My Lords, I am reminded in this debate of a conversation I had in Yarl’s Wood immigration removal centre several years ago with a mother—a black woman—who had been removed. Unfortunately, in the process of removal from her home for detention she was injured. Ten months on she was still suffering from the injury that she received. Her 16 year-old daughter—a child with a younger sister of eight years of age—spoke to me about her anger at the injury on her mother and her frustration at being detained for 10 months without trial.
Perhaps this is not the appropriate amendment to bring this in, for which I apologise, but listening to this discussion I commend the coalition Government for their decision early on to minimise as far as possible the detention of families prior to removal. I warmly congratulate them on taking that move.
My other point—again it is probably not the right place to ask about it—is that I am concerned about the training and development of those officers who go to homes to remove families with their children. I would be interested to know how far they have social childcare training akin to what a residential childcare social worker might have, and how far they are supervised by a child and family social worker. It might be helpful on a regular basis that they should be so.
I would be interested in the answers to that sort of question, perhaps not at this point but later in the course of the discussion.