Unrest over asylum children guidance

By Sarah Cooper Wednesday, 23 April 2008

Children's campaigners are calling for an overhaul of the code of practice that sets out how immigration officers should keep children safe.

Immigration officer. Credit: Matt Gore/Icon

Campaigners say the Border and Immigration Agency Code of Practice for Keeping Children Safe from Harm needs to be made clearer to be effective.

Lisa Nandy, policy adviser at The Children's Society, said the guidance needs to be easy to digest in its current form, but that it fails to tell immigration staff how to protect the needs of asylum-seeking children. "This doesn't give a clear guide for staff on how to do their job," she said.

Nandy said the onus is on the UK Border Agency needs to rewrite the advice in a clearer way. "The guidance has to be short, to the point and practical. At the moment it's unusable," she warned.

"We want it to follow the format of the Department for Children, Schools and Families' Working Together to Safeguard Children, which is clear and practical and explains the expectations of people."

She added that asylum-seeking children's organisations, which worked on the code before it was published by the Home Office in January, had hoped it would spell out the responsibility of staff towards children. "It hasn't happened in this version," said Nandy. "Our concern is that it is not strong enough."

Kamena Dorling, legal and policy researcher of the refugee and asylum-seeking children project at the Children's Legal Centre, said it was difficult to respond to the code since it refers to operational guidelines that have yet to be produced.

"The code could either be a statement of principles, that should be abided by when thinking about children in the immigration system, or operational guidelines," she said. "It's a mixture of both and there needs to be clarity."

Nandy said the code is helpful in the way it talks about people going through the immigration system. "There is an emphasis on talking about children and families as people, rather than cases," she said.

But Dorling added the focus of the code must change: "It needs to have keeping children safe from harm as the over-arching principle."

The consultation closes on Friday 25 April.