Detainees: Females

(asked on 9th November 2020) - View Source

Question to the Home Office:

To ask Her Majesty's Government what strategy they currently have in place on the use of immigration detention for women; and what plans they have (1) to build on the Action Access pilot, and (2) to expand the use of case management-focused alternatives to detention for women.


Answered by
Baroness Williams of Trafford Portrait
Baroness Williams of Trafford
Captain of the Honourable Corps of Gentlemen-at-Arms (HM Household) (Chief Whip, House of Lords)
This question was answered on 23rd November 2020

As part of the Department’s immigration detention reform programme, we are conducting a series of pilots exploring alternatives to detention, with the first pilot being ‘Action Access’.

Now in its second year, Action Access has provided women who would otherwise be detained with a programme of support in the community, including case management support. In June 2020 the Home Office signed a contract with the King’s Arms Project in Bedford for the second pilot in the series, the Refugee and Migrant Advisory Service, which is supporting both men and women. The first participants joined this second pilot last month.

We are working with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) on these pilots and they have appointed the National Centre for Social Research (NatCen) to independently evaluate this work. These evaluations will be published, with the evaluation report of the ‘Action Access’ pilot scheduled for Summer 2021. We will use the evaluation of these pilots to inform our future approach to case-management focused alternatives to detention.

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