90 Asylum Seeker Children Still Missing, Says Minister

A group of asylum seekers are brought in to shore onboard an RNLI Dungeness Lifeboat, following a small boat incident in the English Channel, in Dungeness, Kent, England, on Dec. 21, 2023. Jordan Pettitt/PA Wire

The government will make it a “primary focus” to find 90 asylum-seeking children who went missing from Home Office-run hotels, a minister has said.

In an update given by Home Office minister Lord Hanson of Flint, of the 472 children who had gone missing from these hotels, 382 were found as of Sept. 26, meaning that 90 are still unaccounted for.

“I wish to find the 90 children who are still missing,” Hanson told colleagues in the House of Lords on Wednesday, continuing, “I wish to ensure that we give support to local authorities and the police to do that, and it has to be the primary focus of the Home Office.”

The minister also confirmed that all seven of the Home Office-run hotels for unaccompanied asylum-seeking children were now closed, with six closing in November 2023 and the final one closing in January 2024.

The child hotels were closed following a legal challenge by Every Child Protected Against Trafficking (ECPAT) UK against the previous government, with the High Court ruling the accommodation unlawful.

Calls for an Inquiry

Fellow Labour peer Lord Touhig said that putting children as young as 12 into hotels “without proper care and supervision is an affront to their human rights and a stain on the good name of Britain,” and called for an inquiry.

Touhig’s call for a review was supported by Labour’s Baroness Chakrabarti, who said: “While the focus must be on recovering the missing children, it is still a scandal that so many went missing and that previous Ministers did so little to protect them and find them. A short and focused statutory inquiry would compel witnesses and perhaps focus minds.”

Flint said he would “reflect in due course on what both she and my noble friend Lord Touhig said, but ultimately our focus has to be to find those people who went missing because of the performance of the previous Government’s management of this issue.”

Risk of Trafficking

During the debate, Touhig referenced a report from University College London (UCL) and ECPAT UK, which found that children who had gone missing from these hotels were at an “increased risk of trafficking.”

Researchers found that Albanian boys were “particularly vulnerable” and made up a large proportion of the children who went missing, reportedly because they feared being sent back home.

Some children had been left in them for several months, the report found, despite the Home Office saying it would only use them for emergency purposes and not for longer than two weeks.

The report also said that one former Home Office hotel worker said he had heard of three child trafficking incidents from these hotels.

Researchers concluded that the professionals they interviewed “felt it obvious that if vulnerable children with potential trafficking ties are crammed into a publicly announced, easily identifiable hotel upon arrival in the UK, it provides an easy target for traffickers seeking to find and exploit these children.”

New Border Policies

Flint told peers that in the event of unaccompanied minors arriving in the UK, “the first port of call is to provide support via local authorities, which give proper safeguarding opportunities and responsibilities for those individual under-18s.”

“My objective overall and that of the Government in having the border control system is to ensure that we help to reduce the number of children coming here, exploited by gangmasters and by others, and that we deal with those who come here in a humane and effective way,” he said.

Since coming to power, the new Labour government has focused its asylum and illegal immigration policies on tackling the criminal gangs that smuggle people to the UK, notably along the English Channel route, and increasing deportations for those with no legal right to be in the country.

By Oct. 31, a total of 30,661 people had illegally entered the UK by boat, representing a 15 percent increase on that time last year. That same week, another person had died in French waters trying to make the journey, bringing October’s Channel fatalities to 10, and a total of 50 since the start of the year.