Councils “threatening to take children of undocumented parents into care”: claim

When faced with undocumented families in desperate need, local authorities are often only offering accommodation to children – “effectively threatening to take them into care if an undocumented parent asks social services for support”, human rights groups have claimed.

The claim was made in a report, A Guide to the Hostile Environment: the border controls dividing our communities – and how we can bring them down, edited by human rights organisation Liberty and containing contributions from other campaign groups such as the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants.

The report argued that what it called the Government’s “hostile environment” policies had infiltrated all areas of UK life and led to a “sprawling web of immigration controls”.

It highlighted requirements on, landlords, private sector workers, NHS staff and other public servants – “often unwillingly” – to check a person’s status before they can offer them a job, housing, healthcare or other support.

“In the name of aiding immigration enforcement, ministers have also drawn up a series of secret data-sharing arrangements – without parliamentary scrutiny or public consultation – allowing the Home Office to dip into personal information held by NHS Digital, the Department for Education, the Department for Work and Pensions and others,” they added.

The report noted that:

• Since 2015, the Home Office and Department for Education had shared the school records of up to 1,500 children a month for immigration enforcement purposes.
• Undocumented migrants were charged for medical treatment “at an exorbitant 150 per cent” of the cost to the NHS.
• Many international students were now required to register with police and apply for a biometric residence permit. Some higher education institutions were performing discriminatory attendance monitoring – forcing international students to sign into class or fingerprint themselves into lectures in front of their classmates.
• Fifty-one per cent of landlords had said the “Right to Rent” scheme would make them less likely to consider letting properties to foreign nationals.
• The Home Office – assisted by local authorities, the Greater London Authority and some charities – had confiscated identification documents from rough-sleeping EU nationals so they could no longer work to get themselves back on their feet. “Others have been unlawfully detained in prison-like immigration removal centres.”

Martha Spurrier, Director of Liberty, said: “The Government’s war on migrants’ rights has made the UK a place where parents fear sending their children to school, people with life-threatening illnesses avoid seeking medical care, people sleeping rough hide from services that should exist to support them and undocumented families face a choice between homelessness or having their children taken into care.

“These toxic policies depend on willing participation from people across society – but that will also be their downfall. Civil servants, doctors, teachers and the wider public are already refusing to be complicit in the Government’s attempt to turn us all into border guards. If more of us do so, we can fight for a country that guarantees people’s fundamental rights, wherever they come from.”