‘Flawed decisions’ saw 262 child asylum seekers wrongly classed as adults

More than 260 child asylum seekers were wrongly put in adult accommodation or detention in the first half of last year, a coalition of charities has said.

The Refugee and Migrant Children’s Consortium said such “flawed decision-making” has led to children being put at risk.

Currently if someone claims to be a child but has no documentary evidence, immigration officers have to make an initial age decision on whether the person should be treated as a child or an adult.

The person can only be treated as an adult if two Home Office staff assess that their physical appearance and demeanour very strongly suggest that they are “significantly over 18”.

The group of more than 100 charities called for age determination by the Home Office to be limited and for people insisting they are children to be treated as adults “only in exceptional cases eg evidence they are in their late 20s”.

They said children fleeing war, persecution and human rights abuses often will not have appropriate documentation.

If there is reasonable doubt about someone’s claim to be a child the National Age Assessment Board (NAAB) – a Home Office body made up mainly of social workers – can carry out age assessments.

But the coalition said the board is “hugely expensive, costing £1.7 million a year” and called for it to be scrapped, with a focus instead on country-wide training and support of local authority social workers.

The charity report said that between January and June 2024, 63 local authorities in England and Scotland received 603 referrals of young people wrongly placed in adult accommodation or detention after “flawed Home Office age assessments”.

Of these, 493 cases resulted in the age being determined, of which more than half (53%) were found to be children.

The report stated that “at least 262 children were misclassified as adults in just six months, exposing them to safeguarding risk and even criminal charges in some cases”.

The coalition said the true figure is likely to be “significantly higher” because not all local authorities responded to the requests for data and not all children are being referred to children’s services.

For the 18 months from January 2022 to June 2023, there were more than 1,300 children wrongly assessed to be adults by the Home Office and sent to adult accommodation or detention, the charities said.

The Refugee Council – one of the coalition members – said there had been “repeated warnings” to governments but children were still being “put in unsafe situations at serious risk of abuse and neglect because of flawed decision-making that routinely mistakes them for adults”.

Chief executive Enver Solomon said: “Inaccurate age assessments are leaving them (children) highly vulnerable in adult accommodation, or at risk of criminalisation with cases of exploitation and abuse severely threatening their mental health.

“When dealing with children the highest level of safeguarding must apply. We urge the new Government to take immediate action to do better by vulnerable children it has a duty to protect.”

Kamena Dorling, director of policy at the Helen Bamber Foundation which carried out the data analysis, said: “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.”

A Home Office spokesperson said: “We will never compromise on border security.

“We have robust processes in place to verify and assess an individual’s age where there is doubt and where there is no documentary evidence, including the National Age Assessment Board, of a team of trained social workers whose task is to conduct full age assessments.

“We continue to review all options to improve age assessment.”