Dean Russell MP: I am the Conversative MP for Watford. The Home Office’s new plan for immigration noted that since 2015 the UK has received applications from on average more than 3,000 unaccompanied asylum-seeking children per year. Could you briefly describe how a decision is made on whether a person claiming is a child or is not actually under 18? What is the effect on the system, the process and how they are treated, please? Perhaps I could come to you, Luke, on that.
Luke Geoghegan: Good afternoon, committee. There is a widespread recognition that children, because of their age and developmental status, have specific needs and human rights. This is enshrined in convention internationally and law nationally. The 1989 Children Act states, in Section 1(1), that “the child’s welfare shall be the court’s paramount consideration”. The Act applies to children in Wales, but the paramountcy principle is not in doubt in the other two legal jurisdictions in the UK. Most asylum seeking children coming to the UK first arrive in England, and for reasons of brevity I will focus on the legal situation in England. In addition to what my colleague Stewart was saying, a two-tier system under Clause 11 would be a breach not only of the ECHR and the CRC but of the Children Act. Since the child’s welfare is the paramount principle, this overrides issues of immigration and citizenship. That explains why a child is treated as a child first rather than as a migrant, with the accompanying needs and rights that attach to being a child.
This explains why unaccompanied asylum-seeking children on reaching 18 and legal adulthood are, from that point, subject to immigration law. The assessment of a child’s needs under the legislation is not simply about a chronological assessment of age. It involves a wider assessment of the child’s needs, which is required by the legislation, and, crucially, how those needs are best met. There is widespread recognition that all children who are in care are vulnerable. Children who are looked after because of their unaccompanied asylum-seeking status are particularly vulnerable. They will all have suffered traumatic events.
They have been separated from their parents. They have had to leave their countries, home and everything that is familiar to them. They may have witnessed or been subject to extreme violence. They may have been abused and they have had to function, perhaps for many months or years, without appropriate adult support and protection. For those individuals claiming asylum at an official point of entry, for example a port or airport, an immigration officer can make an assessment of age. If the situation is unclear, the case is referred to a social worker, who undertakes an initial assessment, followed by a full age assessment.
For individuals arriving at an unofficial point of entry, for example a beach or lorry park, police are often the first on the scene, but are not legally empowered to make a determination of age. A social worker will then be contacted, who will undertake an initial assessment of age and, once accommodation has been resolved, a fuller assessment. In line with the paramountcy principle of the Act, it is not for the child to prove that they are a child. It is for the authority to prove that the child is not a child. We are deeply concerned that the wording of Clause 29 of the Bill implies a shift away from this position in talking about insufficient evidence or significant doubt.
Age determination is about broad determination, not precise determination. In everyday language, we might say, “Luke is in his late 50s” and it is implicitly understood that this is a broad estimate. In the absence of appropriate documentary evidence, the independent verification of a precise chronological age of a child or young adult is not possible. Many asylum-seeking children are coming from countries where systems for the registration of births are fragile or non-existent. Countries may have had registration systems in the past that have been destroyed by armed conflict.
Age assessment is a complex process. The most effective age assessment is multidisciplinary and may, for example, draw on the expertise of education professionals and other relevant professionals. Age assessment may also have to take place in less than ideal settings, such as a lorry park, where newly arrived children remain frightened, exhausted and without access to a range of multidisciplinary resources. Some of this age assessment may be continuative over an extended period and confirmatory.
Those of you who have raised adolescents or teenagers will know that a normal part of development is for an individual to seem very adult one day and behaving like a child the next. In addition, the experience of being an asylum-seeking child can prematurely age a child. A child who is 15 and has travelled solo from, say, Afghanistan may well have to adopt the demeanour of a young adult, ie over 18, to survive. Conversely, a young person may regress to the appearance of a young child once they believe they are safe, or they may oscillate between these alternative presentations. The process of age determination takes time and is extremely skilled work.
Dean Russell MP: I take your last point, but in the media a few years ago I remember there was a whole flurry of stories about what looked like grown men coming through and being considered children. That caused a lot of concern. Even to this day, I still have constituents very concerned that grown adults, especially men, might be coming here while being considered children. To clarify, from your perspective, is there a significant problem of adult asylum seekers falsely claiming to be children? Has there been evidence of that in the past?
Luke Geoghegan: The wording of the new plan for immigration presented some information on this. Unfortunately, contextual information was missing. The NPI implied that 54% of those who had their claims assessed who claimed to be children are in fact adults. The truth is that only 25% of unaccompanied children have an age assessment. If 10,000 children arrived in the UK, 2,500 would need an age assessment and just over 1,300 would be found to be in fact adults, or 13%, which is rather different from the headline of 54%. The reality is that a number of claims to be children are not upheld because the system has a number of screens in place. There is the immigration officer’s age determination. There is the age assessment carried out by social workers. Social workers can and do assess people as being over 18 and not children. Of course, there is also the adversarial nature of the immigration process.
Dean Russell MP: I declare that I am the chair of the digital identity all party group. I was interested in the age verification conversation. I am aware, through that, that there is some pretty advanced technology now that can do age verification, I understand from facial recognition, to within a year for young people. It is quite new technology, so I am not expecting you to have already used it. I wondered how nimble the system is to adopting new technologies to do age verification. I understand that it is getting more and more accurate every year. I wondered whether that might be not necessarily the full solution but an element of making sure that this process is more accurate.
Luke Geoghegan: This is not my specialist area. The little bit of reading I have done is that artificial intelligence draws on the knowledge that it takes on. It will read the faces of people it knows to be 16 or 18 because the operator tells it that and then it will make a conclusion. If you draw a different set of faces, it may make mistakes. The term in AI for risk assessment, for example in criminal justice matters, is “amplification”. It judges certain ethnic groups riskier than others, because that is the data that it is being fed.
Dean Russell MP: I totally get that at the moment it is not quite there. I wondered whether there is an openness to looking at new technology and new approaches to improve the accuracy of age verification over time.
Luke Geoghegan: There is an openness. When we get to the questions on the national age assessment board, we would like to make some positive comments on that.
