Call to reform age assessment systems as councils incur massive legal costs

The system for assessing the age of children arriving alone in the UK is inadequate and costing local authorities up to hundreds of thousands of pounds in unnecessary legal costs, a report by Coram Children’s Legal Centre has claimed.

Describing the system as “inadequate”, the report – Happy Birthday? Disputing the age of children in the immigration system – argued that it was having a damaging impact on children.

The legal centre said: “Children who arrive alone in the UK are regularly disbelieved about how old they are and can spend many years without access to education or appropriate support, or end up in unsupervised accommodation with adults or in adult immigration detention centres. The only way to challenge this treatment is to pursue costly and protracted legal proceedings.”

The report highlighted how – between 2010 and 2012 – the London Borough of Croydon, one of the councils with responsibility for looking after the largest number of unaccompanied children going through the immigration system, spent almost £1.2m on costs being awarded against it after its assessments were found to be unlawful.

The legal centre recommended that:

• Age should not be disputed “when there is no reason for the Home Office or local authority to doubt a child's own account of how old they are or the evidence they provide”;
• If there is any doubt whatsoever as to whether someone is over 18, they should not be detained and should not be put in the Detained Fast Track for the processing of their asylum claim;
• Statutory guidance on assessing age should be published. “Currently no national guidance on how to conduct age assessments exists”;
• Where an individual's account is doubted for good reason and an age assessment is necessary, a holistic, multi-agency age assessment process should be developed, including an alternative dispute resolution process to reduce the contentiousness and costs of disputes and enable faster resolution.

The legal centre said this ADR process could be used following an initial decision as a preliminary stage in the commencement of legal proceedings and be made a necessary step for both sides to engage in before continuing proceeding more formally. “Judicial review would remain as a final remedy for a child, but this would be the last resort.”

The legal centre said it was “critically important” that legal aid and access to the court was retained for children. Ministry of Justice proposals under consultation and threatening access to judicial review were “of great concern”.

In relation to the court process, the report highlighted how local authorities and the young people struggled to identify independent experts who could effectively assist the court in a way that was perceived as truly independent of the interests of either party.

Research for the report found that 22 local authorities replying to a freedom of information request had conducted 697 age assessments over a period of under two years.

It also suggested that there was wide variation in the practice of local authorities. The legal centre said some local authorities assessed the age of all children referred to them, but others only carried out age assessments on under a quarter of referrals.

Meanwhile, a third of local authorities found more than half of the individuals they assessed to be over 18, whereas over half found almost all to be children.

In 35 case studies, the length of time taken to resolve the issue of age was between 10 months and four years.

Report author Kamena Dorling, Manager of the Migrant Children's Project at Coram Children's Legal Centre, urged the Government to review the process.

She said: “The current system is failing vulnerable children who come to the UK fleeing violence, abuse and trauma. Of course it is important to be vigilant so that adults claiming to be children are not placed in foster care or in schools with younger children.

“But it is equally important to ensure that our system protects every child and that they do not end up with adults in immigration detention, or at risk of abuse in unsupervised accommodation with adults.”

Dorling added: “Exceptional cases should not shape the whole system for children who do not have proof of their age, and fear of abuse of the system should not result in the government denying children their rights by simply deciding they are older than they say they are.

“Immigration officials and social care professionals must address the culture of disbelief and not dispute a child's age unless there is a solid reason to do so. An urgent review is required to ensure that a fairer, less costly and less damaging system is developed.”

A copy of the full report can be viewed here.