Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many refugee children were wrongly assessed to be adults by the Home Office between January 2022 and June 2023; and if he will make an assessment of the potential implications for his Department's policies of the report by the Refugee Council together with Helen Bamber Foundation and Humans for Rights Network entitled Forced Adulthood, published on 23 January 2024.

The Home Office does not publish the data requested, as this cannot currently be collected via national reporting systems. Our published data on age assessment can be accessed here which includes the number of age disputes raised and resolved. and whether the decision found the individual to be under or over 18.

Our age assessment policies for immigration purposes seek to protect genuine minors and identify those who are adults. Determining the age of a young person is an inherently difficult task and therefore, the age assessment process for immigration purposes contains a number of safeguards.

Where a new arrival does not have genuine documentary evidence of their age and their claimed age is doubted, an initial age decision is conducted as a first step to prevent individuals who are clearly an adult or child from being subjected unnecessarily to a more substantive age assessment and ensure that new arrivals are routed into the correct accommodation and processes for assessing their asylum or immigration claim.

The Home Office will only treat an individual claiming to be a child as an adult, without conducting further enquiries, if two Home Office members of staff independently determine that the individual's physical appearance and demeanour very strongly suggests they are significantly over 18 years of age. The lawfulness of this process was endorsed by the Supreme Court in the case of R (on the application of BF (Eritrea)) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2021] UKSC 38.

Where doubt remains and an individual cannot be assessed to be significantly over 18, they will be treated as a child for immigration purposes until further assessment of their age by a local authority.

The Home Office is currently considering the contents and recommendations of the report by the Refugee Council together with Helen Bamber Foundation and Humans for Rights Network entitled Forced Adulthood, published on 23 January 2024.