Unaccompanied Minors Seeking Asylum

Jim Shannon Excerpts

Tuesday 10th January 2023 Westminster Hall

[Angela Crawley (Lanark and Hamilton East) (SNP)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered unaccompanied minors seeking asylum.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Gary, and I am grateful for the opportunity to lead today’s debate on an urgent and sadly all too familiar issue. Last month, 30 miles out at sea, at 3 am, in freezing conditions, four migrants died after a small boat capsized in the English channel. That is not a new story, sadly—it happens too often—but one of the dead was just a teenager. That news never gets any easier to hear or digest.

In that same tragedy, eight children were among those who were successfully rescued by the coastguard. The Mirror reported that one 12-year-old survivor was escaping Afghanistan after his whole family had been killed by the Taliban. None of us can imagine the horrors that drive people to get on boats or take perilous journeys to cross the channel, yet those horrors are experienced by innocent children every day.

Unaccompanied asylum-seeking children arrive alone, afraid, and have no idea where to start. Unfortunately, this Government are fixated on criminalising and discrediting desperate people who have come to the UK to seek a new life. Vulnerable children and young people are having their rights and protections stripped, and that is the wrong approach. Our duty must be to give them a warm welcome, a fresh start and the protection and hope that they so desperately need when they arrive to seek refuge in the UK.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

I commend the hon. Lady for bringing forward this debate. It is an absolutely super subject, but a very worrying one as well. Does she agree that all young people, no matter their backgrounds, deserve a healthy, stable upbringing that gives them the same chance to succeed in later life? Most of these minors will be helpless. Does the hon. Lady feel like we could do better to fulfil our duty of care by not only providing food and clothing, but ensuring that they have a chance of a future life with an education and a stable home?

[Angela Crawley]

I absolutely agree. I thank the hon. Member for that intervention, as always. He is correct. We have a duty not only as a country and a nation, but as humans, to acknowledge that these children are not the criminal gangs or the ones facilitating the process of getting to the UK. They are simply the innocent bystanders of a process that they themselves may not have chosen.

Far too often, children have been incorrectly declared as adults. An immigration officer will make an age judgment based on demeanour or appearance. If they are judged to be an adult, they are not sent for an age assessment. Rather, they are given a date of birth and sent to live in shared rooms with adults. In 2021, a specialist programme run by the Refugee Council worked with 233 young people over 12 months. The Home Office had initially determined them to be “certainly” adults, when in fact, only 14 of them were adults. That means that 219 of those children were denied the rights and protections of a child, and were exposed to further exploitation, trafficking and violence as a result of that determination. Those 219 children were counting on us to take care of them.

The Home Office refuses to document how often that happens, how many children are judged incorrectly to be adults or what happens to them. There is no process to track such a decision. If there is any dubiety in that decision, there is no pathway to ensure that those individuals are protected and safeguarded until a definitive determination can be made. It is fair to say that even the determinations that are made are questionable at times. I therefore ask the Minister to be more transparent about frontline decision making. Will he commit to publishing statistics on age-disputed children who are initially treated as adults? Will he outline a pathway for those individuals to ensure that they are protected and safeguarded within the system, as they should be?

The Nationality and Borders Act 2022 gives the Home Office powers to conduct medical age assessments. However, the British Association of Social Workers has stated that there is no known scientific method that can precisely determine age. Pushing scientific methods upon age-disputed young people is incredibly insensitive. It ignores the trauma they have been through and the atrocities they have seen.

Those who are wrongly declared as adults will not be able to avoid deportation to Rwanda under this Government’s cruel plans. That is a terrifying prospect for children and young people. I am disappointed in the UK Government. A place that was supposed to be their second chance and a place of safety is only adding to their stress and anxiety. I therefore ask the Minister: when will the report from the Age Estimation Science Advisory Committee on specific scientific methods for age assessment be made available? Will learning from the national age assessment board pilots be shared, given their frontline role in rectifying the Home Office’s mistakes? We need to ensure that these processes are transparent and that we can scrutinise them appropriately.

Unaccompanied asylum-seeking children are being abandoned by the Home Office and placed in hotels that are desperately unfit for anyone to live in, but particularly children, who are forced to live alongside adults, further exposing them to potential harms. The Home Office has set out its intentions to speed up the process by which unaccompanied children are transferred from temporary hotels to long-term care, but it is simply not enough. Again, that process is not transparent. It only normalises the use of hotels that are unfit accommodation for anyone, but particularly for children who should be nowhere near them.

Every Child Protected Against Trafficking says that housing children in hotels is unlawful, dangerous and contrary to the UK’s child welfare legislation. In October last year, more than 220 unaccompanied children went missing from hotels. Had those children been in the care of authorities, they would have been protected. I ask the Minister again, what is the pathway and how do we ensure that no child who is placed in any form of accommodation can go missing without someone being directly accountable and responsible?

Unaccompanied children are alone, scared and vulnerable. Many have left behind their families not knowing how they are; they deserve to have their families join them in safety. The Home Office’s position on altering family reunification rights for children is nothing short of ridiculous. This Government believe that allowing children and young people to sponsor their families would incentivise parents to send their children on dangerous journeys to the UK. Whether that is the case or not, I do not believe it is a decision any parent would make outside of the most desperate of circumstances.

Turning briefly to the point on family reunification, the Home Office’s minimum income requirement means that UK citizens and settled persons currently have to earn £18,600 before they can sponsor a spouse or partner to join them—more, if children are involved. That means that a substantial percentage of the population who do not earn that sum cannot live with their family and have to leave the country. Many thousands of families have been split apart since its introduction almost a decade ago, and many more have been affected by the rules that will also apply to European economic area family members.

Rather than reduce the level of income, or abandon the policy altogether as I have argued for repeatedly, reports have emerged over Christmas that the Home Office is thinking of increasing it further, splitting more families apart. The fact is that many families in the UK right now may struggle to meet those requirements in the current circumstances. To place that requirement arbitrarily on families only serves to ensure that further families will not receive reunification. It is not a reason to keep families apart. That they make those perilous journeys only highlights the grave circumstances that children flee from.

The Nationality and Borders Act 2022 brought in a ham-fisted policy with deferential treatment for refugees seeking family reunion based on the way they entered the UK. Those who arrived outside of one of the ever-dwindling safe and legal routes need to meet higher tests and additional requirements before being able to reunite with their family members. Organisations such as Families Together are calling for this discriminatory policy to be scrapped.

I close my contribution by apologising to the unaccompanied asylum-seeking children, who come to this country seeking safe harbour—because it is simply not the case. I apologise to the thousands of children who have come here and potentially been lost in a system with no traceability, because this Government refuse to acknowledge that they are in fact children. I am sorry that I could not cover more in this debate, but their voices and stories should not be ignored just because of where they came from. The fact is that they are children, and they should be treated as such. The harm and neglect that they are facing after seeking refuge in the UK can only be blamed on this Government, and the heartless Home Office polices that they exhibit.

I do not wish to hammer home the point any more than I already have, but it is simply unimaginable to me that we have, just recently, 219 children who we cannot account for, and many more who we have incorrectly administered as adults. What will the Minister do to correct that? It simply cannot continue.