In March 1947, the British Labour Party Member of Parliament Richard Stokes (Ipswich) visited the interrogation centre to perform an apparently "ad hoc" inspection as part of a long-running effort on his part to promote the of prisoners of war and other post-war detainees. He told the House of Commons that "in cross-examining some of these it may be necessary to indulge in forms of verbal persecution which we do not like, but there is no physical torture, starvation or ill-treatment of that kind". However, he criticised the poor conditions at the interrogation centre. The 65 men and four women being held there were mostly in solitary confinement, in unheated cells at temperatures of ; the interrogation centre had no coal for heating, so the prisoners had instead been given seven blankets each.