Diana Johnson
Main Page: Diana Johnson (Labour - Kingston upon Hull North and Cottingham)Department Debates - View all Diana Johnson's debates with the Home Office
Unaccompanied Asylum-seeking Children
Diana Johnson Excerpts(1 year, 9 months ago)
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Dame Diana Johnson (Kingston upon Hull North) (Lab)
In July last year, the Home Affairs Committee raised our serious concerns about unaccompanied asylum-seeking children going missing from hotels. I can assist the Minister: the Home Office’s permanent secretary, Sir Matthew Rycroft, told the Committee that
“broadly speaking…it is the Home Office”
that acts as the safeguarding authority for a child placed in a hotel.
We called on the Government to
“provide a clear timeline for ending the accommodation of unaccompanied children in hotels.”
May I press the Minister on that today, because it has not been forthcoming so far? Given the Home Office’s clear child safeguarding responsibilities, can we have a clear commitment today from the Minister as to the date by which it will end the clearly unsafe and unsatisfactory placement of unaccompanied asylum-seeking children in hotels?
Robert Jenrick
I respect the right hon. Lady and her Committee, but it is not as simple as my being able to set a date by which these hotels will close, because we have to be honest with ourselves about the challenge that we face as a country. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of young people crossing the channel on small boats every year. What we need to do is flow those young people as swiftly as possible into local authority care, but if local authorities do not have the capacity to take them immediately, we have to bear in mind that we can detain somebody for only 24 hours—or now 96 hours, with the recent legal change that we have made. In a relatively short timeframe, we have to have a short period of bridging accommodation. For as long as the challenge remains as pronounced as it is today, we will need that.
The task for us is twofold. The first part is to work with local authorities and provide the incentives for them to boost their own capacity. The other is to deter people from making the crossing in the first place. We are trying to do everything within our power to do so, including by making further legislative changes, but until we beat this trade, there will be young people placed in this position.