Illegal Migration Bill

Lord Bishop of Durham Excerpts

Report stage
Monday 3rd July 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Touhig (Lab)]

My Lords, I do not want to detain your Lordships for many minutes and will not do so, but I will speak in support of Amendment 87. It will probably not be pushed to a vote, but, if it were, it would help us to regain our self-respect as a nation that cares about the plight of unaccompanied migrant children.

When I spoke in Committee on 5 June, I highlighted the fact that 4,500 unaccompanied migrant children have been placed in Home Office-run hotels and not in the care of a local authority, as prescribed by Section 20 of the Children Act 1989. Some 200 of those children have gone missing. A whistleblower working at the hotel in Brighton said that he believed that they have just disappeared. Perhaps they were trafficked—who knows?—but they have not been found. Some of the children are as young as 10; they are put into hotels, unaccompanied and unsupervised, at the age of 10.

I pressed the Minister in Committee—as I did before and after—to explain which Act of Parliament allows the Government to place these children in the care of the Home Office and not local authorities. In his reply, he did not directly answer my question, but what he said is important:

“The present position will change when this Bill passes”.—[Official Report, 5/6/23; col. 1174.]


I am not trying to put the Minister on the spot—he has enough woes trying to take through this awful piece of legislation—but, from his answer, I must deduce that the Government are acting unlawfully. They know that they are acting unlawfully and that they are not properly caring for these unaccompanied migrant children. All children arriving in this country should surely be afforded the rights under the Children Act 1989. Let us ask ourselves: who among us, if, God forbid, it was one of our children facing this perilous situation, would not want them to be properly cared for?

[The Lord Bishop of Durham]

My Lords, I declare my interests as laid out in the register. I will speak to Amendment 89, and I am grateful to my noble friends from differing Benches—the noble Lords, Lord Coaker and Lord German, and the noble Baroness, Lady Helic—for their support. It is a damning indictment that an amendment of this nature is even required, as it proposes such a basic safeguard to ensure the well-being of unaccompanied children. It requires that, if a child is to be transferred from local authority child protection systems, a justification should be provided as to why it is in their best interests to be looked after by the Home Office rather than the local authority.

It is reasonable that councils should not be mandated to follow a child transfer direction, regardless of any safeguarding or protection concerns. If the Government are unwilling to accept this point, can the Minister say how they will enable the appropriate scrutiny of a decision to move a child out of the formal child protection system and ensure the highest level of safeguarding consideration? These questions deserve full and detailed answers, since the Bill does not set any standards, safeguards or protective obligations for the Home Office when providing accommodation for children. It is even more pertinent given the Home Office’s own record on accommodating unaccompanied children.

The Minister was pleased to share, during the passage of the Bill, that no children are currently accommodated in hotels, but let us not forget that this does not mean that all unaccompanied children are therefore in the care of local authorities. Up to April this year, 186 children remained missing, and it should keep us all up at night, including Ministers, when we think about whose care those children may now be under.

Regardless of the power that the Bill gives to the Government to accommodate children, two things remain true—both of which have already been explained well. First, the Children Act applies to all children, regardless of nationality, ethnicity or immigration status, and therefore any child under the care of the Home Office should have access to the same level of care and protection as any other child in need. Secondly, as recent legal judgments have shown, the Home Office does not have the expertise, knowledge or experience to look after children.

Therefore, it is only right and just that the power to remove a child from the well-established care system should be exercised only when a child’s well-being will be served by doing so—I suspect that that would be very rare. I share the fear of the Children’s Commissioner that accommodating children outside of foster families or children’s homes will be harmful and unsafe; we have no evidence to the contrary. Fundamentally, the care of children is, first and foremost, not an immigration matter, and safeguarding cannot be allowed to be a casualty in pursuit of the objectives of the Bill. Thus, I also support Amendment 87, for all the reasons already laid out. Neither amendment should be regarded as controversial, as, frankly, a child’s life, security and future are too important for them to become collateral damage. Therefore, I support Amendment 87 and intend to test the opinion of the House on Amendment 89.

[Baroness Meacher (CB)]

My Lords, I support most strongly the remarks of my noble and learned friend Lady Butler-Sloss and the other powerful comments already made from the Conservative Benches, the Bishops’ Benches and elsewhere.

My amendments propose that Clauses 15 and 16 should left out of the Bill in their entirety. These clauses, for the first time, provide the legal power for a central government department to take responsibility for extremely vulnerable unaccompanied children and to provide so-called care, protection and support, both while they are children and as adult care leavers.

I understand that the Home Office has recently been housing unaccompanied children in hotels, without the legal authority to do so. But, according to the Immigration Minister, Robert Jenrick MP, no unaccompanied young people are currently in hotels. The Home Office has recently reopened a hotel in Eastbourne, and another in Brighton and Hove, in anticipation of the Bill becoming law. The local authority in the second case is threatening legal action, and I anticipate that it will be successful.

Ofsted has described the housing of unaccompanied children in hotels as utterly unacceptable. The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child called for the urgent repeal of the provision in the Illegal Migration Bill, describing this practice as violating children’s rights under the Convention on the Rights of the Child and the refugee convention 1951. Seven organisations responsible for protecting children have written to us, arguing that they consider Clauses 15 and 16 to be such a danger to unaccompanied children, and to our child welfare system, that they must be removed from the Bill altogether. The Association of Directors of Adult Social Services makes the point that unaccompanied children seeking asylum are fleeing desperate situations; they are extremely vulnerable and should not be placed in hotels, where they are open to further exploitations and abuse.

Clauses 15 and 16 are ill conceived and discriminatory in principle. They give the Home Secretary wide powers to house unaccompanied children of any age in any type of accommodation for any length of time—housing a one year-old or 18 month-old in great big ex-Army barracks, or whatever. The clauses direct that a local authority stops looking after an individual child irrespective, it appears, of the child’s needs, characteristics, experiences and legal status. They legitimate and potentially make lawful arrangements that hundreds of non-governmental organisations have contended are unlawful for nearly two years.

I know that Amendments 87 and 89 might help a little. However, bearing in mind the powerful comments from his own Bench from the noble Baroness, Lady Berridge, and from the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham and from other parts of this House, I appeal to the Minister to seek within himself his humanity and to withdraw Clauses 15 and 16 from the Bill.

--- Later in debate ---

Moved by

[The Lord Bishop of Durham]

89: Clause 16, page 24, line 13, at end insert—
“(4A) But the Secretary of State may not make a decision under subsection (4) unless to do so is necessary to safeguard and promote the welfare of the child.” Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment limits the Secretary of State’s power to transfer a child out of local authority care and into accommodation provided by the Secretary of State, by providing that they may only do so where to do so is necessary to safeguard and promote the welfare of the child.

[The Lord Bishop of Durham]

It is my wish to test the mind of the House because the Minister has not answered some of the questions, and my concerns remain. Some of us have not seen a copy of the letter that was circulated to some noble Lords, so can the Minister undertake to ensure that it gets circulated to those who have been involved in these debates? We really need the local authority to have the say in this, so I beg leave to test the mind of the House.