Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill

Baroness Neuberger Excerpts

Report stage
Wednesday 6th March 2024 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of Chelmsford]

My Lords, I rise also to support Amendment 34. I will keep my comments brief because I fully support the statements from the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, and the noble Lord, Lord Dubs. But please do not mistake my brevity with the level of importance that should be attached to this issue. Safeguarding is not some burdensome requirement but a moral and legal imperative. It is for this reason that I repeat the request that I made in Committee for a child’s rights impact assessment to be published.

It is welcome that the Government have excluded unaccompanied children from the Rwandan partnership, but to safeguard potential children effectively, this commitment must be more than a mere intention; it must be operationally put into practice. This amendment would help mitigate the risk of a person being sent erroneously—when they are, in fact, a child—by sensibly awaiting the result of any age assessment challenge before their removal. When it comes to a child, we cannot allow harm to be addressed retrospectively, as surely it is the role of any Government to prevent harm, regardless of the immigration objective. Trauma, as we have heard, simply cannot be remedied.

The Minister has shared that the Home Office will treat an individual claiming to be a child as an adult, without conducting further inquiries, only if two officers have separately determined that the individual’s appearance and demeanour strongly suggest that they are significantly over the age of 18. But practice to date shows that this is no safeguard at all, because it has not prevented hundreds of children from being incorrectly assessed as adults.

I also want to add that the hotels reinspection report by the Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration, finally published last week, states,

“there has been no assessment of the collective needs of the children”.

That is traumatised unaccompanied children whom the Home Office has placed in hotels. This disturbing finding does not provide any reassurance that the Home Office is equipped to ensure children are protected through the age assessment process.

Therefore, given that errors have been made in the age verification process and children have been subjected to unsafe adult environments as a result, can I ask the Minister to agree today to review the Home Office’s age assessment guidance, in consultation with stakeholders, in light of the new risks posed by the Rwandan removals? Will he also be willing to meet with the signatories of the amendments in this group to discuss this matter?

Finally, the golden rule, “Do to others as you would have them do to you”, could easily be rephrased for this context into the question, “Would you consent to this course of action for your own child or grandchild?” I do not believe that there is anyone among us who would. For this reason, I pray that the Government consider the issues raised today with the consideration that every child deserves.

[Baroness Neuberger (CB)]

My Lords, I rise very briefly to support the amendment in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Lister of Burtersett, the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Chelmsford.

I wholly agree, and I particularly want to echo what the right reverend Prelate said. Would you allow this to happen to your child or grandchild? The answer around this Chamber will be “no”—therefore it should be our answer.

[Baroness Butler-Sloss (CB)]

My Lords, I also support Amendment 34. Several years ago, I was invited by the charity Safe Passage to a drop-in centre of young people who were migrants. I talked to two young Afghans, both of whom were known to be under 18. One had a moustache and the other had a beard. How on earth could an assessment be made, if they did not have any papers, that they were not over 18? There are real problems with some countries where the children—particularly the boys—mature very quickly. That is the sort of problem that is not being met by the Bill.

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.