Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what steps she has taken to help ensure that unaccompanied asylum-seeking minors are adequately protected from potential abduction whilst staying in hotels procured by her Department.

The rise in the number of small boat crossings has placed significant pressures on local authority care placements for young people.

The Home Office takes the wellbeing, welfare and security of children and minors in our care extremely seriously. Robust safeguarding procedures are in place to ensure all children and minors are safe and supported as we seek urgent placements with local authorities.

The National Transfer scheme (NTS) transferred 3,148 children to local authorities with children’s services between 1 July 2021 and 30 September 2022, which is over four times the number of transfers on the year before. To further expand the scheme, we are providing local authorities with children’s services with an additional £15,000 for every eligible young person they take into their care from a dedicated UASC hotel, or the Reception and Safe Care Service in Kent, by the end of February 2023.

When any young person goes missing the ‘missing persons protocol’ is followed and led by our directly engaged social workers. A multi-agency, missing persons protocol is mobilised involving the police and the local authority, who have a shared statutory responsibility to safeguard all children including missing migrant children in order to establish their whereabouts and to ensure that they are safe.

The MARS (Missing After Reasonable Steps) protocol is followed for any looked after child who goes missing from a care setting, including the UASC hotels.

The information below sets out numbers of young people who went missing from the hotels housing unaccompanied children:

• The last 18 months of 01.09.21 – 28.02.23 there were 444 missing episodes and on 253 of these occasions the young person was subsequently located.