Refugee and Migrant Children’s Consortium warns of alarming safeguarding failures due to flawed age assessments
A new report from the Refugee and Migrant Children's Consortium (RMCC) raises ongoing concerns about the Home Office's approach to age assessments for unaccompanied asylum-seeking children, describing the failings in the age dispute process as "a systemic and large-scale safeguarding failure by the state."
The 10-page report can be downloaded here.
RMCC is a group of NGOs working collaboratively to ensure that the rights and needs of refugee and migrant children are promoted, respected and met in accordance with the relevant domestic, regional and international standards.
In its new report, RMCC says in the months leading up to the 2024 general election, the Home Office continued to wrongly identify child asylum seekers as adults, relying on subjective judgments of their appearance and behaviour. As a result, many were placed in adult accommodation or detention, exposing them to serious safeguarding risks.
Data obtained by the Helen Bamber Foundation through Freedom of Information requests reveals that between January and June 2024, 63 local authorities in England and Scotland received a total of 603 referrals to their children's services departments concerning young people who had been placed in adult accommodation or detention. Of the 493 cases where an age assessment was completed, 53% were found to be children, meaning at least 262 minors had been wrongly housed in adult settings, exposing them to significant risk. However, the true number of is likely to be much higher, as many local authorities did not respond to data requests, and some councils fail to consistently track these cases.
In the period from January 2022 to June 2023, the data showed that more than 1,300 children had wrongly been assessed to be adults and sent to adult accommodation or detention.
The report notes: "Children as young as 14 have been placed in hotels or detention and many have been forced to share rooms with adults, with no safeguards in place. Horrifyingly, there have been reports of incidents of violence and sexual assault against children in hotels. When the Rwanda scheme was introduced, there were a number of cases of children who had been detained as adults being issued with 'notices of intent' to remove them to Rwanda. Children have also been wrongly moved to 'large site' accommodation such as RAF Wethersfield, which has been repeatedly found to cause harm to the mental and physical health of those placed there."
Staff in asylum accommodation are discouraged from referring individuals claiming to be children to local authorities due to Home Office guidance, which limits referrals to cases where the person is visibly "childlike" or highly vulnerable. This leads to many children wrongly treated as adults without support or information on how to challenge their classification. When local authorities do intervene, the Home Office often rejects their age assessments, the report adds.
The proposal to use 'scientific methods' for age assessment is criticised in the report as ineffective, expensive, and harmful. Methods such as X-rays or MRIs can only indicate whether an age is 'possible' and do not address the root problem of flawed at-port assessments. Children who refuse scientific age assessments risk being automatically treated as adults. The National Age Assessment Board (NAAB), costing £1.7 million a year, has also been criticised for its inefficiency, with one in seven of its assessments ordered by the Home Office despite local authorities already accepting the children's claimed ages.
While RMCC acknowledges that some adult asylum seekers may claim to be under 18, it emphasises that the answer cannot be a system designed to catch these cases at the cost of harming hundreds of children.
RMCC calls for significant improvements in the current system. Strengthening safeguards and enhancing support for age assessments conducted by local authority social workers should be a key priority. The report recommends limiting Home Office age determinations and treating young people asserting they are children as adults only in exceptional cases. It also calls for the publication and monitoring of statistics on age-determination outcomes and the abandonment of 'scientific' age assessment methods.
"Rather than focussing on extreme 'outlier' cases and giving the Home Office more and more control, it is time for the government to look at what actually works in age assessments and invest in supporting local authorities in carrying them out using their expertise as child protection professionals," the report stresses.
Enver Solomon, Chief Executive of the Refugee Council, commented that flawed decision-making continues to place vulnerable children in unsafe situations, exposing them to abuse and neglect. Many refugee children, who have fled war and persecution, face trauma and need specialist support to heal and integrate into their new communities. However, inaccurate age assessments often place them in adult accommodation, leaving them vulnerable to exploitation and abuse. Solomon urged the Government to take immediate action to improve protections for these children, underscoring that the highest level of safeguarding is essential in their care.
Kamena Dorling, Director of Policy at the Helen Bamber Foundation, stated: "We need urgent change to the flawed policy of border officials assessing age based on appearance."