My Lords, I shall speak to Motion D1. In the last round of ping-pong, my noble friend Lady Chakrabarti described her amendment in lieu as an “olive branch”. Well, this amendment is more of an olive tree, such is the compromise it represents on the original amendment passed by your Lordships’ House. In the case of an age-disputed child, the amendment would require a proper Merton-compliant age assessment to be made either by the local authority or by the National Age Assessment Board before they could be removed to Rwanda. If the assessment decided that the person was an adult, they would then be removed.
In response to the previous amendment in lieu, the Minister made much of the role of the National Age Assessment Board, spelling out in detail why it should be involved in any age assessment. The present amendment takes on board what he said and includes the board as one of two possible safeguards to prevent a child erroneously being sent to Rwanda. As such, it would help to ensure that the Government’s own intention that no unaccompanied child should be removed to Rwanda is fulfilled. The Minister emphasised this, reading out the treaty’s clear statement to that effect. He stated that,
“if an age-disputed individual requires a Merton assessment, they will be relocated to Rwanda only if determined to be an adult after that Merton assessment
”.—[Official Report, 20/3/24; col. 259.]
The problem is that, under the current provisions, it is all too likely that an age-disputed child will be sent to Rwanda without any possibility of a Merton assessment, so the age assessment board will be redundant. As it stands, the Bill allows for the decision to be made by immigration officers on the basis of a quick visual assessment of physical appearance and demeanour, acknowledged to be unreliable by the Home Office—not a high threshold, as the Minister claimed. The Refugee and Migrant Children’s Consortium warns that
“we continually see immigration officers deciding a child is an adult on arrival and placing that child in the adult system. It is only after that age decision is challenged and a further determination is made that the child is correctly assessed to be a child”.
That is the same practice that the Minister has repeatedly said will act as a safeguard against wrongful assessment and removal.
I dealt with the other arguments put forward by the Minister at the previous stage. The key issue facing us today is whether we are prepared to ensure a genuine safeguard against a child being removed to Rwanda because of the failure to provide a proper, holistic, social work led age assessment that is as accurate as possible.
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Given that it is government policy that no unaccompanied child should be removed and the further concession the amendment represents, I had hoped that the Minister might have been able to accept it. As he refuses this olive branch—or olive tree—would he at least be willing to give an assurance, on the record, that no age-disputed child will be sent to Rwanda on the basis of an initial age assessment of appearance and demeanour alone, or to accept his colleague David Simmonds MP’s urging of the Minister yesterday that the decision be made on the basis of
“a Merton-compliant age assessment that is the gold standard for determining whether a young person is an adult
”—[Official Report, Commons, 15/4/24; col. 94.]
or, I would add, a child? This would provide a helpful basis for the meeting that the Minister kindly agreed to on Report. It would be really helpful if we—Peers who signed the original amendments, and key stakeholders on the ground—could sit down with the Minister and officials in a less polarised and contested space to discuss how current safeguards could be strengthened by non-legislative means so as to minimise the risk of a child wrongly being sent to Rwanda or anywhere else, which is a goal we all share.