Lost Childhoods: The consequences of flawed age assessments at the UK border
Our new report shows that child refugees who come to the UK alone are continuing to face harassment, abuse and criminalisation as a result of being wrongly treated as adults and placed in accommodation with adult strangers.
The report ‘Lost Childhoods: The consequences of flawed age assessments at the UK border’ from the Refugee and Migrant Children’s Consortium – a coalition of over 100 organisations co-chaired by the Helen Bamber Foundation – revealed that in the first half of 2024 alone, 63 local authorities in England and Scotland received 603 referrals from various stakeholders who suspected young people were being wrongly placed in adult accommodation or detention due to inaccurate Home Office age assessments. In 493 cases where a decision was made on age, over half cases (262) were found to be children.
Children wrongly assessed as adults are not only forced to share rooms with strangers in adult accommodation, but they are also at risk of being wrongly convicted for crimes of illegal entry or facilitating illegal entry. Between June 2022 and September 2024, 510 people arriving on ‘small boats’ were charged with ‘illegal arrival’ of which 26 cases where children wrongly treated as adults were charged with offences. At least 16 children were wrongly held for various periods of time in adult prisons leaving them at huge risk.
The process of visual assessment at ports needs urgent reform – the use of X-rays and other ‘scientific methods’ to assess age and the creation of the National Age Assessment Board (NAAB) will do nothing to address the root of the problem.
The report calls on the Home Office to only dispute a child's claimed age in exceptional circumstances, and to routinely notify local authorities whenever a potential child has been determined by them to be an adult. It also calls for full statistics on age disputes to be published, showing the number of children who are taken into care from the adult asylum system. The government currently refuses to disclose this data.
Kamena Dorling, Director of Policy at the Helen Bamber Foundation, said:
"Yet again, data from local authorities clearly shows that there is something fundamentally wrong with Home Office decision-making at the border, and hundreds of children are suffering as a result - left without support and forced to share rooms in adult accommodation and some even spending months in adult prisons.
It is unclear what further evidence is needed before action is taken. We need urgent change to the flawed policy of border officials assessing age based on appearance."