Home Office is lying about capacity to care for child refugees

The Home Office is backtracking on its commitment to accept 3,000 refugee children under the Dubs amendment. It says this is because local authorities have no more space for refugee or unaccompanied children and young people.

This is a lie ; there is no other way to describe this egregious attempt to blame local authorities for a decision that has been wholly made in the Home Office, which has made no reasonable effort to examine what capacity there is in the system.

Through 2016, fostering and adoption charity Tact and other charitable agencies including Barnardo’s and Action for Children met Home Office and Department for Education (DfE) officials to discuss capacity in respect of looking after unaccompanied children.

The Home Office and DfE were concerned that a few port local authorities were taking most children, while other councils were not coming forward to help. They were planning the dispersal scheme that has now come into being.

Tact offered the option of also contracting directly with our fostering services as we could offer placements across the UK in a number of local authorities. The Home Office could then pay directly for fostering and semi-independent placements and refund local authorities the additional costs of providing social work and support services to unaccompanied young people.

The Home Office turned down this model, preferring instead to go solely down the route of local authority hubs and the dispersal scheme. We pointed out that councils don’t always know complete fostering capacity in their area.

The other significant issue at play for local authorities is the level of funding the Home Office provides which, in some cases, only covers the cost of the actual placement, leaving little or no money for the local authority’s statutory duties towards the child. This is particularly pronounced when unaccompanied young people turn 18.

The Home Office reimburse local authorities as local authorities are dealing with a Home Office issue not a local child protection issue. Local authorities receive £41,610 a year for unaccompanied children under 16 and 16 and 17-year-olds attract £33,215. However, many local authorities have to place unaccompanied children with private commercial fostering agencies who often charge £800 plus a week for a placement, so that costs £41,600 leaving nothing to pay for social work time, education support, independent reviewing officer services or other services the child may need. The gap is more pronounced once the child is over 16.

For those over 18, local authorities receive £200 a week or £10,400 per year. This is based on general care leaver costs but, because of their immigration status, unaccompanied young people turning 18 can not often access support or benefits that UK citizen care leavers can. So, again, this £200 is highly likely to be insufficient to cover local authority costs.

Recovering costs form the Home Office is also not straightforward. Since our meetings, we have consistently reminded the DfE, Home Office and local government that there are available placements via fostering agencies for unaccompanied young people.

At no time in this process has the Home Office sought to find out how many placements are available for unaccompanied children and young people. Neither has any group of local authorities approached these agencies on behalf the Home Office.

When the immigration minister, Robert Goodwill, announced that there was no capacity, this was based on a complete absence of knowledge about the capacity in the sector.

Being charitable, one could say that this was simply evidence of an amateur and incompetent approach. However, given that there was no urgent need to make such an announcement and that there was time to undertake an assessment of capacity before making a decision on how many children might come to the UK, it seems more sinister.

Responsibility for this mess lies wholly with the Home Office. As the president of the Association of Directors of Children’s Services, Dave Hill, has pointed out :

Local authorities have made extraordinary efforts to accommodate and support the children and young people who have arrived through the various resettlement programmes in place locally, regionally and nationally. This is in addition to supporting the unaccompanied children and young people who continue to arrive through unofficial routes.

Hill is absolutely correct, many local authorities have responded professionally, humanely and compassionately to the refugee crisis. They are being asked to deal with an international issue that falls under the jurisdiction of the Home Office, which is seeking to transfer a significant proportion of the costs to council taxpayers while another part of government is slashing local authority funding.