Two asylum seekers who arrived in the UK as children but were wrongly assessed as adults by Home Office social workers have won a victory in the high court after it ruled that the way they were treated was unlawful.
In his ruling on Wednesday, Mr Justice Henshaw found that the Home Office policy of conducting age assessments soon after arrival in the UK was unlawful, the decision to detain young people for them was unlawful, and the lack of an appropriate adult present for the assessments was also unlawful.
The ruling has been hailed as a victory for hundreds of unaccompanied asylum seeker children thought to have been subjected to the process.
Shortly before Wednesday’s judgment was made public, the Home Office stopped social workers from carrying out age assessments of newly arrived young people at a processing centre for new asylum seeker arrivals called Kent Intake Unit and issued new guidance about age assessment for the new arrivals.
The two children – a 16-year-old Kuwaiti Bidoon who arrived in the UK in the back of a lorry on 15 December 2020, and a 17-year-old Iranian boy who had spent seven to eight hours crossing the Channel in a dinghy – were subjected to truncated age assessments by social workers appointed by the Home Office.
Previously, new arrivals in need of an age assessment to determine whether they were a child or an adult were assessed by Kent county council social workers. When the council was no longer able to manage the volume of new arrivals, the Home Office began to conduct age assessments “in house” from September 2020.
Determining the age of young people is notoriously difficult. There is no proven scientific way of doing this and accepted good practice is for specially trained social workers to conduct a series of assessments before arriving at a decision in what is known as a “Merton compliant” age assessment process.
The judgment highlights the way children and young people are treated by Home Office officials on arrival in the UK after enduring difficult journeys and fleeing danger in their home countries.
The Kuwaiti Bidoon boy was detained in Yarl’s Wood immigration removal centre in Bedfordshire for three days after his age assessment, and the Iranian teenager was detained in Tinsley House immigration removal centre near Gatwick for five days. Both had arrived in the UK in poor condition after their journeys. The first said he had not eaten properly for two months, while the second said his journey by dinghy was terrifying and he arrived soaking wet and freezing cold.
Enver Solomon, the chief executive of the Refugee Council, welcomed the judgment. “We are relieved that the practice of hasty decisions is no longer allowed to continue,” he said. “Distinguishing between adults and children is not something that can be done quickly; it takes time and expertise to make the right decision.
“Children seeking safety arriving alone in the UK are bewildered and frightened. They have been subjected to processes with neither safeguards nor oversight, relying on little more than luck to ensure that someone identifies them as being wrongly deemed adult and helps them access the care they are entitled to. No child should have been faced with disbelief and such appalling practice.”
A Home Office spokesperson said: “We are disappointed by the court’s decision. The government is committed to protecting children and the vulnerable but we cannot allow asylum-seeking adults claim to be children – this presents a serious safeguarding risk. Our Nationality and Borders Bill seeks to improve the challenging age assessment process and will widen the evidence base for social workers to consider when making assessments and lead to better informed decisions.”