CYP Now - Strip Home Office of responsibility for migrant children, sector leaders urge

Sector leaders are calling for the Home Office to be stripped of its responsibility for unaccompanied asylum-seeking children following reports that more than 100 children went missing from government-funded hotels in just 14 months.

Asylum-seekers arriving in the UK are placed in hotels by the Home Office. Picture: Adobe Stock/Wirestock

A BBC News investigation revealed that 116 children disappeared between July 2021 and August 2022, after temporarily being put in hotels by the Home Office.

It also showed that 1,606 children who arrived alone between July 2021 and June 2022 were placed in hotel accommodation by the Home Office.

Andy Elvin, chief executive of Tact foster care, said that the Home Office’s responsibility for unaccompanied children who arrive illegally into the UK should be handed to the Department for Education.

He told CYP Now that he has been in talks “for many years” with the Home Office and DfE about how these children are placed by the government, including around the government’s National Transfer Scheme for the dispersal of lone migrant children across all local authorities, which was launched in 2016.

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