OAKINGTON IMMIGRATION RECEPTION CENTRE INDEPENDENT MONITORING
BOARD ANNUAL REPORT
OAKINGTON IMB REPORT 2005 – PDF version.
Most Annual Reports from Independent Monitoring Boards are made available by the Home Office via their IMB website. Despite being made available to the Cambridge Evening News in time to write an article on the 2nd of May 2006, and presumably submitted to the Independent Monitoring Boards Secretariat at the Home Office at approximately the same time, the IMB website had not published the Oakington IMB report 2005 online by 22 June 2006.
On writing to the IMB secretariat to query this omission I revieved the following reply, which I find incredible:
We’ve unfortunately experienced some technical difficulties with updating
our website in recent months and are therefore unable to put it on our
website at present; however we are hoping to do so in the near future.
A copy of the report was attached to the email, I made that report available here on my site in PDF and HTML format, so that it could be more easily accessible.
Febuary 2007 Update
As of 04/Jan/2007 the IMB at last got the report on to its website (The dates on which reports are placed online appear to be stated as “published date” on their site.) The report is available at: http://www.imb.gov.uk/annual-reports/185734/Oakington_IRC_2005.pdf. I therefore removed the report from my site as soon as I noticed this – on 13/Feb/2007.
As the IMB website includes the date on which reports are placed online I can see that a report was added to the site on 29/Jun/2006, after the point (22/Jun/2006) when I was told they were unable to add the Oakington report to their site. According to the IMB website no 2005 reports were placed online between 29/Jun/2006 and 04/Jan/2007. However 2006 reports were added to the site during this period. This suggests to me that there were no technical problems which were preventing the publication of IMB reports online in a timely fashion.
Detainees despair in unit ‘like prison’ – Cambridge Evening News Article following the publication of the IMB report on Oakington for 2005.