I apologise for not being here earlier this afternoon. I had to go to the Liaison Committee’s meeting with the Prime Minister.
I want to start by following up on a point made by the Chair of the Joint Committee on Human Rights, the hon. and learned Member for Edinburgh South West (Joanna Cherry). In yesterday’s sitting, the issue of children and child refugees was raised more than 40 times by hon. Members across this Committee of the whole House. Many described their deep concern about how child refugees will be treated under the Bill. I have a great deal of respect for the Minister, but unfortunately he did not mention children once in his very short closing speech yesterday. It lasted just 13 minutes, which with 70 amendments before the Committee yesterday translates to about 10 seconds per amendment.
I agree with the hon. and learned Member for Edinburgh South West that the lack of scrutiny of the Bill is a huge concern, especially considering the importance of the
issues, the fact that the Government did not take up the Home Affairs Committee’s offer of pre-legislative scrutiny, the lack of evidence sessions, the large sweep of amendments tabled, the rushed process of introduction and the lack of any impact assessment. I hope that we will get a much more detailed and productive response from the Minister this evening.
I have tabled 10 amendments in this group, which essentially fall under one umbrella: protection for refugee children. All my amendments have the full support of the Children’s Commissioner and some arise from recommendations in the Home Affairs Committee’s small boats report, which we published last year.
I turn first to amendment 295. The Government have excluded unaccompanied children from the removal provisions in the Bill. We know that children will often have made very difficult and perilous journeys, probably at the hands of traffickers or smugglers. However, the Bill will oblige the Home Secretary to remove those unaccompanied children from the United Kingdom when they turn 18.
In the year ending September 2022, the UK received 5,152 applications for asylum from unaccompanied children. Many of them came from Sudan, a country facing political instability following years of civil war, where child marriage is rife for girls as young as 10. Under the Bill, a 13-year-old Sudanese girl, for example, could claim asylum in the UK, be placed in the care of a local authority and be fostered, spend five years at school, make friends, learn English, get an education, build a life and become a member of society, only to face removal on her 18th birthday. If that were allowed to happen, the Home Office would be removing a young woman who had built her life here and might only know this country as home. The Bill also dramatically increases the risk of children fleeing the system and disappearing before their 18th birthday, in the knowledge that they face certain removal. My amendment would not grant an automatic right for these children to remain in the United Kingdom; it would simply prevent their mandatory removal when they become adults, so that each case can be decided on an individual basis.
Turning to amendments 299 and 301, the Children’s Commissioner has raised concerns that under clause 3, the Home Secretary will still have the power to remove unaccompanied children. The explanatory notes state that this power will be used only in exceptional circumstances, but there is no further detail in the Bill about what that means. I tabled amendment 299 to establish the right of an unaccompanied child who makes a protection claim—including a claim to be a victim of slavery and human trafficking, as set out in section 69 of the Nationality and Borders Act—to have that claim considered before potential removal. I have also added my name to amendment 121, tabled by the hon. and learned Member for Edinburgh South West, which would strengthen the position further.
Although clause 5(4)(a) goes some way towards protecting such people by stopping their removal if they make a protection claim or a human rights claim, it is dependent on subsection (4)(b), which relies on the Secretary of State’s considering this to be an exceptional circumstance. I understand that such a power is likely to be used in respect of unaccompanied children from a country listed in new section 80AA(1) of the Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act 2002, under clause 50.
Without my amendment, the Home Secretary would, for example, decide the right of a 14-year-old unaccompanied asylum-seeking child from Albania to remain in the UK. Over recent months, there has been a growing view that Albanian boys are not in need of protection on their arrival in the UK. In fact, they are exceptionally vulnerable, having often been trafficked here without proper protection and pushed into forced labour or criminality. Again, hanging the threat of removal over these children’s heads is a guaranteed way of ensuring that those who arrive here unaccompanied will try to go it alone—run away from care, and slip out of the system and into the arms of traffickers and abusers. Therefore, amendment 301 goes further by removing the power of the Secretary of State to make arrangements for the removal of an unaccompanied child.
The Home Affairs Committee’s report on channel crossings, produced last year, raised grave concerns about the Home Office’s record of safeguarding children, from failures to identify vulnerable children through screening and assessments to failures of communication when transferring safeguarding responsibilities from one agency to another. There is also the disastrous and unforgivable failure of children going missing on the Home Office’s watch.
I greatly fear that the Home Office is simply not up to the job of keeping children safe and secure. That is why I ask the Minister to reconsider clauses 15 and 16, which set out how the Home Office would accommodate a child and would be given safeguarding responsibilities that currently sit with a local authority. These clauses are incredibly thin when it comes to such an essential issue as safeguarding children, and they make no provision for the state of the accommodation to be provided. Will the accommodation be regulated, which body will inspect it, how will decisions be made, and what support will be available for these children?
The Children’s Commissioner has made it clear that she does not believe that the Home Office is the right body to oversee the safeguarding of children, and I completely agree. That is why I have supported amendments 143, 144 and 145, tabled by the hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton), to ensure that our current statutory time and location restrictions on the detention of unaccompanied children and children with families are not disregarded.
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I also want to speak about clause 14, which would remove the role of the independent family returns panel in the removal process. The independent family returns panel plays a vital role in safeguarding families and children from harm while awaiting removal, and in ensuring that they are returned to a country that is safe. It was introduced by the coalition Government to end the detention of children and provide advice on the welfare and safeguarding aspects of removal arrangements made for families. The “duty to remove” provisions proposed in the Bill will mean that the IFRP’s overseeing of the handling of families at ports will become essential. If the Government are going to take us back a decade in safeguarding measures, will they please think again and put some mitigations in place, and will they please remove clause 14?
On the specific issue of removal provisions in the Bill regarding children and their families, I have tabled amendments 304 and 306. Under clause 30, a person
who has ever met the four conditions relating to removal from the UK would forever be ineligible for any route to British citizenship. It seems completely wrong that this applies to children who, by the nature of their age, are not making these decisions or journeys by themselves. It cannot be fair or reasonable that an eight-year-old child brought to the UK illegally by their parents should be ruled as ineligible for citizenship for life. That is illiberal and unjust, and to hold a child responsible for the acts of their parents seems fundamentally wrong. Accepting this amendment would not bestow any rights on a child to claim British citizenship, but it would ensure that nobody’s rights were removed because of the actions of their parents.
Amendment 306 would solidify the rights of a family unit to be considered as a whole, rather than as individuals treated separately by the Home Office, when satisfying the removal provisions in clause 5. This amendment would make it explicitly clear on the face of the Bill that family members arriving in the United Kingdom would be removed only if it was safe for all family members to be removed to the same country. That would mean that a father or husband would not be removed to a country listed in the schedule as safe for men if it was not safe for all members of the family unit, including a wife and daughters.
I want to turn now to my amendments that build on the recommendations in the Home Affairs Committee’s report on small boats, which were obviously reached on a cross-party basis. Our report found specific and serious concerns about child protection, including in the practice of placing unaccompanied asylum-seeking children in hotels, which has led, as we know, to hundreds of children disappearing. Currently, a child’s asylum application will take on average 550 days. That is 100 days longer than an adult’s application, and the issue of age verification and assessment is a very live one, with cases of children often being mistaken for adults. The Committee therefore recommended that the Government commission an independent review of children’s experiences of the asylum system, including an examination of the support needs of young asylum seekers—including failed asylum seekers—and refugees up to the age of 25. I know that the Government are committed to securing the welfare of unaccompanied children and young adults in the asylum system, so I look forward to the Minister responding, hopefully positively, to new clause 14.
The Committee’s report included many witness testimonies on the significant lack of support for vulnerable children who are left to navigate the asylum system alone, often with language and cultural barriers. That must be a terrifying and scarring experience for many of those children and young adults, so new clause 15 introduces a provision for each child to be provided with an independent child trafficking guardian. These provisions are already in place in Northern Ireland and Scotland, and would ensure greater consistency across the whole of the country and deliver independent legal guardianship to all separated children here in the UK. The Children’s Commissioner fully supports this amendment based on the Home Affairs Committee’s recommendation, and I hope that the Minister will do so too. While acknowledging the productive work the Government are doing with the French authorities, I ask the Minister to consider new clause 16, which would integrate the Select Committee’s recommendation that trained child protection workers should work directly with vulnerable child migrants on the French coast.
New clause 33 is incredibly simple and would firmly establish the right of any child to claim asylum. I agree completely with the Children’s Commissioner that children should continue to be allowed to claim asylum, however they arrived here. No vulnerable child should be turned away because of where they were born, because of decisions made by their parents or because of the actions of traffickers or smugglers. I cite the example of an Iranian boy who was trafficked to the UK alone. He believed his family had been killed, he had no concept of what England is and he had no English language, but he had been trafficked here by criminals. Under this unamended Bill, he would not be eligible to apply for leave to remain in the UK. I acknowledge that the Government want to stop the criminal gangs behind the small boats, but they must not do so by refusing to deal with such cases. A child can never, and should never, be used as a battering ram to punish criminals—it is just not right.
Establishing a safe and legal route for refugee children, akin to the Dubs amendment, or fulfilling the rights children had under the Dublin agreement, would go a long way towards ensuring that they do not fall into the hands of traffickers. I therefore tabled new clause 32, on refugee family reunion for unaccompanied children, in line with the Home Affairs Committee’s recommendations in both 2018 and 2022. This amendment would establish safe passage for unaccompanied refugee children to be reunited with a family member who has already been granted leave to enter and remain in the United Kingdom, just as they had before the UK left the EU.
Without a safe and legal route to be reunited with their loved ones, children with family in the UK, who could have otherwise offered them a home and an opportunity for a normal life, will likely turn to traffickers and people smugglers. We cannot leave unaccompanied or separated children alone in camps or in other countries where they have no support system and where they are vulnerable to abuse, trafficking, criminality and worse.
The Bill, in its current form, does nothing to protect refugee children. The Minister did not mention children yesterday, yet there are children out there whom we can and must help and whose voices are missing from this Bill. I hope he will look closely at my amendments and ensure that the rights of refugee children are firmly protected.