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Immigration complaints

Before you contact us, you first need to take your complaint through the Border and Immigration Agency’s internal complaints process for immigration removal centres.

You should:

  • talk to staff in your immigration removal centre to see if they can sort out the matter informally
  • if you can’t get the matter resolved informally, you should then make a formal complaint to the centre's management.

If you are not happy with the response to your complaint and think that you have been dealt with unfairly, you can then complain to us.  You must contact us within three months of receiving a reply.

Ways to contact the Ombudsman


To make a complaint to us you can:

The Prisons and Probation Ombudsman
Ashley House
2 Monck Street
London
SW1P 2BQ

More information and advice

For more information on how we investigate your complaint:

Help for speakers of other languages


There is a translation service available for those who do not speak English as a first language.

The Complain With Confidence - Immigration leaflet is also available in the following languages:

Albanian
Arabic
Bengali
Chinese
Croatian
Farsi
French
Hindi
Pashto
Portuguese
Punjabi
Romanian
Russian
Serbian
Sinhalese
Somali
Spanish
Swahili
Tamil
Turkish
Urdu
 

Our responsibility for Immigration Removal Centre complaints


Our remit was extended from 1 October 2006 to include complaints about the treatment of detainees held in Immigration Removal Centres.

This came about as a result of two special investigation reports by the Ombudsman, following allegations of racism and mistreatment of detainees while at Oakington Reception Centre and the fire in 2002 at Yarl’s Wood Immigration Removal Centre.

In both reports the Ombudsman recommended that an independent element should be introduced at the highest level of the complaints system, to ensure the fair, open and humane treatment of detainees.  See the Special Investigations section for more on these investigations.

As with the prison and probation services, we are completely independent of the Border and Immigration Agency. We can investigate anything to do with the way a detainee has been treated in detention, including complaints about the escorts.

However, we cannot deal with any complaints about a detained person's immigration status, including any decision to remove a person from the UK. These are matters for the Border and Immigration Agency.