Kent 'days away' from being unable to care for more asylum-seeking children
Fiona Simpson
Friday, August 14, 2020
Kent County Council is “days away” from declaring it unsafe to receive any more asylum-seeking children (UASC) arriving through the port of Dover, its director of children’s services (DCS) has warned.
In an interview with CYP Now, Kent DCS Matt Dunkley said that the council needs urgent government and local authority support to deal with a recent influx of migrant boats, many containing children and young people, arriving at Dover.
Since the start of the year, the council has become responsible for 420 unaccompanied children, 275 of whom have arrived since May, Dunkley said, highlighting concerns over the government’s National Transfer Scheme (NTS) which is designed to disperse unaccompanied migrant children across the country.
Just 20 beds were available in the local authority’s reception centres for UASC aged 16 and 17 on Thursday, he added.
“None are leaving on the NTS at the moment so we don’t know how long that capacity will go," he said.
“You're talking a couple of days before I will have to make the judgment about whether I tell my politicians, it is no longer safe to take new arrivals.
“No authority can take in 20-30 children a day for weeks on end. We’re very close to that point and we’ll decide when it is unsafe.”
Dunkley added that the government’s announcement last night that travellers arriving in England from France will have to quarantine for two weeks will exacerbate the problem of finding suitable foster homes for UASC under 16.
“Understandably, not a lot of foster families would want to take on a child that then has to quarantine for two weeks under the current circumstances,” he said.
“Our entire service is stretched.
"This is a national problem that needs a national solution. These people are not choosing to come to Kent, they are choosing to come to England. It just so happens that the one point of the border that is coming through now and that’s Dover.
“This is a human-scale tragedy; these are children in care and they should be distributed around the country. The only way to do that is to make the NTS mandatory.”
The NTS was introduced in 2016 after a surge in the number of asylum seekers arriving in the UK. The voluntary programme is designed to encourage other local authorities to agree to receive UASC from gateway councils, such as Kent, which are often the point of arrival for asylum seekers.
However, until the fresh crisis began to emerge in May, with boats carrying dozens of migrants landing on Kent beaches almost daily, the council “had not successfully placed a child through the NTS since 2018”, said Dunkley.
“On a voluntary basis it kind of ground to a halt in the period leading up to May when the boats started arriving," he said.
“Any child that arrived in Dover became a child in care in Kent without any exception from 2018 onwards."
The government moved to revitalise the scheme in June announcing a funding increase of between 20 and 60 per cent per placement for local authorities who agreed to take on UASC.
The new rate will see local authorities receive £240 per person, per week.
It replaces previous rates of £150 per week for legacy cases and £200 per week for national rate cases.
Legacy cases relate to former USAC care leavers that entered the UK on or before 30 June 2016.
Immigration minister Chris Philp said there would also be a targeted 25 per cent increase in funding for local authorities across the UK looking after the highest numbers of UASC compared with their care population.
For these areas, a new tariff of £143 per child per night instead of the standard rate of £114 per child per night would be introduced, he said.
The move led to 132 offers from local authorities to place some of the 420 UASC who had arrived in Kent since the start of the year, Dunkely said, adding that 92 of these placements had been successful.
However, he warned that despite the “big improvement”, Kent is “never going to meet the demand we’re currently seeing in terms of the number of people arriving unless the scheme is made mandatory.
Currently, only local authorities looking after higher numbers of UASC, at or above 0.07 per cent of their care population, benefit from uplifted rates for under-17s.
In Kent, this figure currently stands at more than two per cent with the council responsible for 589 unaccompanied children and 941 "connected" care leavers (aged under 25).
Dunkely said: “The NTS was devised in 2015 to ensure Kent never went through this again and its not working so here we are, all over again.
“We just can’t get enough volunteers because incentives aren’t there. There is an appetite to make this mandatory because those that are taking youngsters think it is fair that everyone should but the problem the government faces is making that politically palatable.”
Last year, London Council’s described the system as “broken” and warned boroughs including Croydon and Hillingdon would “struggle to cope” with increasing numbers of arrivals unless it was reviewed by the Home Office.
Home Office figures show that since its inception in 2016, 960 UASC have been placed through the NTS.
A spokesperson said: “We remain grateful for Kent’s continuing efforts to care for unaccompanied children and are working urgently to ease the burden on their services.
“The National Transfer Scheme was introduced to assist local authorities like Kent, and since 2016 more than 960 children have transferred to other local authorities, with more than a third moved from Kent.
“In April this year, we increased the amount of support given to local authorities for each former UASC care leaver to £240 a week – an increase of between 20 per cent to 60 per cent of previous rates.”