Hundreds of asylum seeker children in UK wrongly deemed to be adults

Around half of all disputes resolved between April and June resulted in refugees assessed as being children

Asylum seeker children arriving in the UK. Getty Images

Asylum seeker children in the UK have won hundreds of cases against officials who wrongly designated them as adults, official figures reveal.

Data from the UK’s Home Office shows that in just under half of disputes involving the age of a refugee resolved between April and June it was decided they were correctly assessed as being under 18.

In 704 cases it was ruled the refugee was under 18, while in 757 it was decided they were adults.

Children who are wrongly assessed as being over 18 are placed in adult accommodation while their asylum claims are processed, and campaigners have said this puts them at risk of abuse and means they miss out on education as well as the care they need.

Many age assessments are challenged in court and in one recent case, a Syrian asylum seeker Home Office officials said was 28 was in fact 17, while in another instance officials admitted they used a guide from the website of shaving products maker Gillette to incorrectly conclude an Afghan refugee was an adult.

Imran Hussain, executive director of external affairs with the Refugee Council, a UK-based organisation that works with refugees and asylum seekers, told The National that the “grim figures” from the Home Office “are sadly a considerable underestimate of the number of refugee children who are wrongly not believed about their age”.

According to the Home Office, 1,419 age disputes were resolved with the asylum seeker deemed to be under 18 in the first half of this year alone.

This figure has been rising since sharply since 2020, when there were 337 cases in the whole year.

The total number of age disputes currently being examined has now reached 2,088 for the second quarter of this year, compared to 131 in 2020.

The Refugee Council has been supporting refugees who have been assessed as being over 18 and placed in adult accommodation – including Amir from Afghanistan.

When he arrived in the UK he showed his Tazkira – a common form of Afghan ID – which stated he was 16, but his age was instead recorded as 22.

“They just said, ‘no, you are not this age.’ They gave me no reason, they just said ‘no you are 22,’” Amir explained.

“Two or three times, I said, ‘no.’ I said, ‘if you don’t believe me, I am 16, I can give you my national ID.’ They said, ‘this is not your ID.'”

After he was then placed in adult accommodation in a shared a room with 10 grown men. “I cried every day, every second,” he said.

Eventually Amir was taken into local authority care and his age decided using the standard method – known as a “Merton assessment”, after the case law that shaped the best practice.

“In an adult setting, vulnerable children are exposed to harm and abuse, often forced to share a room with unrelated adults and even detained and imprisoned,” said Mr Hussain.

He explained that there also the hundreds of children who are sent straight into the adult asylum system, without an age dispute claim being raised, because officials deem them to be significantly over 18.

“Flawed age assessments are an alarming child protection failure, and the government must take urgent action so that every refugee child is kept safe.”

Stewart MacLachlan, senior legal and policy officer at Coram Children’s Legal Centre, part of a charity that seeks to protect the rights of children, said some unaccompanied children do not know how exactly how old they.

“Processes for the registration of births differ across the world, and the importance placed on chronological age and date of birth – which is high in the UK – is not the same everywhere,” he said.

“Many children are unable to show official identity documents, as they may have never had them, lost them when fleeing harm, or had them taken off them. Some children are trafficked using false documents.”

The Home Office said the age dispute case figures may not correspond to the number of individuals involved, as there could be more than one dispute case for each person.

“Some individuals arrive in the UK without documentary evidence and where there is doubt on someone’s age, there is a need to assess it,” said an official.

“The Home Office has processes in place to verify and assess an individual’s age where there is doubt. This includes the National Age Assessment Board, which consists of a team of trained social workers whose task is to conduct full age assessments.”