Home Office powers to detain unaccompanied children scrapped

Campaigners are celebrating the reversal of powers given to the Home Office in 2023 allowing them to detain unaccompanied asylum-seeking children (UASC) indefinitely.

The powers to detain children without time limit were brought in with the Illegal Migration Act 2023 by the then-Conservative Government, though they had not yet been commenced.

The scrapping of the powers by the Labour Government preserves the status quo of the Immigration Act 2014. This means unaccompanied children can only be detained for 24 hours in airport and other short-term facilities and children in families can only be detained for 72 hours or a week if personally authorised by the minister and in special facilities and with certain safeguards.

Coram Children’s Legal Centre, part of a consortium of charities which worked to limit the child detention powers, said that “babies and children do not belong in indefinite administrative detention and this draconian power has no place on the statute book.”

The Government also said it was scrapping powers for the Home Office to keep unaccompanied children outside of the normal care system by directly accommodating them upon arrival in the UK. The charity involved in ending this practice, ECPAT UK, through a successful legal challenge highlighted how the Home Office (alongside Kent County Council) were failing to uphold their statutory duty to take unaccompanied children into care, reinforcing the vital role of local authorities, irrespective of their immigration status.

In a statement, the charity said it “warmly welcomes the repeal of the proposal that would have deemed the asylum claims of children arriving in the UK inadmissible if they had not come through one of the very limited ‘safe routes.’”

“This represented a departure from a well-established policy exempting unaccompanied children from inadmissibility rules, and its implementation would have caused immeasurable harm to thousands of vulnerable children fleeing war and persecution. The repeal of this harmful measure ensures that unaccompanied children will continue to have the opportunity to seek protection in the UK, in line with international obligations and long-standing child protection principles.”

Controversial provisions relating to age assessments, including allowing the Secretary of State to remove an age-disputed child before the determination on age was completed, were also repealed. Measures which saw young people who did not consent to so-called ‘scientific age assessment’ methods automatically considered to be adults.

Campaigners said these provisions penalised young people who do not consent to scientific age assessment methods, with the Helen Bamber Foundation estimating that more than 1300 children were wrongly assessed in an 18-month period alone.


Children’s Commissioner Dame Rachel De Souza said an erroneous age assessment could have dire consequences in October 2023: “Perhaps the starkest consequence for children wrongly assessed are those who are sent to an adult prison for entering the UK illegally. This issue has been identified by the organisation Humans for Rights Network. My team recently visited HMP Elmley and met with some young people in this situation. Home Office guidance states that someone claiming to be a child should be treated as one unless ‘their physical appearance and demeanour very strongly suggesting that they are significantly over 18 years’. This was certainly not the case for the young people my team met, who appeared to be young, scared and confused.”

Social Workers Without Borders (SWWB) said they were currently digesting all the changes in the new Bill.

“For now, we are taking a moment to recognise the positive changes that directly impact social work practice and the children and young people we work with,” the group wrote on their Facebook page.

“We opposed these provisions as they were brought into force and are now so happy to see them go!”