Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, with reference to reports from the charities Love146 UK and Care4Calais that some children seeking asylum without identification have been classified as adults and are at risk of transfer to Rwanda, how many asylum seekers claiming to be children have been determined to be adults following age assessments since 1 January 2022.

Immigration officers operating at the border perform a difficult but vital function in preventing abuse of the immigration system and protecting genuine children from the safeguarding risks associated with allowing adults to access safe spaces which are properly reserved for children.

The UK Supreme Court recently considered and fully endorsed the lawfulness of the ‘significantly over 18’ policy for initial age assessments conducted at the border by immigration officers in the case of BF Eritrea UKSC 2019/0147.

Furthermore, the initial age assessment process represents only the first stage of a broader age assessment procedure. It has been designed to allow those who wish to maintain their claim to be a child to seek assessment by a local authority. It is long established Home Office policy to give significant weight to a local authority age assessment.

The Home Office publishes data on asylum in the ‘Immigration Statistics Quarterly Release’. Data on the number of age disputes and outcomes are published in table Asy_D05 of the asylum and resettlement detailed datasets. Information on how to use the datasets can be found in the ‘Notes’ page of the workbook. The latest data covers up to March 2022.

Information on future Home Office statistical release dates can be found in the ‘Research and statistics calendar’

The published statistics for age disputes indicate there were 428 disputes raised on the basis of physical appearance and demeanour in the first quarter of 2022. Of the 255 disputes resolved in the same period, 126 cases were resolved with an outcome the person was an adult and 129 concluded the person was a child.

The statistics do not distinguish between those who have been assessed to be significantly over 18 and others who have been age disputed but referred directly to a local authority for further assessment. Detail of the volume of age dispute cases for the following quarter will be made available in future planned statistical publications.

Anyone who is the subject of an age dispute will be excluded from inadmissibility procedures as a matter of policy, where either the individual is undergoing assessment by a local authority, where there are ongoing legal proceedings on the subject of age or where the Home Office accepts a subsequent assessment by a local authority that the individual is a child.