Member

In conclusion, this is a difficult area. It is wise for the Home Office to accept that it sometimes makes mistakes, as the chief inspector has recommended, but critics of the Home Office ought to accept that this is a difficult area; even if the Home Office is doing everything it possibly can, mistakes will be made. But we must not design a system that sets up incentives for adults to wrongly claim that they are children in order to game and evade the system. If you do that, you will test the patience of the British people. The current position, as we have heard before in debates in the House, is that for unaccompanied asylum-seeking children, the British public have a lot of generosity; but if they feel that adults are using that generosity to game the system, that generosity will disappear, and everyone will rue the day if that is the case.