What this is
A national thematic report by the Independent Monitoring Boards, published on 26 November 2025, titled By Force of Habit: How the use of force in immigration detention has lost sight of necessity and dignity. It draws on monitoring across immigration removal centres and short-term holding facilities during 2024 and 2025, and it covers any physical intervention used on a detained person, handcuffs included.
It sets out the frame it measures practice against. Immigration detention is a civil, administrative measure rather than a criminal sanction, and force is lawful only if necessary, reasonable, proportionate and justifiable, used only when all other reasonable methods have been exhausted.
What it records
The boards found those principles routinely sidelined for operational convenience.
One board reported that nearly 100 per cent of the detained people it saw taken to hospital appointments during 2024 and early 2025 were handcuffed. In one case a 70-year-old man, small and frail, with no history of disruption in detention or on previous hospital escorts, was handcuffed for a hospital visit. The paperwork noted no evidence of risk, and the duty director approved the handcuffs citing risk on the escort.
Practice varied by contractor and port. At Luton Airport people were routinely handcuffed for removal flights because the airport authorities preferred it. At Birmingham, handcuffs were used for vehicles but generally not for flights. At Sheffield Vulcan House a blanket handcuffing policy was introduced rather than fixing an unsafe loading bay; the Home Office said the practice had ceased, and the board was still observing routine handcuffing there in September 2025.
It also finds de-escalation opportunities missed, no trauma-informed approach, staff culture of serious concern, and weak recording and review of force.
How to read it
This is monitoring, not adjudication. It decides nothing about the lawfulness of any single use of force.
“Nearly 100 per cent” is one board’s reading of its own escort records over a period. It is not a national rate, and no denominator for force incidents across the estate is published, so no rate should be calculated from it.
The cultural finding is the one to keep. Individual risk assessment had become a formality: boards were assured assessments were done and signed off by the Home Office, and found little critical oversight. Where a signed form is the only test applied, the exception quietly becomes the rule, and “risk on escort” will be written for a man whose paperwork records no risk at all.
Where it stops
Immigration removal centres and short-term holding facilities, monitored during 2024 and 2025. It is not a count of force used nationally, it does not cover police custody or hospital wards, and it makes no finding about any individual officer.
Two years after the Brook House Inquiry reported, the Home Office was expected to issue guidance on the use of force; the boards concluded that guidance alone would not be enough without meaningful cultural change. The Home Office then said handcuff usage would be reviewed in full, alongside an Escorting Operations review of whether policy was applied consistently. The boards were awaiting the outcome, and it had not been published when this page was written.
Sources
- Independent Monitoring Boards, By force of habit: How the use of force in immigration detention has lost sight of necessity and dignity, 26 November 2025
- The Guardian, “Excessive restraint in immigration detention centres ‘deeply concerning’, report finds”, 26 November 2025
If your service escorts people who are unwell, handcuffed, or both, our restraint reduction training covers the risk assessment that has to mean something.
Reviewed 20 October 2026.