QARN on missing asylum-seeking children
‘There needs to be someone responsible for making sure the system is looking after these young people.'
Friends have spoken out about the 200 children recently reported to have gone missing from hotels run by the Home Office.
Simon Murray, the Home Office minister, told the House of Lords on 23 January that the numbers, collated since 2021, include at least thirteen children under the age of sixteen.
The Observer revealed that a whistleblower from the Brighton Home Office hotel claimed that ‘some children had been abducted off the street outside the facility and bundled into cars’.
The department was warned by police that the asylum-seeking children, many unaccompanied, would be targeted by criminal networks.
Sheila Mosley, from Quaker Asylum and Refugee Network (QARN), told the Friend: ‘Children in the asylum system have been disappearing for a long time, most likely to traffickers – who know where to find them.’
When it comes to unaccompanied children seeking asylum, she said: ‘There needs to be someone responsible for making sure the system is looking after these young people, preferably from a statutory agency with a track record of ensuring that the children’s wellbeing is the paramount concern.’
The Home Office said it wasn’t true that children were being abducted from hotels, and that they were free to leave. ‘Robust safeguarding procedures are in place… In the concerning occasion when a child goes missing, local authorities work closely with agencies, including the police, to urgently establish their whereabouts. The ICIBI [Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration] in October found the young people in accommodation unanimously reported feeling safe, happy and were treated with respect.’
David Forbes, from QARN, said: ‘My concern is the silence, indeed the absence, of Migrant Help in all this. Migrant Help, nominally a charity, holds a huge contract from the Home Office in which one of their core services is described as “help to the victims of human trafficking and modern day slavery”.’
A telephone helpline for asylum-seekers run by Migrant Help has been criticised recently for long waiting times of sometimes three hours. Migrant Help was paid £17 million by the Home Office in 2021 but was recently rated ‘inadequate’. The latest audit was the tenth time in just under three years that it had been found to be underperforming.
‘This is a concern that QARN is working on at the moment, regarding the governance of outsourcing work by the Home Office, to companies like Serco, Mitie, Clearsprings, Mears Group [and Migrant Help],’ said Sheila Mosley.
Migrant Help said it was missing its target of answering ninety per cent of calls on time because of ‘significantly higher’ demand than anticipated, adding that it had expanded its team in order to cope. The charity said it had assisted 81,776 asylum seekers over the last year with an average wait of sixteen minutes, and had received only 275 complaints.
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