Powers allowing the government to lock up unaccompanied children arriving in the UK were brought in with the Illegal Migration Act 2023, though had not yet been commenced.
Coram Children’s Legal Centre (CCLC) worked with partners leading efforts to limit powers and following the publication of the recent bill on 30 January, the organisation said: “We are now delighted to see them repealed.
“Babies and children do not belong in indefinite administrative detention and this draconian power has no place on the statute book.”
It said the latest move preserves the status quo of the Immigration Act 2014, meaning that unaccompanied children can only be detained for 24 hours in airport and other short-term facilities and children in families can only be detained for 72 hours, or a week if personally authorised by the minister and in special facilities and with certain safeguards.
Coram also welcomed the scrapping of Home Office powers keeping unaccompanied children out of the normal care system.
The Illegal Migration Act allowed the Home Office to directly accommodate these children when they arrived in the UK alone without families.
Coram said: “This undermined the landmark Children Act 1989 and the care system that is there to protect all children.
“The Home Office usurping these powers was especially controversial after the national scandal of hundreds of lone children going missing from seven Home Office-run hotels. Some of the children have never been found.
“The idea of these children being outside the mainstream children’s care system was also found to be unlawful after a case brought by ECPAT UK.”
Criminalisation of people seeking safety including children and trafficking victims
However, the organisation raised concern over aspects of the bill, which it said: “builds on an existing list of immigration criminal offences, including unauthorised entry”, adding that it “will create a new offence if someone travels by boat and creates a risk of injury to another person”.
It continued: “CCLC has already seen with existing criminal offences from the Nationality and Borders Act 2022 that vulnerable children and trafficking victims have ended up being wrongly prosecuted as criminals and smugglers.
“Children we work with have been forced to steer a boat and then been charged with facilitation.
“They have been disbelieved about their age on the basis of visual assessments by border officials at ports and put into adult prison.
“It is imperative that the effort to target smugglers does not result in the criminalisation of people seeking safety, including victims of trafficking and including children travelling alone. This would undermine the policy intention.
“The Home Office must also act urgently on the serious safeguarding concern that is the number of putative children ending up in the adult system.
“They collect no proper data, but Helen Bamber Foundation and others found over 1300 wrongly assessed children in an 18-month period alone.”
The statement from CCLC went on: “We look forward to continued engagement with the government on protecting children in the asylum and immigration system including unaccompanied children who arrive in the UK alone.
We welcome the significant step forward made today for these children’s rights and look forward to the potential for further strides forward during the passage of the bill.”
