It is a privilege to have secured this Adjournment debate on age-disputed refugee children. I should declare at the outset that I am an officer of the all-party parliamentary group on refugees.
I know the Minister will agree that there are few issues more important than the safety of children, but the current system for dealing with age-disputed refugee children is letting many of them down, with their safety and wellbeing put at risk as a result. The Helen Bamber Foundation, the Humans for Rights Network and the Refugee Council have obtained data showing that over an 18-month period between January 2022 and June 2023, more than 1,300 children were wrongly assessed to be adults by the Home Office. Such incorrect assessments are usually the product of a short visual examination made by a border official almost immediately after the children arrive in the UK.
Incorrect assessments result in children being placed in adult accommodation and immigration detention, exposing them to significant safeguarding risks and denying them the support they need to rebuild a life that has already been distorted by trauma and hardship. Of specific concern are the cases of children being sent to Wethersfield or ending up in adult prisons. I will return to that point in greater detail later, but I will first explain why the current process for assessing the age of asylum seekers is problematic. Before I do so, I thank the Refugee Council for the information it has provided to me in advance of this debate. I also sincerely thank Omer, Motawakil and Amanual, three young refugees wrongly assessed as adults, who were kind enough to meet me earlier this afternoon to share their experiences and who are in the Gallery. I respectfully encourage the Minister to reach out to the Refugee Council to see whether it can facilitate a similar meeting for her, as I found my meeting both eye-opening and deeply moving.
Let me turn back to the issue of flawed assessment processes for children seeking asylum. The issue emerges from the fact that many children seeking asylum arrive here without a passport or birth certificate, often because they have never had such documentation or because it was taken from them during their journey to the UK. In other cases, they fled such trauma that they were unable to collect any of their documentation. I understand that if a young person arrives here without ID, it can be difficult to determine their age, and no system for doing so will be perfect, but charities also tell me of children arriving with ID, only to have it immediately set aside at the border.
As I understand it, the current model places the power to change a young asylum seeker’s life in the hands of a border official conducting an age assessment based, according to Home Office guidance, on a person’s “appearance and demeanour”. If said border official believes that the asylum seeker is the age they claim to be—and different border officials’ judgments will be hugely variable—they are placed into the care of the local authority, where further age assessments carried out by qualified social workers can take place if necessary, and where support networks are more readily available. If, however, the border official believes that a person’s appearance and demeanour very strongly suggest that they are significantly over 18, that person will face an age interview at a processing centre in Dover.
It is not just refugee charities that have raised concerns about this process. Even the Home Office’s own guidance makes it clear that physical appearance is a notoriously unreliable basis for assessment of chronological age, and that demeanour can also be notoriously unreliable. What is more, the independent chief inspector of borders and immigration has described age assessments being undertaken at ports as “perfunctory”.
Beyond the visual assessment, I am aware that many refugees who have been through the process have raised concerns about the interviews that have been undertaken. Their experiences include not being provided with the correct interpreter, being called liars and facing inappropriate comments about their physical appearance. This is unacceptable, and the reason it is so worrying is that the stakes are so high. When children are incorrectly assessed as adults, they are placed into poorly supervised adult accommodation, hotels and detention centres. The safeguarding risks for such children are obvious: some are as young as 14, sharing living accommodation with unrelated adults. Tragically, there have been multiple cases of these children being sexually and physically assaulted. Other children have witnessed suicide or self-harm by the traumatised adults they are living with, who are in need of help themselves.
Even if they avoid that, children in such settings still miss out on access to the pastoral and educational support that they need to rebuild their lives. Many have reported being stuck in their hotel rooms for days on end, with little or no information on how to challenge their age assessment and no certainty about their future. The toll this takes on their mental health and wellbeing is huge. Of the safeguarding referrals made to the Refugee Council relating to potential children staying in adult accommodation, the highest reported risk is suicide. The second highest risk is that the children abscond and we lose all sight of them, not knowing whether they have become homeless, destitute or exploited by someone offering them accommodation elsewhere. This is not alarmist: it is happening.
I am afraid to say that the Government’s recent illegal migration legislation poses further risks—chief among them that children will be inadvertently sent to Rwanda. We know that last year, there were numerous cases of children who had been detained as adults being issued with notices of intent to remove them to Rwanda on flights that ultimately never took off. The Government recently rejected Baroness Lister’s amendment to the Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill, which would have ensured that children who had been wrongly assessed as adults by the Home Office would not be removed to Rwanda while that decision was still being challenged. In light of that, I would be grateful if the Minister could provide assurances that appeal rights regarding age assessments will be granted, and I implore her to ensure that people appealing their decision will not be removed until that process has taken place. Those seem like reasonable steps to avoid traumatised children wrongly being sent halfway across the world.
As well as addressing this issue, I am sure that in her response the Minister will want to talk about some of the measures the Government have put in place to improve the age assessment process. I know that these include the recent authorisation of X-rays and MRI scans in what are being called scientific age assessments, and the establishment of a national age assessment board.
Will the Minister address the concerns of the Refugee Council that the national age assessment board will not work with people who have just arrived in the UK, and therefore will not impact initial age decisions? Can the Minister refer to any evidence showing that the use of X-rays or MRIs is more accurate than Merton-compliant age assessments carried out by qualified social workers, which are favoured by charities working in the refugee sector? Will the Minister explain what happens if an asylum seeker refuses an X-ray or MRI scan? There is an important principle that medical consent should not be sought from a person under duress. Given possible issues with the proposals put forward by the Government, will the Minister consider requests from the Refugee Council and others to limit the conduct of age assessments to fully qualified staff with relevant training?
On the safeguarding issues that I mentioned earlier, I hope the Minister will consider ensuring that the Home Office monitors what happens to people claiming to be children whom the Home Office has determined are adults, and establishing proper processes so that the Department can track the outcomes for those who are later found to be children. Even if the Minister chooses not to pursue those suggestions, I hope she will acknowledge that more needs to be done to improve the age assessment process for young asylum seekers.
I will end by reiterating what these children have been through. They have been driven away from their homes and the places they loved by violence and persecution, separated from family and friends, and forced to undertake an often perilous journey to the UK. Those children should not face new risks to their safety when they get here, and they should not be thrown into the terrifying limbo that is the adult asylum detention system. They should be greeted with fairness and decency when they reach these shores. I am sure the Minister would agree that those are fundamentally British values, so I look forward to hearing how the Government will uphold them when reforming age assessment processes for young asylum seekers.