Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what recent discussions she has had with police forces in areas experiencing disappearances of unaccompanied asylum-seeking children from hotels on (a) investigating the disappearances and (b) helping to prevent future disappearances; and what steps she is taking with the impacted hotels to help to prevent future disappearances.

The rise in the number of small boat crossings has placed significant pressures on local authority care placements for young people. The safety and wellbeing of those in our care is our primary concern. Out of necessity, and with the best interests of the child in mind, we have had no alternative but to temporarily use hotels to give unaccompanied children a roof over their heads whilst local authority accommodation is found.

We take the safety and welfare of those in our care seriously and the Home Office has robust safeguarding procedures in place to ensure those in our accommodation are as safe and supported as possible as we seek urgent placements with a local authority. The National Transfer scheme (NTS) has seen 3,148 children transferred to local authorities with children's services between 1 July 2021 and 30 September 2022. This compares to 739 children transferred in the same time period in the previous year. We are providing local authorities with children's services with an additional £15,000 for every eligible young person they take into their care from a dedicated UASC hotel, or the Reception and Safe Care Service in Kent, by the end of February 2023.

For any young person that goes missing from an unaccompanied asylum seeking child (UASC) hotel, the local authority will convene a multi-agency forum including local police forces and the Home Office to seek to locate the child and ensure their safety, following the 'missing persons protocol', led by our directly engaged social workers. The MARS (Missing After Reasonable Steps) protocol is followed for any looked after child who goes missing from a care setting, including the UASC hotels. Similar protocols within police forces have safely reduced the number of missing episodes from placements by 36%.