Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what safeguards are in place to ensure that recording an asylum claimant’s self-declared age does not place adults at risk of being accommodated with children.

The age of a person arriving in the UK is normally established from the documents with which they have travelled, but many do not have any definitive documentary evidence to support their claimed age.

There are clear safeguarding issues which arise if a child is inadvertently treated as an adult, and equally if an adult is wrongly accepted as a child and placed in accommodation with children to whom they could present a risk.

Where there is reason to doubt an individual’s claimed age, immigration officers are required to make an initial age decision to determine whether the individual should be treated as a child or an adult. This is an important first step to prevent individuals who are clearly an adult or child from being subjected unnecessarily to a more substantive age assessment and ensure individuals are routed to the correct adult or child process for assessing their asylum or immigration claim.

If there is doubt whether a claimant is an adult or child, they will be referred to a local authority’s Children’s Services Department who are then able to either undertake an age assessment themselves or can refer into the National Age Assessment Board for further consideration of their age in the interests of safeguarding. Regardless of age, where issues relating to safeguarding or community safety are raised, referrals will be made to the relevant authorities.