Government age assessment plans risk children being sent to unsuitable settings: social workers

Speaking in response to a proposal in this month’s Kings Speech to make these assessments part of the Home Office, BASW chief executive Sam Baron said:”We are raising the alarm now because although the proposals are in its early stages, the potential implications for safeguarding, children’s rights and social work practice are too serious to wait and see what happens.”

She said age assessments were complex and required high levels of experience and knowledge, and so “that’s exactly why they belong in social work, not immigration enforcement”.

Local authorities can at present make age decisions when someone presents as a child, even if the Home Office or the National Age Assessment Board (NAAB) has assessed them as an adult.

Under the proposal any NAAB assessment through Section 51 of the Children Act 1989 would be binding on local authorities, which would no longer be able to reach a different conclusion.

This would mean Home Office’s age decisions “would effectively override Children Act duties”, BASW said.

It said the Home Office had framed its proposal as preventing adults being placed with children, but has not recognised the reverse risk of children being wrongly treated as adults.

BASW said NAAB decisions “are regularly overturned in court and have been heavily criticised for poor reasoning, inconsistency and failure to consider vulnerability”.

Safeguarding would become dependent on the accuracy of a centralised assessment body rather than the professional judgement of local practitioners who know the young person best.

BASW said the proposal implied that the Home Office thought councils “don’t know what they’re doing” and that it should take over.

It said NAAB had repeatedly denied to BASW that any conflict of interest existed between the Home Office’s immigration function and the NAAB’s work, “but a recent spate of judicial rulings finds that the NAAB is an immigration function”.

These judgments had “confirmed BASWs long-held suspicion – that the National Age Assessment Board is an immigration function, and not a child safeguarding function – contradicting the Home Office’s claim that it is the latter.

Baron said: “With every further move that the Home Office makes on age assessments, it becomes clearer that for them, age assessments are for the purposes of immigration enforcement.

“The courts are now in agreement with BASW that the National Age Assessment Board is an immigration function, not a safeguarding one.”

She said NAAB should never have been created as local authorities were capable of carrying to assessments.

“BASW believes the NAAB should be disbanded and the millions of pounds spent on it should be redistributed to local authorities”, Baron concluded.

The Home Office has been contacted for comment.

Mark Smulian