Home Office to introduce scientific methods for assessing asylum seekers’ age

The Home Secretary has announced that the Home Office is establishing a new scientific advisory committee to provide advice on ways of checking how old an asylum seeker is.

The government says this advice will help ensure asylum seeking adults posing as children do not get access to support they are not entitled to, and remove the safeguarding risks of adults being wrongly placed in children’s care system.

Home Secretary Priti Patel said: “The Nationality and Borders Bill will end many of the blatant abuses that have led to our immigration and asylum system being abused by those with no right to be in our country.

“The practice of single grown adult men, masquerading as children claiming asylum is an appalling abuse of our system which we will end. By posing as children, these adult men go on to access children’s services and schools through deception and deceit; putting children and young adults in school and care at risk.

“It is a fact that two thirds of age dispute cases have found that the individual claiming to be a child is actually over the age of 18. I have given more resources and support to local councils to ensure that they apply vigorous and robust tests to check the ages of migrants to stop adult men being automatically classified as children.

“I am changing UK laws to introduce new scientific methods for assessing the age of asylum seekers to stop these abuses and to give the British public confidence that we will end the overt exploitation of our laws and UK taxpayers.”

The home office says these reforms will bring the UK’s age checking policy in line with other countries. Scientific methods are used by most European countries, who primarily use X-ray scans, and sometimes CT scans and MRI imaging to view key parts of the body.

Finland and Norway take radiographs to examine the development of teeth and the fusion of bones in the wrist. In both countries, two certified experts will carry out the age assessment and must jointly agree on the person’s age. In France, X-rays are taken to examine the fusion of the collar bone, alongside dental and wrist X-rays, while in Greece, dental X-rays are used alongside social worker assessments.

The new committee will comprise a range of expertise, including medical practitioners, academics, scientists and social workers.

It will consider a range of scientific methods for estimating age, and will be considering their accuracy and reliability, as well as ethical and medical issues. They will report their findings directly to the Home Office Chief Scientific Adviser to support her in advising Ministers on appropriate scientific methods for age estimation.

Many of those arriving in the UK who claim to be children understandably do not have clear evidence, such as a passport, to prove their age.

This can result in some people trying to claim they are younger than they are, in order to receive asylum or refugee status in the UK.

This is a significant issue. In the 12 months up to September 2021, of the 1,696 resolved age dispute cases in which an individual’s claim to be a child is disputed, around two thirds were found to be adults.

Resolving such age disputes is currently very time consuming, challenging and expensive for local authorities and the Government. It also often relies primarily on interviews with social workers and, given it is not always combined with scientific evidence, can be subjective, often resulting in expensive legal challenges. These can cost councils hundreds of thousands of pounds and can take as long as three years to resolve.

Recent examples of where age assessment has gone wrong has resulted in adults being put into children’s schools, or children being treated as adults, in both cases putting children at risk of harm. For example, in one instance pupils raised alarm at an obviously mature adult joining their class. He was re-assessed to be 10 years older than