The professional body for social workers has urged its members not to work with the Home Office to assess the ages of asylum seekers, saying that political pressures could undermine their professional judgment.
The Home Office is recruiting social workers to join the National Age Assessment Board (NAAB), which was set up under the Nationality and Borders Act to take responsibility for determining the age of asylum seekers away from local authorities.
However, the British Association of Social Workers (BASW) is warning that this could lead to age assessment work being influenced by political priorities such as reducing immigration, with worrying implications for child welfare.
Ruth Allen, the chief executive of BASW, said: “The Home Office directly employing social workers to carry out age assessments of unaccompanied asylum-seeking children is a risk to professional objectivity and could compromise the judgment of social workers.”
Referring to comments made by the home secretary, Suella Braverman, that individuals pretend to be child asylum seekers to exploit the system, Allen said: “Previous statements by the home secretary have undermined confidence that age assessments could be carried out in a Home Office agency that is free from political interference.”
Age assessment is usually undertaken by social workers in local authorities when an unaccompanied young person seeking asylum claims they are under 18, entailing additional health and education needs and giving them different rights on asylum and immigration status. Under law, children are required to be treated as children first, meaning they can not be deported under immigration legislation and they become the responsibility of the local authority.
It is a sensitive area because children wrongly assessed as adults risk losing vital rights, while adults wrongly assessed as children can present safeguarding risks for other children.
BASW said social workers specialising in age assessment need adequate resources, appropriate supervision and managers who understand their role, all of which have been developed by local authorities over decades. “It seems unlikely a new agency can recreate this overnight,” it stated.
BASW acknowledged that, given budget cuts, some local authorities may find it attractive to transfer age assessment to the Home Office, but this would mean they lose out on independence from central government and risks further fragmenting children’s services.
Josephine Schofield, a social worker who runs Immigration Social Work Services, which provides age assessment training, said she was dissuading the social workers she trains from joining the new agency, despite offering higher salaries after, she understands, initially struggling with recruitment.
She said age assessment was “a really complex, specialist piece of work, which needs to be done holistically, fairly and objectively” and “that’s more difficult to achieve when working under a department with an active hostile environment agenda”.
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While she has not heard of bad practice at the NAAB, she said there was a clear “conflict of interest”, which could put pressure on social workers to confirm the home secretary’s view that lots of adult asylum seekers are pretending to be children. This could mean that instead of the burden of proof being on the social worker to prove that a child is an adult – as is presently the case – social workers could require the person to prove they are the age they are claiming.
Age assessment also requires asylum seekers to disclose a large amount of information and individuals may fear this could be passed on to immigration officers, making them reluctant to disclose, she added. She thought the Department for Education, which supervises social workers, would be better placed to run the agency.
A Home Office spokesperson said: “Age assessments are challenging but vital to identifying genuine asylum-seeking children and [stopping] abuse of the system. We are taking steps to prevent adults claiming to be children, or children being wrongly treated as adults – as both present serious safeguarding risks to children.
“The National Age Assessment Board’s assessments and members of staff will be distinct from the Home Office’s asylum and immigration decision-making functions. The best interests of children and the aim of achieving accurate age assessments will be the primary consideration.”