My Lords, I apologise for not being here sooner, but I was the last person standing to chair the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Children this afternoon. That is where I have been, and it is always revealing. I support the amendment because I have raised this issue on a number of occasions. I hope the Minister will look at this, though he knows well that I do not like long amendments; lists in Bills are not helpful.
I cannot understand why, from the moment when the child is identified as an unaccompanied minor in a school, we do not start not only to stabilise the child’s status but to look at their mental health issues. We know of the trauma they have been through. I know that mental health services are poor across the country—we have heard that repeatedly—but these
children have very particular needs. I am appalled when I learn that often schools do not even know the status of these children. I have met a number of youngsters who realise their immigration status only when they are about to go to university and discover that they cannot. Instead, they spend a year on appeal, appealing being deported to countries about which they know nothing. One young man I met had been here from the age of six. He had been in a foster home and suddenly discovered that this was his status.
I am sure that that is not the way this Government wish to treat children. These children happen to be in this situation only by chance. There might be another child next door who happened to have come in to the country, or be part of a family, on a very different basis. We must treat these children equally.
I am not against returning children home when that is the appropriate answer. We know that there have been very successful programmes of returning children to their country of origin with the right support and understanding; but we have to start sooner than we are starting now, get the position of the child right, make continuous assessment and not leave it until their 18th birthday, when it becomes a crisis.