Member

Amendment 162 seeks to ensure that visual age assessments at the border focus on safeguarding rather than immigration enforcement, removing the power to assign a specific age and strengthening independent oversight and child protection safeguards. Unaccompanied children arriving in the UK often lack documentation due to the circumstances of their journey. Documents may have been lost, destroyed or, in some circumstances, never issued. Some do have documentation, but it tends to be disregarded, in some cases by non-specialist Border Force officials, on arrival. Instead, they routinely conduct what several Independent Chief Inspectors of Borders and Immigration have dubbed “perfunctory” visual assessments at the border, deciding whether an individual is over 18 and assigning arbitrary dates of birth, with no independent oversight or support provided. We do not think that that is satisfactory.