27 July 2023 , 15:39
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"Routine" housing of unaccompanied children in hotels is illegal, a court ruled in a humiliating defeat for the Home Office.
A scathing High Court verdict highlighted the case of 154 children who vanished from hotels, including a 12-year-old, and said there is "evidence" that some have been exploited by criminal gangs. It piles further pressure on under-fire Home Secretary Suella Braverman, who is already battling a mammoth asylum backlog after years of Tory failure.
The High Court upheld legal action by charity Every Child Protected Against Trafficking (ECPAT), which said current arrangements are "not fit for purpose".
Mr Justice Chamberlain said Kent County Council had opted to treat children "less favourably" because they were asylum seekers.
Bella Sankey, leader of Brighton and Hove City Council, said: "I welcome this landmark ruling that the Home Secretary's policy of placing unaccompanied children in hotels for the past 18 months has been unlawful. As a result of this policy, a dozen classrooms of children, including some of the most traumatised and vulnerable children in the world, have gone missing and, sickeningly for us, 50 children are still missing from the hotel used in Brighton and Hove."
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Lib Dem MP Alistair Carmichael accused the Tories of having an "immoral, unworkable" policy (Getty Images)The judge said the power to place the children in hotels "may be used on very short periods in true emergency situations".
He told the court in London: "It cannot be used systematically or routinely in circumstances where it is intended, or functions in practice, as a substitute for local authority care."
He continued: "From December 2021 at the latest, the practice of accommodating children in hotels, outside local authority care, was both systematic and routine and had become an established part of the procedure for dealing with unaccompanied asylum seeking children.
"From that point on, the Home Secretary's provision of hotel accommodation for unaccompanied asylum seeking children exceeded the proper limits of her powers and was unlawful.
"There is a range of options open to the Home Secretary to ensure that unaccompanied asylum seeking children are accommodated and looked after as envisaged by Parliament. It is for her to decide how to do so."
Following the verdict, Lib Dem Home Affairs spokesman Alistair Carmichael said: "Yet again, Home Office policy under the Conservatives is immoral, unworkable - and unlawful too, as the High Court has just ruled.
"This confirms what we have been saying for months - that housing asylum seeking children in squalid hotels is totally unacceptable.
"It's high time for the Home Secretary to finally commit to ending the use of these hotels immediately. Sadly, this Conservative government has decided that their anti-refugee rhetoric is more important than safeguarding children from exploitation."
ECPAT's bid was heard in London alongside similar claims brought by Brighton and Hove City Council and Kent County Council. The Home Office and Department for Education had opposed the legal challenges and said that the hotel use was lawful but was "deployed effectively as a 'safety net' and as a matter of necessity".
As well as finding that the Home Office's use of hotels to house child asylum seekers is unlawful, the judge also said that Kent County Council is acting unlawfully in failing to accommodate and look after unaccompanied asylum seeking children when notified by the Home Office.
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Mr Justice Chamberlain said in his 55-page judgment: "In ceasing to accept responsibility for some newly-arriving unaccompanied asylum seeking children, while continuing to accept other children into its care, Kent County Council chose to treat some unaccompanied asylum seeking children differently from and less favourably than other children, because of their status as asylum seekers."
The court heard that at the time of the hearing in the claims earlier this month, 154 children remained missing from the hotels, including a 12-year-old. The judge said: "Neither Kent County Council nor the Home Secretary knows where these children are, or whether they are safe or well.
"There is evidence that some have been persuaded to join gangs seeking to exploit them for criminal purposes. These children have been lost and endangered here, in the United Kingdom.
"They are not children in care who have run away. They are children who, because of how they came to be here, never entered the care system in the first place and so were never 'looked after'."
Patricia Durr, chief executive of ECPAT, said: "It remains a child protection scandal that so many of the most vulnerable children remain missing at risk of significant harm as a consequence of these unlawful actions by the Secretary of State and Kent County Council."
A Home Office spokesperson said: "The High Court has upheld that local authorities have a statutory duty to care for unaccompanied asylum-seeking children. We have always maintained that the best place for unaccompanied children to be accommodated is within a local authority.
"However, due to the unsustainable rise in illegal Channel crossings, the Government has had no option but to accommodate young people in hotels on a temporary basis while placements with local authorities are urgently found.
"In light of today's judgment, we will continue to work with Kent County Council and local authorities across the UK to ensure suitable local authority placements are provided for unaccompanied children, in line with their duties."
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