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The immigration service is to introduce new controls on unaccompanied asylum-seeking children.

They will be routinely subjected to interviews and reporting arrangements will be introduced for those 16 and 17-year-olds who face deportation once they reach 18 to ensure they keep in touch with immigration authorities.

The changes will involve new immigration rules and will not take place until after the Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Bill receives royal assent, at the end of this year or the beginning of next.

Currently, unaccompanied minors are not normally interviewed by immigration officials. Their applications for asylum are decided on the basis of written information.

The point of the interviews, said Kathy Casey, deputy director of asylum and appeals policy at the Home Office, was to screen for young people who may be making multiple applications, and also to gather more information about the circumstances of their emigration from their country of origin.

Casey was speaking at a seminar on services for unaccompanied asylum-seeking children held by Baaf Adoption and Fostering last week.

She said that in order to meet tough targets on removals, immigration officials would increasingly be deporting young people who had reached 18, and been given leave to remain only until then, and that social workers should be preparing them for return to their country of origin rather than leaving them to be picked up off the streets on their birthday.

But she also told the seminar that any unaccompanied child or young person who was granted four years' exceptional leave to remain could expect indefinite leave to remain once the four years had expired.

Mike Rourke, assistant chief inspector at the Social Services Inspectorate, told the seminar the department was looking at introducing arrangements for spreading the support for unaccompanied asylum seeking children among a larger number of authorities.

Kent social services department's appeal to other local authorities for help with the 2,000 children and young people it was supporting produced some positive responses, he said.

The number of applications for asylum from unaccompanied under-18s almost trebled between 1997 and 2001 from 1,105 to 3,469. Last year the largest number of applications came from Afghan children (672).

Department of Health figures indicate that there are 6,750 unaccompanied asylum-seeking children currently supported by local authorities.