Healthcare: Yarl’s Wood

Debate between Caroline Spelman and Sarah Champion

Wednesday 6th January 2016 Westminster Hall

[Sarah Champion (Rotherham) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir David. I congratulate hugely my hon. Friend the Member for Edmonton (Kate Osamor), because she has given those women a voice which, as my hon. Friend the Member for Walthamstow (Stella Creasy) said, is being denied them.

At the moment a great deal of attention is rightly being given to those who are crossing borders to seek safety. It is important that we focus our attention on those who reach the UK and seek our protection, and that we ensure they are treated with dignity and humanity. Every year, around 2,000 asylum-seeking women are locked up at Yarl’s Wood detention centre. Most are survivors of rape, sexual violence or torture. Because of their experiences in their countries of origin, those women are clearly vulnerable and many have serious physical and mental health problems. However, in spite of that, when they come to the UK for sanctuary they are locked up in detention, where they are re-traumatised, and the physical and mental health care available to them is wholly inadequate.

The chief inspector of prisons has called Yarl’s Wood a “place of national concern”. He found in his most recent inspection report that, of all the areas in the centre,

“healthcare had declined most severely”.

His report also pointed to the lack of gender-sensitive health practices in Yarl’s Wood. For instance, women who had newly arrived at the centre were expected to speak to male nurses as part of the health screening process and women who were placed on constant supervision, deemed to be so mentally distressed that they might kill themselves, were being watched by male staff in spite of their previous experiences of abuse and victimisation.

When Maimuna Jawo, who was detained in Yarl’s Wood prison, gave evidence to the parliamentary inquiry into the use of immigration detention, she said:

“Anybody who is on suicide watch has sexual harassment in Yarl’s Wood, because those male guards, they sit there watching you at night, sleeping and being naked.”

The Home Office has promised that a new policy will be put in place to ensure that women are watched only by female guards, but while the proportion of female staff at Yarl’s Wood remains under 50% there are serious questions about whether such a policy will ever become practice.

There are also real concerns about the treatment of pregnant women in detention, as hon. Members have said. Research by Medical Justice found that pregnant women miss antenatal appointments and some do not have any scans while detained. The poor care provided to those women is particularly troubling when we consider that, as has been said, for most of them detention serves absolutely no purpose.

[Mrs Spelman]

I want to highlight one important point: staff from Yarl’s Wood were actually prosecuted for offences against detainees. It is important to place that on the record.

[Sarah Champion]

I am grateful that the right hon. Lady placed that on the record. It turns my stomach that we are in this situation. Ninety of the 99 pregnant women detained in Yarl’s Wood in 2014 were released back into the community to continue with their cases, so they were locked up and re-traumatised for no reason at all. One of the pregnant women who the charity Women for Refugee Women is in touch with, a survivor of trafficking, was recently released back into the community after being detained for almost two months, even though Home Office guidance says that pregnant women should be detained only if their removal is imminent.