Immigration Bill — House of Lords, 2016-04-12
Topic: Immigration
David Alton (Crossbench, Unknown): My Lords, I should like to support the amendment moved so well by the noble Baroness, Lady Lister. I raised this issue in Committee, and then my noble friend Lord Hylton and I took the trouble to go to Yarl’s Wood where we asked questions about the number of pregnant women who had been detained there in the past or might currently be detained. I share the view of the noble Lord, Lord Bates, who did such wonderful work on this Bill in its earlier stages. He commented on a Channel 4 investigation into Yarl’s Wood, which was shown in March 2015, where staff members called the women being held there "animals" and "beasties". Having watched the programme, the noble Lord said to the House: "I watched that documentary on Channel 4, and quite frankly I was sickened".—[Official Report, 28/1/15; col. 103.] Having been to Yarl’s Wood, I was able to say to the House that many of the staff we met had learned the lessons of that experience, and certainly my noble friend and I were impressed by many of the standards that we saw, but nevertheless we could not be convinced that it could ever be right, as the noble Baroness has just said, to have even one pregnant woman detained in those circumstances The Royal College of Midwives has said that: "The detention of pregnant asylum seekers increases the likelihood of stress, which can risk the health of the unborn baby" In the review referred to by the noble Baroness, the former Prisons and Probation Ombudsman for England, Stephen Shaw, says this: "that detention has an incontrovertibly deleterious effect on the health of pregnant women and their unborn children … I take … to be a statement of the obvious" Alongside that, of course, there are long-standing concerns about the conditions in Yarl’s Wood. The Chief Inspector of Prisons has called it a "place of national concern". Although I have tried, I hope fairly, to say that conditions have undoubtedly improved, nevertheless it is not a place where pregnant women should be The briefing material referred to by the noble Baroness from the organisation Women for Refugee Women poses the question that the Government frequently ask in these circumstances: "If the government said they were going to stop detaining pregnant women, wouldn’t women lie and say they were pregnant—or get pregnant deliberately—just to avoid detention? And wouldn’t women abscond if they weren’t detained?" I agree with the response: "Establishing if a woman is pregnant or not is very straightforward: she simply needs to take a pregnancy test! The idea that women would get pregnant as a way of avoiding detention is unfounded and based on sexist stereotypes about women and the way they behave" To illustrate the strength of that argument, which I agree with, it is perhaps worth mentioning to noble Lords the story of one woman, Priya: "Priya was trafficked to the UK and forced into prostitution. She has been detained in Yarl’s Wood twice; the second time she was locked up, she was 20 weeks pregnant, and was held in Yarl’s Wood for seven weeks before being released back into the community" Picking up her story, she says this: "I was released after three months in detention, and fell pregnant by my partner, but then I was detained again. Although I had a written report from an expert, the Home Office did not believe that I was trafficked, so my claim was refused and I found myself back in detention. This time around I was in Yarl’s Wood for about seven weeks, and I was 20 weeks pregnant when I arrived I only had one hospital appointment while I was there, for my 20 week scan, and even then I was escorted by officers who took me 40 minutes late for my appointment. I felt frustrated that I wasn’t able to speak to the midwife after my scan because there was no time. The officers just took me straight back to Yarl’s Wood instead" I will not read the entire testimony to the House, but let me pull out two more sentences: "The first time I was detained in Yarl’s Wood, I was on medication for sleeping and depression, and I took an overdose because I felt so hopeless … I couldn’t eat the food in the canteen; that made me sick too. A lot of the time I could only really manage milk. It was too far for my partner to visit and, as an asylum seeker as well, he couldn’t afford the travel, but we spoke on the phone every day. I’ve been released now but I still feel depressed". Levels of depression in Yarl’s Wood and incidents of self-harm have been very high indeed. The prisons inspectorate report in 2015 found that more than half of women who were detained there felt depressed or suicidal when they first arrived, and that there had been 72 incidents of self-harm in the previous six months —a huge rise from the previous inspection. Surely these are circumstances in which we should never put someone who is pregnant.