Question to the Home Office:

To ask Her Majesty’s Government, further to the answer by Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon on 13 June (HL Deb, col 1004), what new information they have about the fate of the 10,000 unaccompanied refugee children who, according to Interpol, have gone missing; and how many unaccompanied refugee children have arrived in the UK to date.

The UK is the largest bilateral contributor to the humanitarian response to the crisis in Europe and the Balkans with a total contribution of £65 million. The efforts of the partners we fund are targeted to reach the most vulnerable including children.

It also includes the £10 million Refugee Children Fund the Department for International Development (DFID) has created to support vulnerable refugee and migrant children specifically in Europe. The fund will support three specialist and mandated organisations; the UNHCR, Save the Children and the International Rescue Committee to work with host authorities to care for and assist unaccompanied or separated children in Europe and the Balkans.

In addtion, the government continues to implement the Immigration Act 2016, including the provision to transfer unaccompained refugee children to the UK from elswhere in Europe. We are consulting local authorities as required and are also working closely with relevant Member States and other partners such as UNHCR, UNICEF and Save the Children.

We continue to fulfil our obligations under the Dublin Regulation to unaccompanied children who qualify for transfer to the UK under family reunification provisions. Since January 2016 our records show that over 60 children have been transferred from other EU countries to the UK.

We are working with UNHCR on our Children at Risk Resettlement Scheme to resettle vulnerable children, both unaccompanied and with their family members from the Middle East and North Africa region. We have committed to resettling several hundred individuals in the first year.