Forty unaccompanied asylum-seeking children who went missing from Home Office hotels have still not been found, according to a parliamentary report published on Thursday. The Joint Committee on Human Rights said 472 children had gone missing from the hotels in total. Of those, 432 have since been located. Two of the 40 still unaccounted for are believed to remain under 18.
Evidence given to committee
The figure was given in evidence to the committee by Helen Waite, a director of children’s social care at the Department for Education. She told the committee in June that guidance had been issued to police from the Home Office “to ensure that we continue to look for those children and that we can surface whether they have been found, and information can be updated to provide more reassurance.”
In 2023 it emerged that more than 440 unaccompanied asylum-seeking children had gone missing from Home Office hotels, some reported to be as young as 12. The High Court ruled that year that the Home Office’s routine use of hotels to house lone child asylum seekers was unlawful. The hotels used for unaccompanied children closed in January 2024, reported The Guardian.
Exploitation concerns
Angela Eagle, then border security and asylum minister, told the committee in a letter last year that some of those later found were “located in exploitative situations and may have been trafficked or victims of other forms of exploitation.”
The committee said: “We welcome the fact that the majority of missing children have now been found. However, we continue to be extremely concerned about the fact that some children who went missing from asylum hotels in previous years remain missing.”
Calls for action
It called on the Home Office to “make clear what specific action is being taken to locate these children, to investigate the causes for them going missing, and to avoid unaccompanied asylum-seeking children going missing in the future.” It asked for updates every three months with details of efforts to locate those who remain missing.
Patricia Durr, chief executive of Every Child Protected Against Trafficking UK, said: “The government cannot allow the disappearance of children to fade from public scrutiny. It is a significant child protection failure and we strongly support the committee’s call for regular public reporting and greater transparency about what is being done to find those who remain missing, understand why so many children disappeared, and ensure this can never happen again.”
England’s Children’s Commissioner Dame Rachel de Souza has described the ongoing disappearance of the children as an “unacceptable failure.”
A government spokesperson said: “The safety and wellbeing of children is paramount, and we take any child going missing extremely seriously. The Home Office-operated accommodation for unaccompanied asylum-seeking children closed in January 2024. Since then, the vast majority of children reported missing from those settings have subsequently been located. Police forces are responsible for investigating missing children cases and we continue to review our records, share relevant information with them and work closely with local authorities and safeguarding partners to support those investigations.”
