run Brook House and Tinsley House for a further two years in spite of the ongoing controversy. In October 2018 the Home Office confirmed that, after being threatened with legal proceedings over the treatment of two detainees, the Prisons and Probation Ombudsman would be carrying out a "dedicated, special investigation" on the understanding that the legal action was called off. 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. How is that to be done in any meaningful way here unless MA and BB, non-lawyers where English is not their first language, are enabled through representation to meet their [alleged] abusers on equal terms?" She further ordered that hearings for the inquiry be held in public and stated that 21 staff from G4S could be compelled to give evidence. An appeal by the Home Office, which argued that staff members should not be compelled to give evidence and that holding the enquiry in public would be prohibitively expensive, was rejected in August 2019, with May reiterating that it was necessary to hold the enquiry in public because "the full extent of the discreditable behaviour has not been exposed to public view" and that open hearings would be necessary "to maintain public confidence in the rule of law". In September 2019, found that while the average length of detention had "markedly declined" since 2016, incidents of self-harm had significantly increased and that 40% of detainees said they had felt suicidal at some point. It also noted that detainees spent too much time locked in their cells, and that some aspects of security were "unnecessarily stringent". Financial irregularities Following on from the Panorama investigation, the BBC reported that it had been shown financial documents, including a slide-show presentation from January 2014, indicating that in 2013 G4S had made a pre-tax profit of more than £2.4M, or just under 20%, on the running of Brook House and a further 1.5M (27.3%) from Tinsley House. A former senior manager with G4S who had been present at finance meetings told the BBC that these profits were "far in excess of what was meant to be made" from the detention centres' contract with