News

Local authorities in London and the South East are caring for more than 80 per cent of the asylum-seeking children in England who need social services, new figures have revealed.

The Department of Health's revised Children in Need statistics published last week show that, out of 12,080 asylum-seeking children in need in England during one week last year, 10,255 were being provided with services by councils in the South East and the capital.

In London alone, nearly 8,500 asylum-seeking children were either being looked after by social services or provided with assistance and support to enable them to live with their family or independently.


London boroughs caring for the highest number of children include Haringey, Enfield, Islington, Westminster and Barnet. In the south east, Kent, Slough and Oxfordshire Councils were most affected.

The figures - the result of a census in September 2001 looking at the number of children in need cared for by social services departments in a normal week - reveals that the weekly cost to Haringey Council of providing services to asylum seeking children was £630,000, based on the average child in need costing social services £230 a week. This accounted for more than two-thirds of its overall weekly bill for children in need.

Kent Council's 500 asylum-seeking children cost it £115,000 a week, or nearly £6m a year. This is likely to be significantly higher now, as the number of unaccompanied asylum-seeking children the council cares for has quadrupled over the past year.

Mary Blanche, head of Kent's asylum seeker unit, said the council had to place some children out of the county because it didn't have enough resources to cope.


"We're struggling because there's only so many social workers, interpreters and specialist foster carers to go round. We're calling for a move to a 'safe case' transfer to other local authorities," she said.

Unlike adult asylum seekers, who are distributed evenly across the country, unaccompanied children have to be looked after by the council where they claim asylum.

The extent of the concentration of asylum-seeking children in the South East surprised DoH officials. The report says: "As might be expected, there is significant clustering of the figures, though the actual distribution is rather more uneven than might have been anticipated."

- Children in Need in England at www.doh.gov.uk/cin/cin2001results.htm