Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, whether the Illegal Migration Bill would permit the indefinite detention of children.

We do not detain people indefinitely and the powers in the Bill do not provide for this.

The Bill will create new detention powers which will allow us to detain a person pending a decision as to whether the new duty to remove applies, and thereafter to detain pending their removal. These new powers will not be time limited; however, in line with our other existing immigration detention powers, detention will be limited to a reasonable period of time.

Families will be kept together wherever possible and children will only be detained for as short a period as possible and in age-appropriate accommodation. The Secretary of State is not required to make arrangements to remove an unaccompanied child from the UK until they become adults, but there is a power to do so. As a matter of current policy, this power will only be exercised in very limited circumstances ahead of them reaching adulthood, such as for the purposes of family reunion or where removal is to a safe country of origin.