Unaccompanied Asylum-seeking Children

Caroline Lucas Excerpts

Tuesday 24th January 2023 Commons Chamber

[Caroline Lucas (Brighton, Pavilion) (Green)]

(Urgent Question): To ask the Home Secretary if she will make a statement on what steps she is taking to find missing unaccompanied asylum-seeking children and to keep them safe.

[The Minister for Immigration (Robert Jenrick)]

The rise in small boat crossings has placed a severe strain on the asylum accommodation system. We have had no alternative but to temporarily use specialist hotels to give some unaccompanied minors a roof over their heads while local authority accommodation is found. We take our safeguarding responsibilities extremely seriously and we have procedures in place to ensure all children are accommodated as safely as possible while in those hotels. This work is led on site by personnel providing 24/7 supervision, with support from teams of social workers and nurses. Staff, including contractors, receive briefings and guidance on how to safeguard minors, while all children receive a welfare interview, which includes questions designed to identify potential indicators of trafficking or safeguarding risks. The movements of under-18s in and out of hotels are monitored and recorded, and they are accompanied by social workers when attending organised activities.

We have no power to detain unaccompanied asylum-seeking children in these settings and we know some do go missing. Over 4,600 unaccompanied children have been accommodated in hotels since July 2021. There have been 440 missing occurrences and 200 children remain missing, 13 of whom are under 16 years of age and only one of whom is female.

When any child goes missing, a multi-agency missing persons protocol is mobilised alongside the police and the relevant local authority to establish their whereabouts and to ensure they are safe. Many of those who have gone missing are subsequently traced and located. Of the unaccompanied asylum-seeking children still missing, 88% are Albanian nationals, with the remaining 12% from Afghanistan, Egypt, India, Vietnam, Pakistan and Turkey.

As I have made clear repeatedly, we must end the use of hotels as soon as possible. We are providing local authorities with children’s services with £15,000 for eligible young people they take into their care from a dedicated UASC—unaccompanied asylum-seeking children—hotel, or the reception and safe care service in Kent.

I fully understand the interest of the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas), and indeed the whole House, in this issue and I am grateful for the opportunity to address it. I assure the House that safeguarding concerns are, and will remain, a priority for me and for my Department as we deliver the broader reforms that are so desperately needed to ensure we have a fair and effective asylum system that works in the interests of the British people.

[Caroline Lucas]

This is horrific. Vulnerable children are being dumped by the Home Office, scores of them are going missing, and I can tell the Minister that there is nothing “specialist” about these hotels. We are not asking him to detain children; we are asking the Home Office to apply some basic safeguarding so that we can keep them safe. Does he know how many have been kidnapped, trafficked, put into forced labour—where are they living, are they allowed to leave, are they in school? He should know because the Home Office is running these hotels. It has told me it is commissioning everything from social work to security, but it is still unclear whether it is prepared to take legal as well as practical responsibility.

Meanwhile, these children are in legal limbo. I was told before Christmas that Government lawyers were deliberating over their ultimate legal responsibility. We need to know the outcome today: what is it? We need to know why successive Home Secretaries have played into the hands of criminal gangs.

The Minister will talk of new money being given to local authorities, but where will they get the foster care capacity, which he knows is in seriously short supply? Brighton and Hove City Council has been raising concerns about the dangerous practice of using these hotels for 18 months, and as the hon. Member for Hove (Peter Kyle) has made clear on many occasions—I pay credit to him for his tireless work on this—it was entirely foreseeable that children were at risk of being snatched, abducted and coerced by criminals.

Has the Minister taken up offers of help from charities working with children? What is the response to the migration watchdog’s finding that some staff in these hotels were not DBS—disclosure and barring service—checked? What role is the Children’s Commissioner playing? Why is not Ofsted inspecting these hotels regularly? Will he commit to publishing regular data on missing children—how long they have been missing, whether they are still missing, when they went missing? Where is the special operation to find the missing children? This feels like the plight of the girls in Rotherham who were treated like they did not matter and, frankly, it is sickening. Lastly, the use of these hotels must stop—when will that actually happen?

The staggering complacency and incompetence from the Home Office are shameful. We need immediate answers and an urgent investigation, and we need to ask how many more children are going to go missing before we see some action.

[Robert Jenrick]

If the hon. Lady has not visited the hotel in her constituency, or indeed in her neighbouring constituency, I would be happy to organise that. I spoke with the chief executive and director of children’s services of Brighton and Hove City Council yesterday to ask for their reflections on the relationship with the Home Office and the management of the hotel. We have a good relationship with that council and I want to ensure that that continues.

As regards the level of support provided in that hotel, and indeed others elsewhere in the country, it is significant. On any given day, there will be a significant security presence at the hotel. Those security guards are there to protect the staff and the minors and to raise any suspicious activity immediately with the local police. I have been assured that that does happen in Sussex. A number of social workers are on site 24/7. There are also nurses on site and team leaders to manage the site appropriately. So there is a significant specialist team provided in each of these hotels to ensure that the young people present are properly looked after.

The report by the independent chief inspector of borders and immigration in October last year—I believe that Ofsted was involved in the inspection—did find unanimously that the young people reported that they felt safe, happy and treated with respect. Now, that does not mean that we have any cause to be complacent, because it is extremely concerning if young people are leaving these accommodation settings and not being found. I have been told that any young person leaving one of these hotels and not returning is treated in exactly the same way as any young person of any nationality or immigration status who goes missing anywhere else in the country and that the police follow up as robustly as they would in any other circumstances. That is quite right, because we have a responsibility to any minor, regardless of why they are here in the United Kingdom.

Working with police forces and local authorities, we have created a new protocol, known as “missing after reasonable steps”, in which further action is taken to find missing young people. That has had significant success: I am told that it has led to a 36% reduction in the number of missing people occurrences. We will take further steps, as required, to ensure that young people are safe in these hotels and not unduly preyed on by the evil people smuggling gangs that perpetuate the trade.

The key task ahead of us—other than deterring people from making dangerous crossings in the first place, of course—is to ensure that these young people are swiftly moved out of hotels, as the hon. Lady rightly said, and into more appropriate settings in local authorities. Since being in position I have reviewed the offer that we have for local authorities and significantly enhanced it. From next month—this has already been announced—any local authority will receive a one-off initial £15,000 payment for taking a young person from one of these hotels into their care in addition to the annual payment of about £50,000 per person. That is a significant increase in the amount of financial support available to local authorities.

The hon. Lady is right to say that money is not the only barrier to local authorities, because there are significant capacity issues including a lack of foster carers, a lack of trained social workers and a lack of local authority children’s home places. Those are issues that the Department for Education is seeking to address through its care review. The best thing that any of us can do as constituency Members of Parliament who care about this issue is speak to our local authorities and ask them whether they can find extra capacity to take more young people through the national transfer scheme so that we can close these hotels or, at least, reduce reliance on them as quickly as possible.