Unaccompanied Child Refugees: Europe

Alex Sobel Excerpts

Thursday 2nd November 2017 Commons Chamber

[Alex Sobel (Leeds North West) (Lab/Co-op)]

I thank the hon. Member for South Cambridgeshire (Heidi Allen) and my hon. Friend the Member for Walthamstow (Stella Creasy) for securing the debate.

Two fundamental questions arise every time we debate the issue of child refugees: what kind of society and what kind of a nation do we want to be? We want to be part of a society that is fair-minded, generous and compassionate, and which understands its role in the world and does not shirk its responsibilities. In my home in Leeds, refugee charities and local authorities are doing incredible work settling and welcoming people to the city.

[Hugh Gaffney (Coatbridge, Chryston and Bellshill) (Lab)]

I just want to put on record what the people of Scotland are doing. Angela and Maria Feeney organised an initiative called Wishaw to Calais, which became Scotland to the world—just to help my friend over there, the hon. Member for Gravesham (Adam Holloway). The people of Scotland got together and North Lanarkshire Council gave us two warehouses. We filled them up and supplied the world. One of the volunteers, a young girl called Leanne Hawkins, wanted to help because she was also a child. She died recently, and I pay tribute to her and thank her for her work.

[Alex Sobel]

I, too, pay tribute to my hon. Friend’s constituent for the work that she did. I also pay tribute to his other constituents, and those of other hon. Members, for the work they have done for so many children in Calais.

Local authorities often have to act at short notice—sometimes as little as 48 hours—and under competing and enormous pressures on resources to house vulnerable refugees and asylum seekers, and to find homes for children who come through the scheme. Our northern cities have deep and powerful humanitarian instincts and traditions, going back to the Huguenots and the Kindertransport, but as local authorities’ budgets have been slashed, the strains have become all too apparent. Child protection in the UK is decentralised, meaning that it is managed by local government. At the same time, the care of unaccompanied asylum-seeking children is funded directly by the Home Office. That creates a major source of conflict and confusion, and it is invariably bad news for the children whose wellbeing and futures rest in the hands of these institutions.

Local authorities, and the charities that work with them, would like nothing more than to be able to act confidently and swiftly to assist child refugees when they are transferred to their care, but as things stand it is not uncommon for local authorities to find themselves subject to unreasonable and close-to-unworkable demands to house refugee children. As such, a 2016 report by UNICEF on unaccompanied child refugees made a single recommendation to the UK Government, calling for measures

“to ensure that local authorities have the financial resources and operational capacity to enable these evaluations to be carried out quickly, whilst safeguarding the child’s best interests.”

Without clear guidance and financial guarantees to local government, we risk falling far short of the standards of decency and compassion that we aspire to as a society. I am sorry to say that as a nation we have fallen short of our best traditions of global leadership and humanitarianism on this issue.

According to UNHCR, 138,300 refugees have made their way to Europe so far this year, with Italy, Greece and Spain managing the bulk of arrivals. More than 2,500 refugees are thought to have died or gone missing in the process. In the same period, only 3.5% of asylum applications made in Europe by children were made in the UK. The UK is the second wealthiest nation in Europe, but ranks a lamentable ninth on European child asylum applications. We are clearly—and hazardously —not pulling our weight. As this clearly shows, pull factors are not a consideration when it comes to child refugees.

In the long term, there are few established benefits to isolationism. The domestic problems and anxieties we face as nation are invariably shaped and impacted by events beyond our immediate control. Whether we like it or not, we cannot retreat from these challenges. We should never be comfortable retreating from the challenge of sharing responsibility for child refugees. This goes to the heart of the question of who we are as people and a nation. The nation may have voted for Brexit, but it did not vote to turn its back on child refugees.