Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what information her Department holds on local authority capacity to accept refugee children under the Dubs scheme and allegations that the Dubs scheme has encouraged traffickers to exploit such children.
The Home Office consulted extensively with local authorities on their capacity to host unaccompanied children to arrive at the number of additional children they could take under section 67. Over 400 local authority representatives attended events in England, Scotland and Wales. On 8 September 2016, the Minister for Immigration wrote to local authorities to ask them to confirm their capacity to host all unaccompanied asylum seeking children, regardless of how they reached the UK. Local authorities told us they had the capacity to support 480 unaccompanied children. This capacity was in addition to the more than 4,000 unaccompanied children already in local authority care.
The migration crisis has shown that pull factors, such as policy changes and political messaging, can influence the movements of migrants. Approximately two thirds of asylum-seekers in the EU last year chose to travel to Germany and Sweden after passing through many safe countries en route. Whether it is push or pull factors that motivate children to come to Europe, it is always in the child’s best interest to enable them to come before they need to make dangerous journeys to Europe and before they become unaccompanied. That is why the Government’s strategy is to resettle the most vulnerable refugees directly from the regions; this is how we stop traffickers and smugglers from exploiting vulnerable people and children affected by conflict. In 2016, we resettled more than 5,000 people under the Syrian Vulnerable Persons Resettlement Scheme and the Vulnerable Children’s Resettlement Scheme.