Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what recent assessment he has made of the adequacy of asylum seeker (a)age verification and (b) identity checks.

Where an individual claims to be a child without any documentary evidence, and where there is reason to doubt their claimed age, there is a need to assess their age. Determining the age of a young person is an inherently difficult task. Recent legislative reforms aim to make assessments more consistent and robust from the outset, with any disputed decisions resolved quickly and conclusively.

This includes establishing a decision-making function within the Home Office, called the National Age Assessment Board (NAAB). The NAAB consists of expert social workers whose task is to conduct Merton compliant age assessments, increasing capacity and expertise in the system. The NAAB is in the process of recruiting and training suitably experienced social workers who can carry out age assessments on behalf of the Home Office and will expand into wider regions as social worker capacity builds up. We will continue to review and monitor the impact of this board.

In addition, regulations laid by the Home Office and the Ministry of Justice were approved by Parliament in November 2023, which will authorise the use of X-rays in scientific age assessments, paving the way for the Home Office to improve their ability to effectively determine the age of illegal entrants making disputed claims to be children.

As part of an asylum seeker’s identity checks we capture their biometric and biographical information and check them against a range of domestic and international law enforcement databases. We enrol the fingerprints of all asylum seekers aged five years or older and who are physically capable. This helps us to establish whether we have encountered them previously and helps to ensure they do not make multiple applications using multiple identities, and to identify those who pose a threat to public safety, our national security, or are likely to breach our laws. We can also check any documentary evidence they may have and authenticate them against document image archives and whether they have been reported lost or stolen.