Home Office age assessment of unaccompanied asylum-seeking children criticised
The way the Home Office decides if an asylum seeker is a child or adult is incorrect, inaccurate and flawed, a top county council chief has warned.
As of September 2024, Hampshire County Council is caring for 323 children who arrived in the country. Between January and March 2024, 55 children arrived at Hampshire as UASC.
The council indicates that nearly all new UASCs are over 16 and placed in post-16 accommodation.
Steph How, deputy director of children’s services at Hampshire County Council, said that ‘separate’ children, as they called them, arrived from three different routes.
One is the National Transfer Scheme (NTS), where they have noticed the age profile of children is much older than it used to be.
Another route involves children arriving in the back of lorries, along with a significant number of young people found in asylum hotels, which is “by far” the route where the greatest number of young people are received.
Mrs How highlighted that one of the challenges they are facing is the Home Office age assessment process that determines the young person’s age and stipulates whether it is an adult or a child.
Mrs How said: “I remember very well that in the middle of our full [Ofsted] inspection, we had 33 young people in one day in the hotel that we had to assess and accommodate because they were children, and we were told they were not.
“We have raised some concerns around the age assessment process at the highest level. The challenge is that fundamentally, it is believed that those being put in a hotel are not children. I think what is flawed is the age assessment process.
“So I don’t think the hotel is the problem; the issue is with the age assessment process, which is incorrect, inaccurate and actually flawed.”
With the increase in ‘separated’ children, accommodation costs have risen, placing additional pressure on the council and exceeding the grant received from the central government.
The cost of these types of accommodation has created a £4m pressure for Hampshire council in the last two years. Of the total, £2.4m goes to fund placement for under 18s and £1.6m for UASC Care Leavers.
In 2021/22, the council received a government grant totalling £66,300 to care for 272 with an expenditure of £6,1m. In 2024/25, with the same grant amount, the council estimated that it will have an expenditure of £22,8 million towards the care of 531 children seeking asylum in the county.
Separated children will need to be looked after by the local authority until they reach 18 years. They will then have care leaver status with continuing support from the local authority until they are 25.
Whilst the Home Office provides set funding for separated children, an Association of Directors of Children’s Services report evidenced that the funding only covers 50 per cent of the actual costs to the local authority.