Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker, and I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for highlighting that in a way that I am sure many of our constituents would choose to highlight it as well.
To finish the point around the convention itself and amendment 1B, as the Minister said at the Dispatch Box, when we cannot be certain of a future potential legal challenge it is appropriate that the statement is made as it has been made in respect of this. However, it remains my view, and I think the view of many others, that we have many channels of influence, both diplomatic and political, and that this is a living convention. We know that it is embedded in many different parts of our constitution—not just the Good Friday agreement, but our withdrawal agreement from the European Union—and therefore our adherence to it remains incredibly important. But because it is a living document it is able to flex and evolve, to recognise that the world we see today—the world of asylum and the international context—is different from the world when the treaty of London was first very strongly championed by Winston Churchill in the
1950s. Therefore, I am very much persuaded that the Minister is correct in the way he seeks to reject these amendments while also acknowledging the spirit and tone behind them.
I would like to address some of the issues that arise in amendment 7B. I am again persuaded by what the Minister has said about this, but there is a long-standing issue with the way unaccompanied children are treated. The Children Act 1989, which set up the legal framework, sets out in some detail that a child who is not accompanied by a person who has parental responsibility for them by operation of law becomes the responsibility of a local authority. Whether or not that local authority goes through any process at all to bring that child into the care system formally, for example by seeking a care order, it remains the responsibility of the local authority where that child arises to take care of them. If they return later on in early adulthood and are able to make a case that they had been present in that local authority area as a child, they are also entitled to care-leaving responsibilities from that local authority under the Children (Leaving Care) Act 2000.
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That is significant because it sets up a potential conflict between the impact of immigration legislation and the impact of Department for Education and Children Act legislation. We know this has been an issue; there is at least one other Member who represents the same local authority, the London Borough of Hillingdon, which sits in a substantial part of my constituency, and where Heathrow airport means that it has had very large numbers of unaccompanied children coming in over the years and has been responsible for carrying out age assessments, which have often been challenged by those young people and their advocates in a way that can result both in judicial reviews going one way or another, with significant cost implications to the public purse, and safeguarding risks both to children and others they might be with where those may arise.
I therefore urge the Minister to ensure that when pressing the point that the Home Office remains the decision maker as to whether a person is a child or not, and that as far as the law is concerned it is a Merton-compliant age assessment that is the gold standard for determining whether a young person is an adult. While it has been widely suggested that we could use scientific methods such as X-rays, the fact remains that those provide a very wide age range for a young person, which for the purposes of determining whether they were just under or just over 18—the relevant issue for the Children Act responsibilities—is useless. That is why the Merton-compliant age assessment process is so important.
Therefore, although I support the Minister’s view that we need to reject that amendment, we do need to ensure that the process we have in place does not put local authorities in an impossible position, where they are judicially reviewed for their failure to provide services that they are obliged to provide under the Children Act or the leaving care Act to an individual who has been removed or subject to other immigration control by a decision of the Home Office, because we could certainly open up the prospect of what are, in effect, proxy judicial reviews to challenge the Government’s immigration position by using the Children Act or the leaving care Act.
I want to address two other points that arise, one in respect directly of the amendments and the other in response to a point made by the hon. Member for Glasgow Central (Alison Thewliss) about what in practice happens to people. It is very welcome that the Government have brought forward what they have to say about the treatment of victims of modern slavery. Many of us will have had individuals in our constituencies who have been affected by that and will know of the impact it has on our local public services, our police forces and our local and housing authorities in identifying people and providing appropriate support, but we are also keen to ensure that, given the progress we have made in this House on that issue, we do not fall back through the impact of other legislation. We will be looking closely to ensure that the report that is proposed as an alternative to the Lords amendment on that will work in practice as well as the Minister has set out.
Finally, a number of Members have raised the point about what happens in practice. Many of us will be conscious that this has a very significant impact on local authorities, and this goes back to the National Assistance Act 1948, which states that a local authority must provide support to someone within its area who is destitute, regardless of any other considerations about their status. In practice, that is the reason why local authorities will be required to step in and provide emergency temporary accommodation to families with children, in particular where their asylum claim has been refused but they remain here in the United Kingdom.
While the local authority will never be housing those people in social housing, because those individuals have no entitlement to it, they will be accommodated in hotels, hostels and other types of accommodation, which in turn creates additional housing pressure locally. It is incredibly important that we make sure, as the Government have set out, that this system not just works well at making decisions early on, but ensures there are effective processes so that those who should not be in the United Kingdom are removed, in order that that accommodation and those other services are available for those entitled to be here.