The Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, has been urged to back an amendment to the children and social work bill that would speed up the process of bringing child refugees to the UK.
The legal amendment to give child refugees in Calais the protection of UK safeguarding rules, which would create a proper system of bringing unaccompanied youngsters to Britain, has been tabled in the House of Lords on the initiative of the Labour MP Stella Creasy.
Creasy said she had secured the votes of several Tory MPs who had committed to supporting the amendment once it reached the Commons, including Sarah Wollaston MP, from Totnes, but it is understood she has yet to receive any formal backing from the Labour party’s leadership. The leader’s office did not respond to requests for comment.
On Wednesday, the Labour party conference will debate the protection of child refugees and Creasy’s Walthamstow constituency party has put forward a motion for Labour to adopt the safeguarding amendment as party policy.
The proposed change to the act obliges the Home Office to treat unaccompanied child refugees at the camp in the French port as potential UK citizens, because many qualify for transfer 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 last Thursday.
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. No formal system currently exists to assess children who have the right to sanctuary in Britain.
Yvette Cooper, chair of Labour’s refugee taskforce, will back the amendment in a speech to conference on Wednesday and will also back the call from the French and British children’s commissioners for both countries to immediately agree to each take half of the 1,000 lone child refugees.
She will say: “Now France says they will dismantle the camp by Christmas, moving people to accommodation centres across the country where their asylum claims will be assessed. And they are right to do so. The camp is dangerous.
“But there are no places for lone children. No safe accommodation for the child refugees alone in the camp to go [to]. Last time they cleared the camp, many of the children just disappeared.”
The move has been backed by a coalition of charities include those working in the Calais camps, including the Red Cross, Citizens UK, Refugee Action, Help Refugees, UK-based human rights and child protection charities including the NSPCC, City of Sanctuary and Liberty as well as the International Rescue Committee, which is run by a former Labour foreign secretary, David Miliband.
In a joint letter, the NGOs said unaccompanied refugee children need a proper system to process their claims to come to the UK. “Implementation of the Dubs amendment requires a fast-track process for unaccompanied refugee children with family in the UK, rather than the patchwork system kept going by volunteers and charities.
“And it needs a proper process of safeguarding and access to protection for unaccompanied children without family. No eligible child should spend another winter in the Calais ‘jungle’ or in unsafe refugee camps elsewhere in Europe.”
Children in refugee camps across Europe “risk their hopes and dreams being squashed by an intransigent bureaucracy which prevents them accessing legal routes to safety. Without access to these routes desperate children are left facing a terrible choice between train tracks on the one hand and people traffickers on the other.”
Unicef UK has also called on the government to support the safeguarding amendment.
On Monday the French president, François Hollande confirmed that the makeshift camp would be “completely and definitively dismantled” and campaigners are concerned about the scattering of more than 1,000 unaccompanied refugee children. France has said it hopes to find 9,000 new places in reception centres by winter.
Hollande called for the UK to redouble its efforts to solve the crisis, saying he would like to see British authorities “play their part in the humanitarian effort that France is carrying out here and will continue to carry out in the days to come”.
• This article was amended on 28 September 2016. Stella Creasy’s proposed safeguarding amendment is to the children and social work bill rather than an immigration bill, as we said in an earlier version of the opening paragraph. This has been corrected.
