Draft Immigration (Age Assessments) Regulations 2023

Stephen Kinnock Excerpts

Monday 20th November 2023 General Committees

[Stephen Kinnock (Aberavon) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Hosie. The Government’s plans to use scientific methods in verifying the age of unaccompanied asylum-seeking children have been long in the making, but we would not necessarily know it from the somewhat sketchy evidence around the SI or the rather flimsy documents published alongside it.

The legislative framework for such assessments was set by the Nationality and Borders Act 2022, which has been on the statute books for more than 18 months. Yet the Government have still not managed to answer some of the most basic questions that these proposals raise, in particular how much they will cost and what their impact will be on our health services, at a time when our NHS is under unprecedented strain.

These are questions that any reasonable Member would expect the Government to address in their impact assessment. However, no such assessment has been provided, on the basis that, in the Government’s words:

“the policy and design are still under development.”

I note that the explanatory memorandum commits to preparing a full impact assessment as implementation of the policy moves forward. If the Minister could commit to a timely publication of such an assessment, I am sure that Members from all parties would be very grateful.

It is also unclear to me, as it was to the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee, why the Government should feel the need to move forward with legislation that is still in the process of being developed. We would be very grateful if the Minister could shed some light on that question posed by the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee.

We also find that House of Lords Committee expressing palpable frustration at the repeated running-up against a brick wall of any reasonable requests to Ministers for basic information, in this case about the extent of any further consultation between Ministers and experts from the medical and wider scientific communities beyond the members of the Government’s hand-picked Age Estimation Science Advisory Committee, to which the Minister referred. More importantly, what specific feedback have Ministers received from experts beyond the members of that committee in the course of any consultations that have taken place?

These questions really matter, because there is clearly no evidence of consensus among experts in support of the Government’s plans—far from it, in fact. From a report in a recent edition of the New Scientist, it is clear that a widely shared view among experts is that what the Government describe as scientific age verification is based largely on what those experts describe as pseudo-science. Based on their public statements, a range of expert bodies, representing such diverse fields as social work, paediatrics, dentistry and radiology, also seem to be proactively urging their members to play no part in such practices.

Therefore, my final question to the Minister is this: what thought have the Government given to how they might be able to implement the measures that he has set out today if professionals in the sector are not willing to operationalise them? My question specifically is this: do the Government have a plan B in the event that the key practitioners are not prepared to operationalise the measures that have been set out today?

[Paul Blomfield]

My hon. Friend raises some important questions, as others have, and he will know the concerns that we raised when the Nationality and Borders Act was in Committee. Clearly, we are in a situation where the actual implementation of these measures will fall to a future Labour Government, so I wonder whether he could confirm something. If it is our experience in Government that these measures do not add value and do not assist the process, will we review and scrap them?

[Stephen Kinnock]

We will certainly keep these measures under review, as would be the duty of any sensible Government. Policy making should be based on evidence, on facts and on the law, and Labour Members remain absolutely committed to those basic principles. If our review concludes that they are working, effective and accurate, then we would look to retain them. However, if such a review concluded that they were counterproductive, ineffective or damaging, particularly around safeguarding and so on, then—of course—we believe in evidence-based policy and that is a very important principle for any Government to pursue.

With that response to my hon. Friend, I conclude my remarks. I thank the Minister for his attention and look forward to hearing his response.