City to contest cases where asylum seeker assessed as adult threatens legal action

Liverpool City Council is to contest the next cases in which apparently adult asylum seekers claim to be children, in the face of a potential £1.5m cost for looking after them.

A report to the council’s Education and Children’s Services select committee by Barry Kushner, cabinet member for children and social care, said 39 asylum seekers had been sent by the Home Office to Liverpool who claimed to be children, not adults.

The council had had to pay £1,500 for an age assessment for each, which concluded that 24 of them were adults.

Support levels are considerably higher and more costly for those deemed children.

Liverpool said the Home Office should not have sent it child asylum seekers, who could be in the care of local social services.

But once they were in Liverpool and assessed as children, the council became obliged to support them at some £657,000 a year.

The council said the 24 adults should have been accommodated by the Home Office at no cost to Liverpool City Council but their asylum seekers’ legal advisers had threatened judicial review.

Cllr Kushner said: “To avoid the potential expense of judicial review, children’s services have been providing supported accommodation to the young people as if they were indeed children, until the age at which they claim they are an adult.

“The cost to Liverpool City Council of this is approximately £350,000 per year.”

There were a further 17 asylum seekers who claimed to be children who could add costs of £500,000 to the existing £1m bill.

The report said: “Children’s services have decided to fund legal advice to challenge the next six cases where the young person is assessed as an adult and a judicial review is threatened by the asylum seeker’s legal adviser.

“If [Liverpool] can win these cases then children’s services will be able to divert young people assessed as adults back into the adult asylum seeker process, without threat of legal challenge, and without any further cost.”

It said the council should also be able to recover the costs associated with children who were in Liverpool but had been wrongly sent there via the adult asylum system.

A copy of the report can be downloaded here.

Mark Smulian