Question to the Home Office:

To ask His Majesty's Government, further to the White Paper Restoring Control over the Immigration System (CP 1326), published in May 2025, what steps they intend to take to secure the status of children entering adulthood, including care leavers and children who have been in care; and what plans they have to secure those young people’s citizenship rights.

The Home Secretary set out in the Immigration White Paper published on 12 May 2025 that the Home Office will ensure children who have been in the UK for some time, turn 18 and discover they do not have status, are fully supported and able to regularise their status and settle. This also included a clear pathway for those children in care without status.

In light of this commitment, we are considering the specific position of migrant children in care who reach adulthood without having secured immigration status and the support currently available to help them regularise their status. We are considering appropriate safeguards for these children, through our ‘children in care’ policy, recognising that many of these children may have been unaware of their unlawful status.

A range of reforms are underway across the immigration and asylum system, and the development of a pathway to settlement for children in care without status must be considered alongside these changes.

No formal consultation will take place. Instead, we will undertake targeted engagement with external stakeholders to help us to understand the challenges in this area and develop a policy solution which supports children in care without status while upholding the need to have a robust and coherent migration system.

Any changes for this cohort will complement the existing work already undertaken by our Public Protection Specialist Safeguarding Team in relation to nationality issues.