She says the current system of accommodating young asylum seekers is blighted by a “lack of safeguarding measures” and poor information around their vulnerability.
Under the Illegal Migration Act the Home Office is given powers to accommodate children. De Souza instead wants to see children taken into local authority care “from the moment they arrive”.
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Councils also need to “be given the funding they need to provide the medical and psychological help the young people need, and a safe and stable home that can provide them with consistent love and care”.
🧵 Exclusive data gathered under my statutory powers from @ukhomeoffice clearly shows vulnerable children fleeing war & persecution aren't getting the care they need.
— Children's Commissioner for England (@ChildrensComm) November 29, 2023
Some as young as 10 arrived having experienced rape, torture, organ harvesting.
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Between July 2021 and May this year, a total of 5,298 children were housed in Home Office run hotels, but the government noted vulnerability in less than two in five cases, she found.
In these cases, almost 200 children were victims of beatings or assault, 34 were torture victims and 25 had been raped or sexually assaulted. In some cases children’s organs had been harvested.
In addition, 259 cases of infectious diseases, including diphtheria, were noted.
One in 10 girls had been victims of rape, sexual assault or sexual exploitation during their journey to the UK.
It has also emerged that 442 children, some as young as 12, have gone missing from eight Home Office hotels. In three cases they have been missing for more than a year and in 166 cases no return date has been recorded.
De Souza found evidence that “pregnant girls were housed in hotels, including indicators that some pregnancies had been a result of rape”.
The Home Office also lacks “basic information” on their health and whether safeguarding concerns had been previously made.
This “is just not good enough”, warns de Souza.
De Souza has also criticised Home Office delays in responding to her requests for data around children, which she made seven months ago.
“This has made my job of protecting the rights of vulnerable children significantly harder, especially considering that much of the information I asked for was not returned,” she said.
The criticism comes as a High Court judge ruled that the Home Office's management of its National Transfer Scheme for the fair dispersal of unaccompanied children arriving in the UK was was “inadequate” and “for large periods unlawful”.
