Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill

Baroness Neuberger Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 19th February 2024 Lords Chamber

I shall finish with a case study from the report I mentioned. Ahmed was a 17 year-old Afghan who arrived on a small boat last June, having been rescued following a frightening voyage. He had photographs on his phone of documents proving his age, but he was not permitted to show them to immigration officers. He was treated as an adult, spent two days at Manston sleeping on the floor in a tent, and ended up in a London hotel, where he had to share a room with an unrelated adult male. He experienced acute distress and discomfort and felt that no one was listening to him. He took himself to a police station and finally, with the help of Humans for Rights Network, was visited by social services and was accepted by them as a child. Under the Bill, Ahmed might have ended up in Rwanda without a civil society organisation to help him. We must try to prevent that happening, so I hope the Minister will seriously consider this amendment. I beg to move.

[Baroness Neuberger (CB)]

My Lords, I support the noble Baronesses, Lady Lister of Burtersett and Lady Brinton, and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Chelmsford, and I wish to make only a very few short points in relation to Amendments 54 and 55, to which I have added my name. I apologise that I could not be here for the two previous days in Committee, due to prior commitments.

Once again, we are considering the age-old issue of age assessment of young asylum seekers. I will not rehearse the many arguments about the validity of such age assessments using so-called scientific means or, indeed, any other means; I have spoken in this House on many occasions on this very subject. Now, the consequences of these age assessments may be very much worse than hitherto: as the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, rightly said, you may be sent to Rwanda, and you might even be sent back and forth like an unwanted parcel. This is really serious: time and time again, we have seen unaccompanied children incorrectly assessed by the Home Office as adults on their arrival in the UK and treated as if they were over 18, only for them to be determined to be children after further assessment.

In addition to the evidence the noble Baroness has just given us from various organisations that have found age assessments to be wrong, we have evidence from local authorities’ children’s services—and noble Lords might think that they would know. They reveal that in the first six months of 2023 alone, 485 children were wrongly assessed by the Home Office as adults. Under the Bill, those 485 children, as well as all the others cited by the noble Baroness, would face removal to Rwanda. Furthermore, should those children seek to challenge the incorrect assessment, Section 57 of the Illegal Migration Act provides that the Home Secretary can still make arrangements to remove them to Rwanda, as we have heard, while the UK courts and tribunals are considering the challenge of the age assessment. There is a real risk, given the numbers we already know about, that children arriving alone in the UK in search of safety will mistakenly be sent to Rwanda before they can access justice. That is truly shocking.