks like as if you are walking through mini-Mumbai.”
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‘The system is more than broken’
‘It’s taxpayers who are paying’
And he claims economic migrants are regularly arriving – who’ve paid strangers to pretend they’re a friend or relative in order to obtain a visitor visa to get to Britain.
He says: “I’ve come across so many people who have come this way into this country. It’s widespread. When I talk to these people, they literally tell me, ‘Oh, someone is coming tomorrow, day after tomorrow, someone is coming’.
“Because they’re hidden they may not be claiming benefits, but they can access emergency healthcare and their children can go to school.
“And who is paying for it? It’s the taxpayers who are paying for all this,” says the man we’ve met in north London.
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A Home Office spokesperson said: “We will not tolerate any abuse of our immigration system and anyone found to be breaking the rules will be liable to have enforcement action taken against them.
“In the first year of this government, we have returned 35,000 people with no right to be here – a 13% rise compared to the previous year.
“Arrests and raids for illegal working have soared to their highest levels since records began, up 63% and 51%.”
The government can’t say with accuracy how many visa overstayers there are in Britain – no data has been collated for five-and-a-half years.
Sky News has spoken to immigration lawyers about the numbers, and one believes there could be as many as 400,000 living across the country.
Harjap Singh Bhangal described the situation as a “shambles”.
“The Home Office doesn’t have any accurate data because we don’t have exit controls. It’s a shambles. It’s an institution where every wall in the building is cracked,” he told Sky’s Lisa Holland.
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The visa overstayers in ‘soft’ Britain
Why doesn’t the government know?
The Home Office used to gather data on visa overstayers by effectively checking a list of passport numbers associated with visas against a list of passport numbers of people leaving the UK, taken from airlines and other international travel providers.
If there was a passport number match in the arrivals and departures part of their database, that person was recorded to have left when they should have. If there wasn’t, they were a potential overstayer.
They stopped producing the figures because a combination of Brexit and COVID added complications that made the Home Office conclude they wouldn’t be able to get to a reliable number using the same method.
It’s now four and a half years since EU citizens had freedom of movement to the UK revoked, and more than three and a half years since pandemic-era travel restrictions ended.
And yet we are still waiting to see what a new method might look like.
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The old method wasn’t perfect. If someone changed their passport while in the UK, for example, or if the airline or individual entered the number wrong when they were leaving, there wouldn’t be a match.
The Home Office regarded the statistics as likely overestimating the true number of overstayers, and the Office for National Statistics designated the figures as “experimental” rather than “official” statistics, meaning the conclusions should be treated with caution. But they were a reasonable best guess.
With all that in mind, between April 2016 and March 2020 upwards of 250,000 people were flagged as potential overstayers, equivalent to 63,000 per year.
That’s more than the 190,000 people who are recorded to have arrived in the UK on small boats since 2018.
It represents 3.5% of the seven million visas that expired over that period, so at least 96.5% of people left when they should.
Other Home Office data reveals that more than 13 million visas were issued between 2020 and the end of June 2025, including a record 3.4 million in 2023.
But what we don’t know is how many have expired, which means it’s difficult for us to even guess how many people might have overstayed.
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