The row over migrant children missing from Home Office hotels

At least 200 asylum seekers aged under 18 who were housed in hotels by the Home Office are currently missing in the UK, the immigration minister has confirmed.

Robert Jenrick told Parliament that more than 4,600 unaccompanied minors had been accommodated in hotels since July 2021, during which time there had been 440 “missing occurrences”. A total of 13 of those still unaccounted for were aged under 16, he admitted.

The latest asylum seeker row to blight Rishi Sunak’s government erupted after an investigation by The Observer found that 136 unaccompanied children had gone missing from a Brighton and Hove hotel in the past 18 months. Amid fears that missing minors are being trafficked and forced into modern slavery, more than 100 charities have written to the prime minister calling for an end to the Home Office’s “unlawful” use of hotels.

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What is happening to children arriving in the UK?

Unaccompanied minors are usually “the responsibly of local authorities where they reside”, said the Financial Times, and should have a designated social worker and access to certain services.

But who has legal responsibility for the thousands of asylum-seeking children housed in hotels as a “temporary” measure remains unclear. Jenrick told Parliament last week that security guards, nurses and social workers were stationed at the Home Office-run hotels, but admitted that no decision had been made about who was the “corporate parents” of minors accommodated there.

The Refugee Council’s chief executive, Enver Solomon, told The Guardian that vulnerable children were “being left in legal limbo” and were “at greater risk of being neglected or overlooked”.

Brighton and Hove-based newspaper The Argus reported that in the wake of The Observer’s investigation, the city council had sent a letter to Jenrick expressing “deep concern and worry” about children being housed in a local hotel – which has not been named for security reasons – “without consultation or consent from communities”.

In a separate statement, the council said: “For many months now we have been raising with government our concerns about the Home Office’s use of hotels to accommodate asylum-seeking children.”

Why are asylum-seeking minors going missing?

About 176 of the 200 child asylum seekers still missing from hotels across the UK are of Albanian origin, “raising questions about the role of organised crime groups in their disappearance”, said The Independent.

Analysis of government data by the paper found that the number of Albanian children in the UK who are thought to be victims of modern slavery had risen by 250% in two years.

Philip Ishola, CEO of charity Love146,warned of a “lack of specialist support” for these children, with limited training for the staff in hotels on how to identify victims of trafficking. “This leaves them vulnerable to being re-trafficked from the very people who they are meant to be protected from,” he added.

According to The Observer, police had warned the Home Office that the vulnerable occupants of the Brighton hotel would be targeted by criminal networks.

“Children are literally being picked up from outside the building, disappearing and not being found,” a child protection source told the paper.

A whistle-blower from a security company working at the hotel spoke of his despair at seeing children drawn into crime. “We can’t run around the area, checking to see who’s where. We can’t arrest the children, we can’t detain them,” the insider said.

What is the government doing?

The Home Office said this week that the use of hotels was a “temporary” but “unacceptable” solution.

“There are currently more than 45,500 asylum seekers in hotels costing the UK taxpayer £5.6m a day,” a spokesperson added. “We engage with local authorities as early as possible whenever sites are used for asylum accommodation and work to ensure arrangements are safe for hotel residents and local people.”

More than 100 charities including the NSPCC, Barnardo’s, the Children’s Society and the Refugee Council wrote to Rishi Sunak last week to express “grave concern that separated children seeking asylum are going missing, suspected of being trafficked and criminally exploited, from hotels where they have continued to be accommodated by the Home Office”.

As the row escalated, The Guardian reported that the Home Office had quietly published details of a £70m contract to put asylum seekers into large “accommodation centres” instead of hotels. But a first attempt to set up such a centre, at RAF Linton-on-Ouse in North Yorkshire, stalled last year following fierce local opposition.

The leader of the local district council, Mark Robson, told the Yorkshire Post that “clearly for an asylum centre, it wasn’t the right place, even though I think the [centres] are the right plan”.

Charities have criticised the planned asylum centres as “warehousing” and say asylum seekers should be accommodated in communities instead.