Detention Centres: Children
Home Department

Jim Cunningham (Coventry South, Labour)

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department

(1) what assessment she has made of steps taken by immigration detention facilities to improve the family-friendly nature of their institutions;

(2) what has been her Department's expenditure on steps to make immigration detention centres more family-friendly in the latest period for which figures are available.

Damian Green (Minister of State (Immigration), Home Office; Ashford, Conservative)

The Government are committed to ending the detention of children for immigration purposes. On 16 December 2010 we published our plans for doing this, including the immediate closure to children of the family unit at Yarl's Wood Immigration Removal Centre.

A fresh approach to managing family returns is being developed which places greater emphasis on engagement with families and aims to encourage families to leave without the need for enforcement action if they are found to have no legal right to be in the UK.

Most elements of this new process went live across the UK on 1 March, including the setting up of a new independent Family Returns Panel to advise the UK Border Agency on how to ensure the return of those families who do not take up the opportunities to leave under their own steam. A range of options has been developed to provide sufficient flexibility for a tailored approach to each family.

As a backstop, we are also developing a new option of pre-departure accommodation for use when other options for ensuring return have failed. This will not look or feel like an immigration removal centre; families will be held in self-contained flats, providing them with independence and privacy, within a large setting, including extensive grounds. It will be run on a care model rather than a secure one and there will be provision for family members to leave the premises after suitable risk assessments. The project to create the pre-departure accommodation has engaged the use of a number of specialist consultants for areas such as surveying and planning. We have so far received invoices for around £65,000.

The pre-departure accommodation will take a little longer than 1 March to establish so a small number of family rooms will remain available at Tinsley House Immigration Removal Centre in the meantime. Their use will be kept to an absolute minimum during this interim period. We do not expect them to be used beyond May for families with children, other than for those few cases of families who are refused entry to the UK at the border and need to be held for a short time while enquiries are made and/or until a return flight can be arranged for them. There may also be the occasional need to use Tinsley for criminal or other high-risk families who could not be accommodated safely in the pre-departure accommodation but this would be rare.

The family facility at Tinsley House has just been refurbished to create a far more family-friendly environment. This work has cost £1.3 million.

Both the family unit at Tinsley House and the new pre-departure accommodation will be subject to regular assessments and reporting by UK Border Agency monitors, but also to the oversight and inspection of HM Chief Inspector for Prisons, the Children's Commissioner for England and the Independent Monitoring Board.