Hundreds of asylum seeker children are wrongly being treated as adults by the Home Office, according to data from dozens of local authorities.
Responses from freedom of information requests showed that two-thirds of children – 867 out of 1,386 – deemed to be adults by the Home Office were later confirmed to be children.
A report that collated the data from FoI responses from 70 different local authorities about age assessments carried out by specialist social workers on age-disputed young asylum seekers said the number is likely to be an underestimate.
The authors of the report, the charities Helen Bamber Foundation, Humans for Rights Network and Asylum Aid said not all councils responded to the FoI request and that some children wrongly classified as adults by the Home Office are never referred for a detailed age assessment social worker so do not have the opportunity to have their age corrected.
Wrongly classifying children as adults means they could be placed alone in unsupervised accommodation alongside adults they do not know or wrongly placed in adult immigration detention centres. Some children as young as 14 have been forced to share rooms with unrelated adults, according to the report.
The findings have emerged in the week the government will debate amendments to the illegal migration bill. One amendment announced on Friday evening states it seeks “increasing protections around the safeguarding risk caused by adults pretending to be children”. It is introducing scientific age assessments and adds that any age-disputed person who refuses to undergo a scientific age assessment test will automatically be treated as an adult.
The new plans will give children no right to appeal against incorrect age assessments and reduce access to judicial review as a mechanism to challenge these decisions.
Yet in January 2023, the government’s own scientific advisory committee warned that plans to use X-rays to check the age of children seeking asylum could put them at risk of harm from radiation and cause distress. The advisers said it was not possible to scientifically confirm a person’s age “with precision”.
The Home Office said that between 2016 and December 2022 there were 7,900 asylum cases where age was disputed and subsequently resolved, of which 49% (3,833) were later found to be adults.
One unaccompanied 16-year-old, Abdul, who arrived in the UK after crossing the Channel on a dinghy said that he was asked to write his age down on a piece of paper. He later found his age had been recorded as 23. A full age assessment was carried out, he was confirmed to be 16 and was placed in the care of social services.
Maddie Harris of Humans for Rights Network said she and her colleagues had worked with hundreds of children who found themselves in the same situation as Abdul.
“These children are living in isolated hotels with unrelated adults and are frequently distressed, traumatised and afraid,” she said.
A Home Office spokesperson said: “Adults claiming to be children, or children being wrongly treated as adults present serious safeguarding risks, which is why we are launching the national age assessment board, introducing scientific measures, such as X-rays, as well tabling new amendments to the illegal migration bill to further strengthen the measures in place.”
