A legal amendment to give child refugees in Calais protection under British safeguarding rules and thus speed up their transfer to the UK has been presented to parliament, with the Labour MP who is leading the effort, Stella Creasy, saying she hopes it will be passed.
The proposed amendment to the Immigration Act would oblige the home secretary to treat unaccompanied child refugees at the camp in the French port as potential UK citizens, thus coming under child protection requirements.
The aim would be to speed up the transfer of the children deemed eligible to come to the UK. Some of these qualify under the Dubs amendment, passed in March following the efforts of the Labour peer and former child refugee Alf Dubs.
Dubs and the Rev Paul Butler, the bishop of Durham, put the proposed amendment to the House of Lords on Thursday.
The parallel mechanism allows minors to be reunited with relatives under the EU’s Dublin regulation, which takes into account family ties and other issues to decide which country should accept a refugee.
Stella Creasy, the Labour MP who has led efforts over the amendment, said the idea had received cross-party support as well as backing from charities and local government, and she hoped it could be passed even if the Home Office did not support it.
“I’m reasonably confident that the government has got a fight on their hands,” she said.
Creasy’s constituency party, Walthamstow, has also tabled a motion to next week’s Labour conference in the hope of having the policy adopted by the party, she said.
While charities working in the Calais camp say more than 200 children living there have the right to be brought to the UK as they have family there, only a few dozen cases are being processed, which is complex and time-consuming.
“There are kids there who have the right to be in the UK, but for want of a formal process for the voluntary organisations to plug into, they are stuck there,” Creasy said.
“We accepted responsibility for these kids back in March. When we accept responsibility for children Britain safeguards them so why are we not extending our same principles of safeguarding to how we manage children we’ve committed to helping?”
This week the UK’s new anti-slavery commissioner, Kevin Hyland, warned that the slow pace of efforts to give sanctuary to the unaccompanied child refugees was exposing them to the risk of modern slavery and exploitation.
The amendment calls for the home secretary, Amber Rudd, to publish a strategy for the safeguarding of the children identified for resettlement in the UK under the Dubs amendment by 1 May.
Extending child safeguarding to cover the refugees would mean there would be a panel responsible for each child, with an assigned guardian, to make decisions on their future welfare, health and education.
At the moment the system is so murky and slow that some child refugees eligible to move give up and try to enter the UK illegally on lorries, according to Karl Pike, the refugees and asylum policy manager at the British Red Cross.
A 14-year-old Afghan boy who died this month trying to climb on to the roof of a lorry near Calais was understood to have a brother in the UK, and thus the right to live there.
Even for children who have family in the UK it can take between 10 and 11 months to get there via a “frustrating and confusing” system, Pike said.
“There is a legal mechanism, but the process within the mechanism is quite inaccessible and confusing and can be a little bit scattergun in whether children succeed or not,” he said.
Then, when the Home Office accepts a case, the French government has up to three months to organise the child’s travel, Pike said. “We have cases where we have vulnerable children who’ve been accepted by the UK but are expected to remain in a camp for three months until they’re allowed on the Eurostar, which is perverse,” he said.
The amendment says safeguarding duties should be used for “expediting a speedy and safe transfer to the UK of the children who have been identified for resettlement”.
A Home Office spokeswoman said: “Our priority is to offer humanitarian support to those most in need and we work closely with the French government to protect those vulnerable to trafficking and exploitation.”
She said the government was “dedicated to ensuring that children in Calais with family links in the UK are identified, receive sufficient support and can access the Dublin family reunification process without delay”.
