UK Government Urged to Stop Housing Unaccompanied Immigrant Children in Hotels

A group of illegal immigrants are brought in to Dover, Kent, from a Border Force vessel following a small boat incident in the English Channel, on Sept. 22, 2022. (Gareth Fuller/PA Media)

The UK government is facing renewed pressure from campaigners to stop housing underage immigrants in hotels after some children were reportedly abducted.

More than 100 charities, including children’s charities Barnardo’s and NSPCC, signed an open letter to Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, calling for an immediate end to the practice, according to campaign coordinator End Child Prostitution and Trafficking (ECPAT) UK and the Refugee Council.

Charities including ECPAT UK have previously issued multiple warnings to ministers and government departments about the dangers of the Home Office accommodating children in these hotels.

Patricia Durr, CEO of ECPAT UK, accused the government of ignoring the warnings and taking a “discriminatory approach to some of the most vulnerable children,” and she called on the government to fund local authorities with sufficient funds to boost children’s services capacity.

It comes after Home Office minister Robert Jenrick confirmed that 200 unaccompanied asylum-seeking children (UASC) are still missing, including 13 under-16s.

‘Taken From the Street’

According to The Observer, which cited a whistleblower and child protection sources, among the 600 UASC who passed through a Home Office-run hotel in Sussex, 136 were reported missing and 79 were never found.

The report said the children were “being taken from the street by traffickers.”

Speaking to Parliament on Tuesday following the revelation, Jenrick told MPs more than 4,600 unaccompanied children have been accommodated in hotels since July 2021, and there have been 440 missing occurrences.

Jenrick told MPs that a child would be considered missing after disappearing for four hours, and a multi-agency missing persons protocol would be mobilised alongside the police and the relevant local authority to find the child.

More than half of the children have been found, but 200 remain missing, “13 of whom are under 16 years of age and only one of whom is female,” he said.

Of the 200 missing children, almost nine in ten (88 percent) are Albanian nationals, with the rest from Afghanistan, Egypt, India, Vietnam, Pakistan, and Turkey, Jenrick added.

‘Must End the Use of Hotels’

The minister said the government doesn’t have the power to detain the children.

He said the government “must end the use of hotels as soon as possible,” but declined to set a date, saying the children have to be housed somewhere when children’s services don’t have the capacity to accept them immediately.

The minister said the government is incentivising local authorities to boost their child services capacity by giving local authorities £15,000 for taking a UASC and is “trying to do everything” to deter illegal entry into the UK.

House of Commons leader Penny Mordaunt on Thursday acknowledged there have been stories of gangmasters turning up at migrants’ hotels and “taking people away,” as she answered questions in the House of Commons.

She said it is, for “very obvious reasons, very hard to protect people in that kind of environment,” adding: “So we have to address this.”

Capacity Issues

According to Home Office figures, there were 72,027 asylum applications in the year ending September 2022, and around half were made by illegal entrants who snuck into Kent on small boats via the English Channel.

The number of asylum seekers is not unprecedented, but Home Secretary Suella Braverman in government said people who entered the UK under other humanitarian schemes, including those from Ukraine, have taken up some of the accommodations, making the level of pressure on the asylum system unprecedented.

But the capacity issues in children’s services began before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In 2021, Kent County Council, which bore the brunt of the small boats influx, twice stopped accepting new UASCs due to capacity overload.

The number of Albanian illegal immigrants also increased significantly last year.

According to the Home Office, a total of 815 Albanian nationals arrived in small boats in the whole of 2021. Between May and September 2022, 11,102 Albanians arrived by the same method, representing 42 percent of all small-boat arrivals in these months.

Modern Slavery

Of all modern slavery claims, Albanians account for 28.6 percent of them, up from 14 percent in 2020.

Around nine in ten Albanians referred to the National Referral Mechanism for modern slavery were granted the right to stay in the UK.

The UK’s National Crime Agency previously said Albanian gangs were bringing illegal immigrants across the English Channel, coaching them on what to say to the UK Border Force, and then putting them to work in cannabis farms.

Andi Hoxhaj, a Lecturer in Law at the University College London with an Albanian background, previously told the Home Affairs Committee that his research showed most of those who left Albania left for reasons including economic opportunities, well-being, access to the judiciary, or joining families.

In the same hearing, Esme Madill, Solicitor at Migrant and Refugee Children’s Legal Unit at Islington Law Centre, who works with Albanian minors, told MPs in some cases impoverished children were trafficked by gangs to pay back loans after their families, sometimes unknowingly, borrowed money to pay for things like medical care; while in some other cases, young people left the country for economic reasons before ending up in debt bondage, and the debt was sold on to criminal gangs which trafficked them.