Councils offered £15,000 to take in unaccompanied children from Kent

Authority welcomes incentive, introduced by outgoing Conservative government, but says it is "far from enough" to prevent its children's services from being overwhelmed

By Mithran Samuel on July 25, 2024 in Children

Photo posed by model (Jan H Andersen/Adobe Stock)

Councils are being offered £15,000 to take unaccompanied asylum-seeking children from Kent County Council to relieve pressures on the south coast authority.

The incentive, introduced by the Conservative government before it left office, is for any authority that takes a child from Kent into its care within two days of a notification to do so under the National Transfer Scheme (NTS).

The policy is in addition to an existing incentive for councils and Northern Irish health and social care trusts to receive £6,000 to take a child from Kent within five days. Both will be in place until the end of September this year.

The vast majority of unaccompanied children entering the UK arrive in Kent, making the authority responsible for accommodating them under section 20 of the Children Act 1989 in the first instance, pending the transfer of many elsewhere under the NTS.

About the National Transfer Scheme

Under the NTS, English, Scottish and Welsh councils and Northern Ireland’s health and social care trusts for whom unaccompanied children in care account for at least 0.1% of their child population – including Kent – refer young people to be transferred to an authority with a lower proportion of separated children.

The nine English regions, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland take it turns to be responsible for receiving referrals, on a rota system, with regional leaders allocating each case to an eligible authority within their area. The deadline for transfers between councils is ten days.

Since 2021, participation in the scheme has been mandatory and, according to the Home Office, 7,130 children were transferred under the scheme from July 2021 to December 2023, three times the number of transfers made over the previous such timeframe.

Kent and Home Office found to have acted illegally

However, the council has repeatedly struggled to manage the number of children coming into the county over the past few years.

The High Court ruled last July that Kent had acted unlawfully from 2021-23 by agreeing with the Home Office to a cap on the number of arrivals it would accommodate (120) above the NTS threshold of 0.1% of the child population, which the Home Office facilitated by placing children in hotels.

The same judgment, the first of four delivered by Mr Justice Chamberlain as part of judicial review proceedings, ruled that the Home Office’s use of hotels as a routine source of accommodation for unaccompanied children was also unlawful.

The judge ordered Kent to take all possible steps to accommodate unaccompanied children arriving in the county by increasing its care capacity, saying its duties to them under section 20 applied irrespective of its resources.

Government funding to boost Kent’s capacity to care

However, in the last judgment, issued in June this year, the judge made clear that the home secretary needed to take action before Kent reached the point when it could not discharge its duties.

On the back of the litigation, the government agreed to provide capital funding to help Kent develop accommodation for unaccompanied children, along with about £50m in revenue funding to resource additional care placements for them in 2024-25.

The authority said it was in the process of “acquiring, refurbishing, and opening new government funded reception centres in the county with some additional capacity to care for these vulnerable children”.

The council and the Home Office have also developed a protocol designed to ensure action is taken to prevent Kent from breaching its capacity.

Record high numbers of children arriving in Kent

However, the authority said the number of arrivals was at a “record high”, with 1,165 unaccompanied children referred to Kent in the first six months of 2024, compared with 624 in the same period in 2023.

Council leader Roger Gough said that the £15,000 incentive was “a welcome initiative” but that it was “still far from enough to guarantee an efficient and effective national transfer scheme (NTS) to ensure that Kent’s children’s services are never overwhelmed again”.

Transfers of children out of the county were still not keeping up with arrivals into Kent and the authority was “far too frequently at the point of reaching our full capacity”.

Authority ‘expected to shoulder disproportionate burden’

“For far too long [Kent] has been expected to shoulder this large and disproportionate burden to accommodate and care for every [unaccompanied] child (even on a temporary basis) by itself, simply because of its location on the shortest crossing from Europe,” he said.

“This has meant that [Kent] has effectively been required to find solutions for a national problem, dictated by global migration patterns, within the very limited resources and tools available to a county council.”

He said he had invited new home secretary Yvette Cooper and education secretary Bridget Phillipson to visit the county to see the work the authority was doing to safeguard the welfare of unaccompanied children.

“We have an opportunity now to make positive and long-lasting changes, particularly to get the NTS working, and it is my hope that this can be done outside of court processes that we have had to resort to most recently,” he added.

asylum, national transfer scheme, unaccompanied asylum-seeking children