Unaccompanied Asylum-seeking Children

Tim Loughton Excerpts

Tuesday 24th January 2023 Commons Chamber

[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.

[Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham) (Con)]

I share the concern about the story, but it is not new news. Last year, the Home Office came in front of the Home Affairs Committee to be interrogated about this, and there was a particular problem with the hotel in Hove, which instigated the story in The Observer at the weekend, because the Home Office did not tell the local council when it was putting children there in the first place. However, there have not been any reports to Sussex police of children being snatched and abducted by gangs outside.

There are two questions that the Minister may like to clear up. First, there is a grey area over who is responsible as the safeguarding body for children in hotels. Is it the Home Office or the local authority? There seem to be different stories. Secondly, is he using specialist refugee children’s charities, which have welfare and safeguarding training, to look after children in the hotels and ensure that they are not being taken advantage of, as he has done at Dover and other ports of entry? Those children are not criminals, and we cannot put them in a secure facility. They are free to come and go, but we need people keeping a special eye on them.

[Robert Jenrick]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for those questions. He is right to make the final point, which is that these are not secure locations. Young people are not detained in them. We do not have the legal powers to do that and I do not think any right hon. or hon. Member from across the House would wish us to do that. It is inevitable that some young people will choose to leave these settings, as, very sadly, they do from local authority care homes, but that is not to diminish or renege on our responsibility to reduce that as far as we possibly can.

We have relationships with charities and the voluntary sector. I will happily take up with the Department whether there is more we can do there. We have made good use of those relationships in other settings, such as hotels for adults and Manston. As I said earlier, there is a very significant amount of specialist support in the hotels. I specifically asked the officials running them what we would find on any given day. It is several security guards, a number of nurses and a number of social workers, as well as team leaders running the operation. So they are well staffed by well-trained and professional individuals who are drawn from other settings where they are used to looking after vulnerable young people.

Lastly, on the first point my hon. Friend made, there is a challenge around the legal status of a local authority with respect to these hotels. Our objective is to reduce demand for hotels as fast as possible, so that young people are in this accommodation for a very short period of time while we get them to local authorities where they can be cared for properly in accordance with the law.