Immigration Act 2016

Baroness Sheehan Excerpts

Wednesday 19th July 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Sheehan (LD)]

My Lords, we are receiving conflicting statements from the Government and local authorities. Will the Minister update the House on her department’s working relationship with local authorities based on, first, evidence presented recently to the High Court by Help Refugees that local authorities had the capacity to accept a far greater number of unaccompanied minors than have currently been accepted? Secondly, freedom of information requests have shown that local councils have voluntarily offered to accept 1,572 more children in addition to those they already support. Does the Minister acknowledge this? In the light of this information, will the Government reopen Dubs and take their fair share of these children, who are at such risk that, according to Oxfam, 28 children a day are going missing from Italy alone?

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

The Government have consulted fully with local authorities. We held roadshows up and down the country. The FOI response to which the noble Baroness has referred talks, I think, about spare capacity for 784 unaccompanied asylum-seeking children. These figures are entirely at odds with our consultation and do not reflect capacity among local authorities. Over recent weeks and months there has been a lot of misunderstanding about the purpose of the 0.07% threshold to which I assume she is referring. It is neither a target for the number of unaccompanied asylum-seeking children that we would expect to see in a local authority area, nor is it an assessment of a local authority’s capacity to accommodate unaccompanied asylum-seeking children. It is an indication of when a local authority is caring for a disproportionate number of such children, as some local authorities are, and when we would expect to see them transfer away from that authority. Drawing conclusions about local authority capacity by automatically assigning them from their 0.07% threshold is a flawed methodology which fails to reflect existing capacity.