Age-disputed Refugee Children

Laura Farris Excerpts

Friday 19th April 2024 Commons Chamber

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department (Laura Farris)]

I thank the hon. Member for Stretford and Urmston (Andrew Western) for securing this debate and for the sensitive way he presented these issues. Fairness and decency should indeed sit at the heart of our immigration and asylum system, particularly when it involves children. It might be helpful if I set out in general terms the Government’s approach to age assessment. As he observed, the age of a person arriving in the United Kingdom would normally be established from the documents with which they travelled, but many who claim to be children do not have documentary evidence to support their age.

I am sure there is no real point of disagreement between the Government and the Opposition that there are serious safeguarding risks if individuals over the age of 18 are treated as children and placed in settings with children. We all know about the high-profile case in Bournemouth last year of an adult man who was assessed as being 14 years old and in fact was wanted for a double murder in Serbia. We obviously want to avoid situations of that nature, and we are aware of other examples where pupils in schools have raised an alarm about an obviously mature adult who has joined their class purporting to be a child—indeed, in one case someone was reassessed to be 10 years older than their claimed age. That reduces the valuable resource and support that is available to genuine children, and undermines public confidence. Of course the Government have always been clear that there are serious equivalent safeguarding risks if true children are treated as adults.

I must point out that there are incentives for adults to claim to be under 18, as unaccompanied children generally receive a higher level of support than adults in several respects. That includes the accommodation and support they are provided with, the level of care they receive, perhaps including therapeutic care, the procedural and substantive treatment of their immigration claim, the arrangements that are needed to secure their possible removal, and whether or not they can be detained in immigration detention. The legislative reforms that the Government are bringing forward aim to make those assessments more consistent, reliable and robust from the outset.

Section 52 of the Nationality and Borders Act 2022 makes provision for the scientific method of age assessment. This is a new and vital tool for the assessment of age that the Government need to get right. The full plans for integrating scientific age assessments into the existing process will be set out very shortly.

We accept that there is no single assessment method, scientific or otherwise, that can determine an individual’s age. In response to the hon. Gentleman’s challenge, scientific methods offer the opportunity for significant improvement, which is something we should welcome wherever we sit in respect of this debate. It should also be noted that the UK is one of the few European countries that do not currently employ any scientific methods of age assessment.

The Immigration (Age Assessments) Regulations 2024 came into force in January this year. They specify the use of X-rays and MRIs of certain body areas, including the wrist, to aid age estimation, as proposed in the recommendations of the Age Estimation Science Advisory Committee. I hope I can reassure the hon. Gentleman by saying that this is an expert committee, consisting of subject matter experts from a range of disciplines including social work, dentistry and radiology, and established by the Home Office’s chief scientific adviser to provide expert advice on potential scientific methods of assessment, as well as ethics and best practice for their use.

[Andrew Western]

Can the Minister explain why the committee has encouraged the Government to abandon scientific methods of age assessment?

[Laura Farris]

Let me gently repeat that we are not going to do that. We are one of the only European countries that do not employ any scientific methods, and we are working towards the implementation of that. I think I gave a fair caveat by accepting that there is no single method that will ever be truly reliable, but a method can be used in conjunction with others. In due course I shall say something about the Merton test, to which the hon. Gentleman referred in his speech. In our view, this is not just important but vital progress in the fair and accurate assessment of age, which is relevant to exactly the kinds of protection with which the hon. Gentleman is primarily concerned.

The combination of dental and skeletal images is important, as it increases the accuracy of the approach. The committee advocates a likelihood ratio method which offers a logical and consistent summary of the evidence and permits greater confidence in, particularly, the range of age assessment of whether the claimed age is possible. Given the scientific methods specified in the regulations, when an individual refuses to consent—without reasonable grounds—to the use of those methods, a decision maker must take that refusal as damaging the age-disputed person’s credibility. This is referred to as a “negative inference”. It would not automatically preclude the individual from being considered to be a child; that refusal would be taken into consideration alongside other evidence as part of the Merton-compliant age assessment process. None the less, it will be relevant.

Let me also clarify the current process of initial age investigations. The hon. Gentleman is correct: on the individual’s arrival, the initial assessment is undertaken by an immigration officer. The threshold that must be applied is that immigration officers may treat an individual as an adult only when two members of Home Office staff determine that individual’s physical appearance and demeanour strongly suggest that he or she is significantly over the age of 18. That is a deliberately high threshold. The principle of the benefit of the doubt is key: when there is doubt, an individual will be treated as a child pending further observation and consideration by a local authority. That approach was confirmed by the Supreme Court in the landmark case of BF (Eritrea) v. Secretary of State for the Home Department in 2021.

When doubt remains after the initial age assessment has been undertaken, the local authority will conduct a more in-depth assessment, known as the Merton-compliant age assessment, to which the hon. Gentleman has already referred. Merton assessments are holistic, social worker-led assessments that must adhere to principles that have been set out by the courts in the case of R (on the application of B) v. London Borough of Merton—a well-established public law case—as well as in subsequent case law. We know, however, that these tests are not sufficiently precise. They depend entirely on oral questions being put to the individual. In order to strengthen them, the Nationality and Borders Act 2022 allows local authorities to refer age assessments to designated officials of the Home Office who form the national age assessment board. The board, which was launched in March 2023, currently consists of 42 expert social workers, and aims to increase capacity and expertise in the system until we have scientific methods working alongside it. As well as conducting assessments for local authorities, the board supports them with training and best-practice advice.

Lastly, through the Illegal Migration Act 2023, the Government have taken steps to ensure that the process is as robust as possible. Section 58 of the Act introduces a regulation-making power that would allow the Secretary of State to set out the effect of a decision by an individual not to consent to the use of a specified scientific method for age assessment. Those regulations could, in the future, specify that a person who refuses to consent without reasonable grounds is to be treated as though the decision maker had decided that they were over the age of 18. That power will not be used unless—and until—the Home Secretary determines that the science and analysis is sufficiently accurate to support providing for an automatic assumption of adulthood. Under section 57 of the 2023 Act, judicial reviews will not suspend removal, to avoid lengthy age disputes delaying or preventing removal of those who have been assessed to be adults.

In closing, once again I thank the hon. Gentleman for securing the debate, raising what is indeed a sensitive issue, where accuracy really does matter. Whatever the dispute, I think that we agree on that point. Age assessment is critical not only to the integrity of our system, but, of course, to the protection of genuine children. We understand that it is crucial that these assessments are robust, consistent and well-evidenced to ensure that genuine children are not incorrectly treated as adults, and that adults are disincentivised from knowingly misrepresenting themselves as children.

[Andrew Western]

The Minister is being incredibly generous in giving way again. To further the attempts at accuracy, may I press her on the point I made about further monitoring of those whose claim of being a child is rejected at the border? At the moment, we have no data showing how many of those decisions are overturned later, other than that pulled together by the charities I referred to earlier, who found that there were 1,300 between January 2022 and June 2023, and I understand that there have been some 600 since then. It would be incredibly helpful if the Government were to start tracking and monitoring that information. It would improve their own data and, I think, take us some way towards having greater certainty that they are on top of this issue.

[Laura Farris]

If the hon. Gentleman would be willing to write to the immigration Minister—I have tried to think about which of the two it would apply to, but I will get my office to clarify that—I will, of course, relay what has happened in this debate and ask them to reply specifically with reference to the numbers and mis-categorisations that the Refugee Council has drawn to his attention in that period. This is an important issue, and, as I have set out, one that the Government approach with the seriousness—and I hope the sensitivity—that this House would expect.

Question put and agreed to.