The shocking kidnapping of unaccompanied children

The shocking kidnapping of unaccompanied children

Good morning. Two days ago, the Observer reported a story that seemed to set a new low for the authorities’ handling of asylum seekers who come to the UK by small boats: dozens of vulnerable children, with no parent in the country, being abducted from outside Home Office-run hotels and disappearing. And yet that summary only scratches the surface of the policy mess that has left them so at risk.

At one hotel alone, 79 children are still unaccounted for. In many cases, they may have been picked up by criminal gangs, perhaps having been told that they will be sent to Rwanda if they stay. And yet there is no timeline in places for ending the practice of putting children up in hotels, a temporary policy created to deal with an emergency that has become the norm.

Yesterday, a government minister admitted that 200 children are missing from six Home Office hotels. But he could not put a date on when the practice would end. In today’s newsletter, Laura Durán, of the rights organisation Every Child Protected Against Trafficking (Ecpat), explains the stopgap solutions that led to a shocking threat to children’s safety – and why there is little sign of the problem being solved. Here are the headlines.

Five big stories

1. UK politics | Rishi Sunak has instructed his ethics adviser to investigate the tax affairs of the Conservative party chair, Nadhim Zahawi, but faces growing pressure over whether he knew about an HMRC inquiry when he appointed Zahawi. The prime minister admitted there were “questions that need answering” over Zahawi’s affairs.
2. Probation | Ministers and the probation service have been accused of having “blood on their hands” after a watchdog uncovered failings which left Jordan McSweeney free to murder the law graduate Zara Aleena. A report said McSweeney should have been identified as a high-risk offender with a long history of misogynist and racially-aggravated incidents.
3. Media | Richard Sharp’s selection as BBC chair is the subject of two separate investigations, it was announced yesterday, amid allegations he helped Boris Johnson secure a loan of up to £800,000 weeks before he was recommended for the job by the then prime minister.
4. US news | Seven people have been killed in two shootings in an agricultural region of northern California, authorities said on Monday. The news follows the killing of 11 people over the weekend at a ballroom dance hall in the south of the state.
5. Education | A four-year-old British boy called Teddy Hobbs has become the youngest member of Mensa after he taught himself to read and count – including in Mandarin – while playing on his tablet.

In depth: ‘We had a warning from day one that this was absolutely going to happen’

Migrants brought ashore in Dover in June. Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

In August 2020, Kent county council announced that it was doing the “unthinkable”: declaring that it could no longer look after unaccompanied child refugees. After caring for more than 1,500 such children since 2014, the local authority said the system was under “impossible strain”. “The stark reality,” said council leader Roger Gough, “is that … the council simply cannot safely accommodate any more new arrivals at this time.”

If the situation was unthinkable, it was nonetheless allowed to persist. The government made an existing voluntary national transfer scheme mandatory, but Kent said that this had not been enough to solve the problem. In June 2021, the council said its services had again reached “breaking point”.

The council said it had double the number of children in care that it could safely handle, and warned that it would seek a judicial review of the Home Office policy. A month later, an emergency alternative was put in place: housing the children in hotels.

To understand the gravity of Mark Townsend’s report for the Observer on children being kidnapped from these hotels, you first have to understand how predictable it was. “It is shocking, but it is not surprising to us,” said Ecpat’s head of policy Laura Durán. “We have been warning the government from day one that this was absolutely going to happen.”

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What protections are in place for unaccompanied child asylum seekers?

In theory, children who arrive in the UK by small boats are “entitled to the same local authority support as any other looked-after child”, the Home Office’s 2017 safeguarding strategy (pdf) said. That is not the reality for the children who have found themselves in hotels, where they typically stay for about two weeks.

“When this started, the position was that it was an emergency – and the Home Office had absolutely no authority or legal basis for accommodating children,” said Durán. “It amounted to them excluding a whole group of children from the UK’s child protection framework because of their immigration status. And now the emergency has been carrying on for almost two years.”

By rights, these children should have a care plan, access to education, proper medical care and a host of other entitlements. But a report (pdf) by the Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration (ICIBI) on four hotels last year found that while children felt safe and happy, they had “perfunctory” English lessons with no formal schooling, no access to legal advice or prescriptions, and in all but one hotel no fully functioning kitchen. They were being looked after at two of the hotels by staff who lived on site with access to master keys but had not been vetted through the Disclosure and Barring Service.

Perhaps most urgent is the question of what happens if they go missing. “If that happens, there are really specific steps that are supposed to be taken,” said Durán. “You have to hold a meeting, determine the risk, that determines the level of investigation that will be carried out and how information is shared – a host of things. But in these hotels, nobody is taking that responsibility.”

In October, ministers admitted that of 222 vulnerable children whose whereabouts it did not know at the time, 39 had been gone for more than 100 days. Now Mark reports that dozens of children have been effectively abducted from one Brighton hotel alone, in a pattern apparently being repeated across the south coast.

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Can anyone stop this?

The police’s policy on how how to respond when asylum-seeking children go missing is still in “development”. In the meantime, “Children are literally being picked up from outside the building, disappearing and not being found,” a child protection source said.

When staff and security guards see this happening, there is astonishingly little they can do. “We can’t run around the area, checking to see who’s where,” a whistleblower working for outsourcing firm Mitie said. “We can’t arrest the children, we can’t detain them.”

“The hotel staff are independent contractors,” Durán said. “Ultimately all they can do is ring the police.” Even that limited redress only works if they see the incident in the first place. While the police has warned the Home Office that the children would be targeted by criminal networks, it says it has received no kidnapping allegations.