Calais: Child Refugees

Lord Roberts of Llandudno Excerpts

Monday 24th October 2016 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Roberts of Llandudno]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what steps they are taking to fulfil the obligation under the Immigration Act 2016 to accept unaccompanied child refugees before the camps at Calais and Dunkirk are demolished on 31 October.

[The Minister of State, Home Office (Baroness Williams of Trafford) (Con)]

My Lords, the camp clearance is now under way. Home Office teams have been deployed to France to support the identification, assessment and transfer of eligible children to the UK. We transferred as many children as possible who qualified under the Dublin regulation before the camp clearance began, and we began transfers of other unaccompanied refugee children under Section 67 of the Immigration Act 2016 over the weekend. Transfers of those who qualify under the Dublin regulations and those who meet the wider criteria of Section 67 of the Immigration Act are ongoing.

[Lord Roberts of Llandudno (LD)]

We all welcome the child refugees. However, can the Minister say why it has taken more than 12 months for us to reach here? We have argued week after week, and yet until a few days before the demolition of the camps the answer was, “We can’t accept them”. Why was that? Can we have a guarantee that in the future, every single child who is in Calais or Dunkirk on the last day will be found a place here in the United Kingdom? Before I finish, I thank all those wonderful volunteers who have given so much of their time and expertise to get this act together.

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

I join the noble Lord in thanking all the volunteers and everyone who has been involved, including local authorities here, in expediting the process of getting children to this country. Why has it not happened sooner? I have explained several times now at this Dispatch Box that we have been reliant on several aspects of process to get the children transferred here, not least the lists we provide to the French through the NGOs. Those have now been forthcoming and have been released to us, and the process has started, albeit quite late in the day. But the point is that the process is well under way now as the camp begins to be cleared, and many of those children are now here.