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Rising numbers of unaccompanied children seeking asylum are having their ages disputed by the Home Office, resulting in them being treated as adults, the Refugee Council has told Community Care, writes Craig Kenny.

According to the charity’s estimates, about half of those aged under-18 seeking asylum are now being challenged about their age.
In one case a 16-year-old boy had to sleep rough because the Home Office refused to accept his country-of-origin’s identity card as proof of his age.

Official figures suggest that the numbers of unaccompanied minors seeking asylum halved last year to 3,180 applications, compared with 6,200 in 2002. This trend has continued, with just 1,310 lone children officially applying for asylum in the first six months of this year.

The Refugee Council said some of this could be down to the Home Office’s increasing tendency to dispute a child’s age. It warned that the practice was “enormously harmful and potentially very damaging for children who will already have been through traumatic experiences”.

However, the Home Office denied the charity’s claim that applications from age-disputed children were not included in the statistics for unaccompanied minors, even when they were finally proven to be the age they said they were on arrival.

Peter Gilroy, Association of Directors of Social Services spokesperson on unaccompanied children seeking asylum and director of social services at Kent, said social services departments were still struggling to meet the costs incurred by lone children seeking asylum, despite falling numbers.


He said costs had risen following the High Court ruling in August 2003 that councils had a duty to provide care and support for unaccompanied minors until they were 21, and in some cases 24, in line with duties to care leavers.

The funding formula also pays councils per asylum seeker, Gilroy added, thereby penalising councils such as Kent with high overhead costs for its assessment units.

A spokesperson for the Home Office said age disputes could arise from differing calendars or ways of recording age. In some cases, traffickers presented young people as older or younger to avoid immigration controls or social services checks.

He said it was important that resources were maximised to assist those under the age of 18 who are perceived as generally being more vulnerable than adult asylum seekers, and added that the Home Office was working with local authorities on a protocol for assessing the age of children.