Brook House Immigration Removal Centre

The facility was built on a similar design to Colnbrook Immigration Removal Centre at Heathrow and was initially intended to provide short-term accommodation for male detainees.

[6] On May 21, 2020, Serco took over operations at the centre from incumbent contractor G4S after a successful tendering process In 2010 the Chief Inspector of Prisons Dame Anne Owers declared the facility to be "fundamentally unsafe" due to bullying, violence, and drug misuse.

In May 2018 the High Court of Justice gave the detainee, and another individual who had been held at the facility, permission to seek an independent public inquiry into claims of systemic abuse by G4S.

[12] In June 2019, after a high court judge ruled that a public inquiry would indeed take place, Tulley told The Guardian newspaper: “In the two and half years I spent inside Brook House … I bore witness to the repeated mistreatment of some of the most vulnerable people in our society.

So it’s encouraging that with a full public inquiry likely to take place, those responsible for the abuse may be held accountable, and detainees in this country may face a safer, stronger system in the future.”[13] In May 2018, the Independent Monitoring Board's annual report identified a "spike" in violence, both detainee-on-detainee and detainee-on-staff, an attempted escape, and protests against removals during the preceding year, and noted that staff had used force against detainees more than 300 times, twice as much as the previous year.

[17][18] In June 2019 Mrs Justice May ruled that the two detainees were entitled to publicly funded lawyers, saying: "When dignity and humanity has been stripped, one purpose of an effective investigation must be to restore what has been taken away through identifying and confronting those responsible, so far as it is possible.

[21] G4S senior executive Peter Neden, speaking to a cross-party government select committee chaired by Yvette Cooper after the revelations, said the profits reported by the BBC did not take account of costs, but refused to disclose Brook House's finances, citing commercial interests.

[23] On 18 October Rebecca Hilsenrath, chief executive of the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), wrote to Home Secretary Amber Rudd, calling for a prompt and independent inquiry into the abuse allegations.

In the letter, Hilsanreth advised Rudd that the alleged abuse potentially breached Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights (prohibiting torture and "inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment"): in addition, Hilsenreth suggested that the alleged abuse might highlight a wider problem extending to other immigration removal centres in the UK, raising concerns about the government's decision to outsource the management of such facilities.

Responding to the report, Yvette Cooper stated "For G4S to be making up to 20% gross profits on the Brook House contract at the same time as such awful abuse by staff against detainees was taking place is extremely troubling.