Kent council loses High Court bid over child asylum seeker placement scheme

A council in the south-east of England has lost a High Court challenge against the Home Office over a scheme designed to place unaccompanied asylum-seeking children around the country.

Medway Council brought a legal bid over the department's national transfer scheme, where local authorities share the responsibility for looking after unaccompanied youngsters.

At a hearing earlier this month, the court heard the Home Office started a voluntary scheme in 2016 following a growing number of unaccompanied children seeking asylum, designed to reduce pressure on local authorities near major entry points to the UK.

However, after the voluntary scheme was unable to place all the new arrivals in the participating local authorities, the Home Office made the scheme mandatory in 2021 - with some exemptions allowed for reasons including capacity and finances.

Medway Council objected to being part of the transfer scheme - arguing it had issues with capacity - but was told after a review that it was still required to be involved.

The council brought legal action at the High Court in London, arguing the policy ignored important factors in deciding whether the scheme would "unduly prejudice" local authorities' other work.

Lawyers for the Home Office said that the scheme was "nuanced" and took local pressures into account.

In a judgement on Friday, Lord Justice Bean and Mrs Justice Collins Rice dismissed the council's claim.

Lord Justice Bean said the Home Office "was entitled to interpret 'undue' prejudice as requiring circumstances amounting to a crisis such as a complete breakdown of children's services".

The judge said that while "many recipients of directions under a mandatory scheme may be unhappy about receiving them" any local authority could say that they would be negatively affected by taking in more children due to staff shortages and budget issues "which nowadays are all but universal".

He continued: "It was in our view neither irrational or otherwise unlawful for officials to devise, and for ministers to approve, a policy that the burden of providing the services to unaccompanied asylum-seeking children imposed on authorities such as Kent and Hillingdon should be widely shared."

The judge added: "Although usually, if not inevitably, this will cause a degree of prejudice to the discharge by recipient local authorities of their other functions, it should only be in circumstances of crisis amounting to a complete breakdown that a local authority should be exempt from participation in the scheme altogether on the grounds of undue prejudice to the discharge of its functions."

Lord Justice Bean later said that taking part in the scheme may be different to the number of children transferred to the area, with some local authorities previously allocated zero children.

He concluded: "No one doubts that many local authorities' children's services are currently under great pressure.

"But, unlike local authorities, the Home Office and its officials do not have the facilities, the skills, or the legal powers and duties to look after children... It is plainly not in the best interests of unaccompanied asylum-seeking children to be accommodated, at any rate for more than very short periods, in hotels or immigration reception centres."