Healthcare: Yarl’s Wood

Anne McLaughlin Excerpts

Wednesday 6th January 2016 Westminster Hall

[Anne McLaughlin (Glasgow North East) (SNP)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Edmonton (Kate Osamor) on her heartfelt, moving speech. I want to thank her for crying—I am not the only one who does that in this place. She said that she wanted to be the voice for women detained in Yarl’s Wood and she has been that incredibly well today. Her demonstration of how deeply she feels will matter to them when they watch the debate.

If the UK Government need more evidence of the desperate human consequences of unlimited incarceration of vulnerable people, the shameful reports of inadequate healthcare as well as the dire treatment of female detainees in Yarl’s Wood should be telling enough for them to abandon their inhumane policies. I appeal to the Minister, who I know has a humane side to him—sometimes a very humane side—to do something now. We are waiting on the outcome of reports, but we already have significant reports, so we should not wait for more of them before we do anything.

Yarl’s Wood is a prison for people who have committed no crime, as the hon. Member for Cheltenham (Alex Chalk) pointed out, where diabolical health and safety standards threaten the lives of innocent people, many of whom have already been victims of torture and trauma. Evidence of the degrading, inhumane consequences of indefinite detention shows the vital need for time-limited detention as a matter of urgency. The Scottish National party has long supported that. The UK Government are fundamentally failing to protect some of the most vulnerable women seeking refuge.

Yarl’s Wood fails to meet the most basic standards of health and safety for detainees and is a “place of national concern”. Those are not my words, but those of the chief inspector of prisons, Nick Hardwick. I sincerely hope that the Government will listen to that and do something as a matter of urgency.

I want to return to something that the hon. Member for Edmonton talked about. Last year, 90 of the 99 pregnant women detained were later released and not deported. I think it was the hon. Member for Rotherham (Sarah Champion) and the hon. Member for—[Interruption.] She and the hon. Member for Walthamstow (Stella Creasy)—I do that in every debate—asked, if 90 of those women were later allowed to go to homes in the UK, what were they doing there in the first place? The hon. Member for Bishop’s Stortford—

[Mrs Spelman]

Good try—Meriden. [Laughter.]

[Anne McLaughlin]

The constituency names do not come up on the Annunciator in Westminster Hall. In an equally moving speech, the right hon. Member for Meriden (Mrs Spelman) noted that in 2015 there were—I think she said—only two pregnant women in Yarl’s Wood. I would be interested to hear from the Minister whether that is because the Government are now politically opposed to the detention of pregnant women and whether we can expect that number to go down rather than up.

I also pay tribute to the right hon. Lady for speaking movingly about how deeply she feels about the situation, and in particular for mentioning her experience of miscarriage. That is not an easy thing to do, but she recognised her duty to do that to highlight the problems faced by other women.

I share the shame that the hon. Member for Walthamstow mentioned she feels. She did something important: she spoke in this place the words of women currently in detention. The hon. Member for Rotherham—I know where she represents—has been a true champion of those seeking asylum. She rightly questioned why 90 pregnant women were at Yarl’s Wood in the first place if they were released.

The SNP has long called for an end to the unlimited detention—imprisonment, in fact—of migrants. It recently advocated that a 28-day maximum time limit be written into the Immigration Bill, based on evidence that being locked up for any longer would be catastrophic for the detainees’ health. An unlimited period of detention not only causes damage to health, but is a fundamentally unnecessary and expensive exercise.

My hon. Friend the Member for Cumbernauld, Kilsyth and Kirkintilloch East (Stuart C. McDonald), who is our immigration spokesperson, asked a parliamentary question in September about the cost per capita of detaining someone in one of these centres. The reply from the Home Office was that last year the average cost to hold an individual in detention was £91 per day. I would argue, as others have, that that money could be better spent elsewhere. The Home Office has also said that the UK detains immigrants only as a last resort, but in 2013 it detained just over 30,000. Germany detained just over 4,000, Belgium just over 6,000 and Sweden almost 3,000. During that time, Germany received four times as many asylum applications as the UK, and I do not think anyone would accuse Germany of being a soft touch. We are the only EU country to have no time limit on detention.

Many of the women detained at Yarl’s Wood have backgrounds that include trafficking and torture, as well as physical and mental abuse. A young woman who fled persecution in Uganda on account of her sexuality talked about the lack of support for those with mental health problems and how the lack of appropriate healthcare in the detention centre led to suicidal thoughts. I understand that some counselling services were withdrawn last year; will the Minister give us an update on that? Surely that was a mistake and those services will be reinstated, because if anywhere needs it, it is that place. We must address the failures not only in Yarl’s Wood but in the immigration system as a whole. We cannot put up with a prison-like system, not only because of the financial consequences, but because of the devastating human cost, which is simply not just.

I pay tribute to a choir that came to this place from Manchester at Christmas. In fact, they might have sung in this Chamber. They are called WAST—Women Asylum Seekers Together—and it was incredibly moving to witness them just before Christmas. All the women had been in detention and were now out, but the damage that had been done to them, by not only the detention but whatever had happened in their past, was visible.

I conclude by repeating something I have said on more than one occasion in this place. I know that we no longer detain children, but I am going to use the words of a 10-year-old boy who I knew extremely well. He was in Yarl’s Wood with his mother and could stand it no longer, and said to her, “Mummy, please can we just die? Please, dying would be better than this. Let us die.” That child was 10 years old. It does not matter what age someone is; if we are doing something to people that makes them feel like they want to die, we have to do something about it. We cannot keep waiting for report after report after report. Listen to the reports that have come out already and take action as soon as possible.