UK Borders Bill

The noble Lord may say that, but in the consultation document on the process of age determination, there was no reference to the 1981 report. Therefore, I must be given leave to suspect that there are people in the Minister’s department who were not aware of its existence. That report was endorsed at the time by an ad hoc medico-legal committee which consisted of representatives of the BMA, the TUC, law centres, regional health authorities, the JCWI and individual lawyers and doctors. In the Government’s consultation document, Planning Better Outcomes and Support for Unaccompanied Asylum Seeking Children, there is a discussion of the problem of age determination, so that eligibility for children's services and for enhanced access to legal aid, which we were discussing a few minutes ago, can be decided. It is also necessary, as we discussed on Amendment No. 41, to determine whether a child is over or under the age of 16 and a half at the date of his original application. The Government say that in 2005, 2,425 asylum seekers claimed to be under 18, but were initially deemed by immigration officers to be adults. Some of them were later reclassified as children following more thorough assessment by social workers, but the document claimed that the number of age-disputed cases was illustrative of a serious level of abuse of the system. While not disputing that some pretend to be younger than they are, the fact that social workers frequently have to correct the initial assessment by immigration officers may be said to indicate that a systematic misjudging by those officers is built into the system. I very much welcome the proposals by ILPA in their report, When is a Child not a Child?, launched in Committee Room 17 on Tuesday, for reducing the number of age disputed cases, and for referring all those cases where agreement is not reached between the asylum seeker and the immigration officer to a regional age assessment centre, independent of the local authorities. The head of the BIA, Ms Lin Homer, who must be given her due for poking her head into the lion’s den by attending the launch, said that the BIA was interested in the idea, which might be related to the Government’s proposal for specialist authorities to whom UASC will be directed in the future, subject to the agreement of the authorities concerned, as we were discussing earlier. The Government envisage that there would be 50 to 60 such authorities, each caring for about 100 UASC, all outside London and the south-east, and all having previous experience of dealing with a reasonable number of UASC. That probably limits the choice to authorities in five regions, so there would be about one regional age-assessment centre to 20 specialist authorities. Although it sounded as though the BIA was firmly committed to the use of dental X-rays as an aid to age determination, Ms Homer said at that meeting that no decision had been taken, and that the BIA was still consulting on it. However, I believe—the Minister may confirm this—that they have already invested in some equipment and have been surreptitiously trialling the concept at some entry ports. I received no answer to the question of whether they had proactively asked the BMA, the BDA and the Royal Colleges on the matter, but Sir Al Aynsley-Green, the Children’s Commissioner, who was scathing about the idea in his foreword to the ILPA report, said that none of the professors of paediatric endocrinology to whom he had spoken were in favour of the use of X-rays, and he could not imagine any scenario in which dental X-rays might supplement other methods of age determination. We recognise that procedures for age assessment are necessary to ensure that, as far as possible, children are treated as children, and adults who claim to be children are not. This is a problem facing every jurisdiction, and there is no best practice. Extraordinarily, in the UK there is no statutory procedure or guidance, but the London boroughs of Hillingdon and Croydon, which have dealt with the largest number of UASC have jointly developed their own pro forma. This has been approved by the courts and is now being used by most SSDs, but the ILPA research showed that none had been given training on how to use it. The way forward would be for the Government now to take powers to enact statutory guidelines by order, building on the experience since the Merton judgment in 2004, with the flexibility of being able to vary them from time to time as further experience may suggest. In this way, the process of age determination can be improved and standardised without returning to the unethical and inaccurate subjection of children to ionising radiation, which was abandoned by a Conservative Government more than 25 years ago. I beg to move.