Systemic Failings or “Isolated Incidents”? A Discourse Analysis of Corporate Blame Avoidance for the Mistreatment of Immigration Detainees

This Study

Our study analyses the evidence submitted on behalf of G4S Care and Justice Services, a UK arm of the global security company G4S, to the public inquiry into the mistreatment of detainees in the Brook House Immigration Removal Centre (‘the Brook House Inquiry’). We explore the relationship between the formal inquiry setting and discourses of blame avoidance used by the company in its written and oral testimony.

We begin this article by setting out the background to the Brook House Inquiry. We then situate our research within the existing scholarship on blame avoidance in official discourse and describe our methodological approach. Drawing from the insights of critical discourse analysis (CDA), we find that G4S employs a combination of referential and argumentation strategies aimed at diverting blame away from corporate responsibility. The company contends that legal liability lies outside the Inquiry’s remit, urging a focus on moral rather than criminal responsibility. This strategic manoeuvring is designed to shield G4S from criminal or civil sanctions, reinforcing the narrative that, while blameworthy in the abstract, the company’s actions should not be subject to concrete legal or reputational consequences.

Blame, Denial and Accountability in Public Inquiries

To answer such questions, our study is situated within existing scholarly debates belonging to three separate spheres of inquiry ⁵ – the sensemaking perspective, blame avoidance and criminological state analysis.

First, the sensemaking perspective consists of a large and rapidly expanding body of literature that has been described as ‘an extraordinarily influential perspective with a substantial following among management and organization scholars’ (Brown et al., 2015, p. 265). While the perspective is associated with research that is ‘interpretive, social constructionist, processual and phenomenological’ (ibid.), it also stands in connection with the turn to study language and identity in organisational text and interaction (Weick, 1995). Sensemaking has been developed as a lens with which to examine post-crisis inquiry reports as ‘authoritative’ (Brown, 2004) and as part of a wider depoliticisation of crisis events (Brown, 2000). Public inquiries are regarded as crucial organisational responses to crises, aimed at constructing accounts of what happened, why it happened and who was responsible. The study of public inquiry sensemaking can therefore reveal how institutions develop a shared sense of what went wrong and how they learn lessons (Gephart, 2007; Mueller et al., 2023; Shrivastava, 1987). Seen as events in which ‘micro-level sensemaking practices produce the macro social order’ (Gephart et al., 1990, pp. 44–5), they reveal much about how shared sense is made and given after a crisis (Gephart, 1993).

Second, the blame avoidance perspective has been of noteworthy importance in political science and public policy research, ever since Kent Weaver (1986) argued in a seminal article that public officeholders are motivated by avoiding blame (as opposed to claiming credit) as voters were particularly sensitive to negative performance. Government communications in particular have been analysed as using a range of blame avoidance behaviours and strategies (Hinterleitner, 2017, 2020; Hood, 2011), in an effort to present themselves in a positive light and to downplay responsibility for failures. Illustrative of this approach to the study of public inquiries is the work by Sulitzeanu-Kenan (2006, 2010, 2020), who describes blame avoidance as a central plank of crisis inquiries. Others have married the perspective with discourse analytical approaches to explain the linguistic strategies used in blame attribution and avoidance during public inquiries or other argumentation events (Hansson, 2015, 2018; Murphy, 2019). To take one prominent example where the politics of blame is visible, the coronavirus crisis and the post-crisis inquiries have already been subsumed by a ‘tsunami of complex and aggressive blame games’ (Flinders, 2021, p. 496).

A third perspective is provided by criminological state analysis. We use this as an umbrella term for interactionist, Foucauldian and Marxist theoretical approaches to state crimes and policy failures, which understand state-led accountability mechanisms as quasi-judicial instruments to reassert the legitimacy of government bodies and public authorities. Considering the kind of scandals that engulf public institutions, Greer and McLaughlin assert that the state’s traditional strategies of denial are giving way to new forms of regulation, frequently ‘in the form of the re-vamped public inquiry’ (Greer & McLaughlin, 2017). A classic example of criminological interrogations of state discourse is the study by Frank Burton and Pat Carlen (2013 [1979]) into the relationship between government ideology and official publications and there have been more recent extensions of this avenue of inquiry (Gilligan & Pratt, 2013 [2004]). Other prominent work is that by Stanley Cohen (2001) into the systematic denial of human rights abuses or by Phil Scraton on the inquiries and inquests into the Hillsborough disaster (2013, 2016). The relationships between the state and the private sector have also been moved into focus by critical examinations of the techniques used by multinational companies and their structural architecture that enable the evasion of corporate accountability (Whyte, 2016, 2020).

Avoiding Corporate Blame

Discursive blame avoidance in the Brook House Inquiry was underpinned by nomination and predication strategies, both in the oral testimony given by G4S managers and in the written submissions prepared by the company’s lawyers. For those strategies to function, G4S witnesses ensured frequent use of lexical repetition. In the most obvious illustration of repetition, the company’s language use downplays its responsibility for the mistreatment in Brook House, while scapegoating individual employees. In his oral evidence, for example, G4S manager Gordon Brockington employs the phrase ‘isolated incidents’, or variations thereof, eleven times. Asked to clarify the company’s position by the lead counsel to the Inquiry, Brockington places this argument at the centre of his testimony. The following extract from the hearing (Brook House Inquiry 2022a, pp. 48–49) revolves directly around the extent to which the company’s practices and systems were blameworthy:

Q: So does G4S accept, or not accept, that these practices were ingrained and systemic?

By employing this repetition of ‘isolated’, Brockington is drawn into sometimes comical fallacies; consider for example his unnecessary nominalisation of the adjective to become ‘isolatedness’. In another telling extract from his testimony, Brockington is asked about the evidence provided to the Inquiry by Mary Bosworth, an academic expert (Brook House Inquiry, 2022a, p. 25). The questioner sums up Bosworth’s submissions to provide a counter to the assertion that the secretly filmed abuse were isolated events.

Q: So she is one, as I say, of three experts who has told us that, really, just the whole environment, the whole effect and impact, not only on the detainees but staff, caused or attributed to what we are all here for now. Are you prepared to accept that?

Research into the language of denial and neutralisation frequently highlights that powerful actors do not necessarily issue literal denials, but rather employ strategies of blame minimisation. We found such discursive strategies of blame avoidance in the G4S closing statement, where the company accepts that the abuse has taken place but interprets it as not central to the culture in the detention centre at the time. Central to the text’s aim is the avoidance of criminal sanction and specifically to prevent the Brook House Inquiry from finding that the mistreatment of detainees breached the threshold of an Article 3 violation.

Here, the acknowledgement of specific incidents of mistreatment precedes discursive blame avoidance with the company’s reiteration that it is ‘exceptionally sorry’ for the conduct of its Brook House staff. In the closing statement (Brook House Inquiry, 2022b, p. 2), the G4S lawyers write:

G4S accept that a number of its staff at Brook House engaged in mistreatment of detainees. Further, a number of staff witnessed such mistreatment but did not report it. Both the mistreatment of the detainees and the failure, by other staff who were present, to intervene to stop it or to report it was wholly inappropriate, and abhorrent to G4S; such misconduct [footnote] was fundamentally inconsistent with G4S’s values and what was expected of their employees.

The first thing to note is that the company’s ‘acceptance’ of what happened does not lead to an acceptance of blame at a corporate or managerial level. The excerpt from the statement only accepts failures by ‘a number of its staff’. In this way, emphasis is shifted away from corporate responsibility and towards a disciplinary matter of employee misbehaviour. The statement develops this line of argumentation into a clear objection against any discourse of culpability that recognises systemic failings. Failings are ascribed to the behaviour of individuals within the organisation who have acted contrary to what the organisation expected of them.

To go a little further, we may juxtapose the use of nouns and verbs as devices for the discursive representation of the physical and psychological abuse of detained persons in Brook House. In the excerpt above, and across the corporate closing statement, the G4S lawyers use a range of nominations – ‘mistreatment, failure, misconduct’ – to describe the Inquiry’s subject matter. Critical discourse analysts frequently point to nomination as a linguistic strategy that serves to deflect from individual agency. Rather than accountable actions (e.g. staff have mistreated detainees) nomination conveys less information about who is to blame. By way of contrast, nomination is accompanied by the linguistic representation of harmful actions through verbs (‘engage, witness, intervene, stop, report’). These all refer to the harmful or negligent behaviour of individual staff (as opposed to that of the corporation or its senior managers) who are accused of digressing from the company’s stated values and are thus constructed as blameworthy.

A further example of blame avoidance rooted in discourse is a footnote in the extract, following the word ‘misconduct’. The footnote reads:

“Misconduct” in this document is used colloquially to mean conduct that was unacceptable rather than treatment contrary to Article 3 ECHR.

Although the submission has a quasi-legal character, the footnote proposes that some of the language used in the document does not belong to the register of law, but rather to a moral register. The kind of responsibility for wrongdoing that may be identified is a moral one, not a criminal one. Across the submission, this argument finds further prominence. The closing statement advances the argument that ‘culpability’ as legal liability lies outside the Inquiry’s remit. Although some actions can be seen to be ‘blameworthy’, the Inquiry ought not determine any criminal liability. Together, these discursive strategies employed by G4S are directed towards a remedy: say sorry (maybe revise internal policy) but remain shielded from any criminal or civil sanction or wider political (or economic) accountability.

“Profit, I Think you stated”

While the discursive strategies used by G4S seek to shift blame onto individual employees, they are accompanied by attempts to legitimise the role of G4S as a private business contracted to manage the detention of immigrants in Brook House. Even though at the current time, G4S no longer holds the contracts for the management of IRCs, the privatisation of border control has intensified (Bosworth, 2024; Bosworth & Singler, 2022). The nature of outsourcing contracts in the sector in general, and the company’s performance in particular, had come under intense scrutiny as a result of the Brook House scandal. ⁷ Between 2012 and 2018, G4S had reportedly made £14.3 m in gross profits from operating Brook House (Grierson, 2019). The chair of the Home Affairs Committee, Yvette Cooper, added to the pressure: ‘Given that profits reduced when G4S had to increase staffing and training after the Panorama programme, this raises very serious questions about G4S’s running of the centre to make higher profits whilst not having proper staffing, training, and safeguarding systems in place’ (Cooper, cited in Grierson, 2019). It is within this context that Gordon Brockington repeatedly refers in his oral evidence to G4S Care and Justice Services as a ‘healthy business’. He highlights the positive actions taken by the company following the BBC Panorama exposures, including the dismissal of Brook House staff.

Brockington appears before the Inquiry as a corporate witness, representing the company in a managerial role, but one who has not personally witnessed the mistreatment of detainees in Brook House. The examining counsel apparently anticipates that the manager could seek to distance himself from the events under investigation and proceeds to establish the extent to which Brockington can provide evidence on behalf of the corporation.

Q: … I know you are the mouthpiece for the company, and you are here to answer questions on behalf of the company… (Brook House Inquiry, 2022a, p. 11)

While Brockington accepts this role, there are clear limits to his willingness or ability to account for the actions or inactions of his staff.

A: I really cannot comment further on these, and I am afraid I have nothing further to add on the evidence which you have just put in front of me… (Brook House Inquiry, 2022a, p. 33)

Let us turn to a further example from the exchanges between Brockington and the examining counsel (Brook House Inquiry, 2022a, p. 35).

A. I cannot conclude either way. I have nothing more to add to … in relation to …

Such ‘denial of knowledge’ responses can serve to disassociate the corporate management of G4S with the realities of staffing challenges on the ground and situates the question of mistreatment in the past (Schoultz & Flyghed, 2020a). They further link to the corporate apology for what happened at a specific time and place, locating blame in the behaviour of a few individuals who acted contrary to the company’s rules and values (see Hearit, 2006). The question of corporate responsibility therefore revolves around the extent to which G4S itself acted in accordance with its contractual rules of engagement. Here it is Brockington who links the question of staffing levels and the company’s profits (Brook House Inquiry, 2022a, pp. 21–22):

I don’t believe there is a direct correlation between the turnover of staff - profit, I think you stated - and the isolated incidents of individuals acting wholly,and I maintain wholly [emphasised in the hearing transcript], inappropriately… So I think we train the individuals to do what they do and these individuals chose to act in the way that they did, so I see no correlation between staff turnover and profit.

It is worth noting that the counsel to the Inquiry had not mentioned ‘profit’, or even alluded to it. It appears as a pre-emptive strategy to minimise blame apportioned to the outsourcing of immigration custodial operations to private providers. Faced with the reality that privatised immigration enforcement was making money from misery (Bhatia & Canning, 2021), Brockington’s anticipatory comments are neutralisation techniques, which naturalise the status of ‘profitability’ as a legitimate objective.

Schoultz and Flyghed (2020b), too, propose that corporations accused of wrongdoing ‘usually find it necessary to justify their actions’ through a variety of ‘corporate neutralisation techniques’ and denials. Amongst those, they cite ‘appeals to higher loyalties’ among businesses, including profit maximisation and the furtherance of corporate interests. Schoultz and Flyghed (2020b: p. 750) argue that although ‘it is difficult for corporations to justify gross violations of human rights’, companies do so ‘indirectly’ by ‘framing the positive influence of business activities’. In the way it was proposed by Sykes and Matza (1957), ‘techniques of neutralisation’ explained how some individuals justified norm-deviant or illegal behaviour. Later, Stan Cohen (2001) developed the original framework to apply it to state and organisational, rather than individual, accounts of denial. Others have further extended neutralisation theory to encompass justifications for corporate wrongdoing (Box, 1983). Among the categories of neutralisation relevant to our discussion, two are particularly pertinent: the ‘denial of responsibility’ and the ‘appeals to higher loyalties’. Both categories are proposed by Sykes and Matza and were later applied by Cohen to organisational contexts.

‘Denial of responsibility’ refers to the notion that the deviant individual is not accountable for his or her actions due to forces beyond their control. Insofar as the high profit margins are a feature of the contract awarded by the Home Office, G4S does not deny the problems with the procurement process. The company’s statement does however seek to ‘deny responsibility’ for it. G4S points out, repeatedly, that the original contract was awarded to a different outsourcing company and that G4S simply inherited the terms when it took over at Brook House. Moreover, the company’s statement suggests that it ‘did not think it appropriate’ to bid for a contract that it saw as ‘minimising the costs’ to the Home Office (Brook House Inquiry, 2022b, pp. 18–19). Aligning its values and practices with societal norms in this way, the company can hope to avoid blame and shift it to a different corporation and a government contract which it had not negotiated.

The category of an ‘appeal to higher loyalties’ proposes that an individual sees their actions within a differential context in which deviant behaviour accords to the norms of a specific subgroup rather than wider societal values. Although the G4S evidence stresses that the mistreatment witnessed in Brook House was ‘abhorrent’ and in contravention of company values, the company seeks to contextualise this by pointing to its other obligations. Pre-empting criticism of its profitability, G4S argues that it had responsibilities to its shareholders. Its closing statement reads: ‘G4S is a company rather than a public body or a charity. It has legal obligations to its shareholders to make a profit’ (Brook House Inquiry, 2022b, p. 48). Techniques of neutralisation, employed in this way, serve to shift the focus of blame allocation. The attention, according to managing director Gordon Brockington (although when pressed he accepts ‘a degree of responsibility’), should be directed at the ‘customer’:

So again, it is back to… I am afraid it is back to the Home Office. They set the criteria in terms of what is to be measured…’ (Brook House Inquiry, 2022a, p. 85).

The image that is constructed is of a company with its ‘hands tied’ acting in a situation beyond its immediate control. Legal obligations to maximise profits as well as an unfavourable contract which incentivises cost-cutting provided the context for the mistreatment in Brook House.

Discursive de-legitimation

While one blame avoidance strategy aimed at the discursive legitimation of profit-making in custody settings, another focused on the discursive de-legitimation of accountability and of the public inquiry itself. The statutory inquiry, with legal powers to compel witnesses to give evidence, had succeeded a non-statutory investigation by the Prison and Probation Ombudsman precisely because of the reluctance by (former) G4S employees to cooperate. Previous research has shown how, during the preliminary phase of the Brook House Inquiry, G4S had sought to limit the Inquiry’s scope and reach (Schlembach & Hart, 2022). Following the evidential phase, during which several (former) G4S employees and managers provided testimony, the G4S written closing statement sought to frustrate the Inquiry’s ability to reach conclusions that would adversely affect its business reputation.

Notably, the G4S statement borrows from the adversarial procedures of a criminal court to undermine the credibility of the witness accounts of former Brook House detainees and of the whistleblower Callum Tulley. The statement argues that the Inquiry must assess the reliability of various witnesses and that it must place differential weight on witness accounts that have been ‘inconsistent and contradictory’ (Brook House Inquiry, 2022b, p. 8). In particular, the G4S submission seeks to question the reliability of evidence given by those detained in Brook House, and several of those working there, during the relevant period. The following extracts are illustrative in this regard:

(1) It is clear that the mere fact that a former detainee has asserted that something happened does not mean that it did happen.

The Inquiry Chair is invited here to qualify the credibility it attaches to the evidence it has received from (1) detained persons, (2) Brook House staff and (3) the whistleblower. The examples speak to what G4S calls an absence of ‘procedural fairness’ in the Brook House Inquiry. To paint an image of unfairness and bias, the submissions invoke the procedural rules of a court hearing. The use of words such as ‘asserted’, ‘accused’, ‘witnessed’, ‘selective’, ‘premise’ invite a reading of the procedure in the Brook House Inquiry as structured in similar ways to a criminal trial.

If the submission invokes the roles and procedures in a court, it can question the ‘expert authority’ of other witnesses and the ‘judicial authority’ of the Inquiry (Van Leeuwen, 2007). G4S connects the reliability of the evidence provided by key witnesses - especially where their testimony speaks to the existence of a toxic environment and systemic corporate failures - to their treatment as witnesses by the Inquiry. The closing statement proposes that these witnesses were ‘self-serving’, followed a personal agenda, sought to ‘minimise responsibility by seeking to blame others’ and were treated favourably by the Inquiry. The examination of their evidence is described as ‘very gentle’, with the counsel to the Inquiry unwilling to properly test the reliability of their accounts. In the following passage from the statement, the company argues that the conduct of the Inquiry therefore departed from the inquisitorial character expected of a public inquiry:

However, it is clear beyond doubt, that CTI [counsel to the Inquiry] frequently cross-examined numerous ‘hostile’ witnesses. This differential approach and the fact that only one ‘side of the case’ has been tested means that the [sic] it is difficult, if not impossible, for the Inquiry to reach fair conclusions on the factual matters that it is required to determine (Brook House Inquiry, 2022b, p. 9, grammatical errors in the original).

By describing the counsel’s questioning of corporate witnesses as cross-examination, the extract evokes the image of a court of law in which (former) G4S employees stood as the defendants and the Inquiry acting as a prosecutor. Not only do we get a sense that the Inquiry’s conduct has departed from its intended purpose and legal basis, we also get presented with the argument that there were two categories of witnesses.

While G4S replicated the typical conduct of courtroom adversarialism in the examples above, it also employed intensifying discourses to de-legitimise the Inquiry itself. Our analysis shows examples of how the personal authority of the Chairperson was undermined. The closing statement submitted on behalf of G4S seeks to undermine the position of the public inquiry and particularly questions the position of the Chair and that of the lead counsel to the Inquiry.

Unfortunately, the procedure adopted by the Inquiry has not met the basic requirements of fairness. Prior to the Inquiry starting, the Chair’s press interviews raised real concerns that the Inquiry had predetermined various issues. The conduct of the Inquiry further reinforced such concerns. In particular, the differential approaches to questioning of witnesses depending, inter alia, on whether they supported the Chair’s views set out in the press interviews is particularly troubling. The approach adopted by the Inquiry of essentially only testing evidence that did not accord with the Chair’s predetermined views, is a further reason why it should not reach conclusions on whether or not particular conduct was contrary to Article 3 ECHR. (Brook House Inquiry, 2022b, p. 5)

In this extract, the company seeks to ‘prove’ that the Chair’s stance is not independent. It seeks to introduce evidence of this fact by citing, later, two press interviews with Kate Eves, in which the Chair sets out the Inquiry’s task. In both, she indicates that ‘systemic’ failures will be scrutinised in her investigation. The G4S submission states that the company had sought transcripts from the interviews, a request apparently denied by the Inquiry. Although G4S claims that it is ‘impossible for G4S to form a final view as to the existence of apparent bias/predetermination’ (Brook House Inquiry, 2022b, p. 6), it nonetheless raises the prospect of bringing a judicial review claim on the basis of the allegations. Such discursive de-legitimation of the Inquiry as a legal authority may have ultimately failed to sway the Chair’s final report, but it also reveals the importance given by the company to the aim of avoiding criticisms for systemic failings.