Woman loses Legal Challenge to NHS Charges For Pregnant Migrants

A woman who faces decades of repayments to the NHS for maternity care has lost a case in the high court challenging the government’s healthcare charging regime for migrants. The woman, who cannot be named, brought the legal challenge along with the charity Maternity Action, which works to end inequality and improve healthcare for pregnant women. It will come as a blow to hundreds of impoverished migrant women who are pregnant. Last year Maternity Action provided advice to 400 such women.

The woman, who had been subjected to female genital mutilation and is incurring NHS charges of £10,636 for maternity care – a debt she is paying back at £10 a month – argued that the charging regime for migrants deters, delays or denies access to healthcare for pregnant women, those giving birth or those who need postnatal treatment. She and the charity were seeking permission to judicially review government policies but the judge, Mrs Justice Whipple, rejected the case. Whipple said she was not granting permission for the case to proceed, not because of “a lack of sympathy” for the disadvantaged group the case applied to, but because the case had been brought out of time as it referred to charging rules introduced by the government in 2015. She could not see a legal basis for the claim, which related to matters of policy, which needed to be addressed by parliament, and not to matters of law.

Read more: Dianne Taylor, Guardian, https://is.gd/1tlJHk