Charity blasts councils for failing to meet legal duties to teenagers

Local authorities are failing to comply with their legal duties to protect teenagers – leaving them homeless and at risk from abuse, a charity has claimed.

In a report, The Door Is Closed, Coram Voice claimed that:

• Children's services often told children who presented to them as homeless to go back to their families or "sofa surf";
• Local authorities sometimes passed homeless children to housing departments who found them accommodation in hostels for vulnerable adults where they could feel threatened;
• Once children turned 18, local authorities often closed their cases. “If they try to get their cases re-opened they just encounter a bureaucratic brick wall.”

The report was based on the experiences of 40 out of 200 children and young people the charity helped in 2013/14 to challenge decisions by local authority children’s services departments.

Coram Voice Director Andrew Radford said: “We meet far too many children who have been forced to leave their homes, normally because of violence, or abuse or family breakdown. They have asked their local authority children’s services departments for help, but they get turned away and end up homeless.”

The charity noted that under the Children Act, local authority children’s services had an obligation to assess any child who presented as homeless or at risk of immediate homelessness. The child should be accommodated while the assessment is being carried out and, in most cases, should then be taken into care.

Sending children back to their families with no follow-up support was not sustainable, it argued.

Sara Gomes, a Coram Voice advocate, said: “Families break down again and children leave home again, ending up at risk of harm and exploitation. And many children who say they are sofa surfing are actually sleeping on night buses, with strangers, or in drug dens.”

‘The Door Is Closed’ report arose out of a programme which sees Coram Voice working with a youth homelessness centre in London and a group of solicitors.

One solicitor interviewed for the report claimed: “The general attitude towards these children who are suffering obvious maltreatment is ‘go home and stop bothering us’. There are Rotherham-type child protection failures…

“Some local authorities are challenged over and over again - they know what the law is and they know what they should be doing, but deliberately don’t do it. They only start to engage when they get a legal challenge.”