UK Borders Bill

First, there is no argument between us about the necessity for having as reliable a procedure for determining age as is technically and scientifically possible, while always bearing in mind that this is not an exact science. However you refine the procedures, there is always going to be a residue of children whose age is indeterminate, where one would suggest that the immigration authorities should give the benefit of the doubt. The consequences of a child being wrongly classified as an adult can be immensely serious, both in terms of their treatment in the immigration system and the amount of legal help they get and so on. We are not aiming at perfection. The Minister will concede that nobody claims a great deal of accuracy for the assessment of age by dental X-rays, even within the populations of western Europe and North America. The techniques used—the Tanner-Whitehouse atlases and the Greulich-Pile atlas, developed in the United States and imported into this country—refer to well fed, middle-class American children. As my noble friend was trying to point out, when you are looking at populations of Ethiopian children, you have no idea whether the mean and standard deviation of a particular development in a child’s skeletal or dental structure are the same as those in the host population. In spite of what the noble Baroness, Lady Anelay, was saying to contradict my noble friend about paediatricians coming into the family courts and making age assessments of malnourished children in the United Kingdom, those would certainly not be applicable to populations, let us say, of Somali or Afghan children. You have no knowledge whatsoever of the mean and standard deviation of the dental and skeletal developments in those populations.