Unaccompanied asylum seeking children
Response to question about Unaccompanied asylum-seeking children, raised at Full Council Meeting on 17 October 2018
Unaccompanied asylum seeking children
Question by Zeenat Suleman
Appears at Council meeting webcast on 17 October 2018 at 00:04:12
Kensington and Chelsea Council has a good record of supporting Unaccompanied Asylum Seeking Children (UASC). We currently have 20 UASC from a population of 87 Looked After Children, all of whom are from the countries mentioned by the questioner, and 73 former UASC who we support as care leavers until they are 25, making up 42% of our leaving care population.
We are members of the London Asylum Seekers Consortium, a central resource for providing services and safeguarding to UASC, and participate in the National Transfer Scheme, introduced by the Government to ensure that no Local Authority is required to care for more UASC than it can cope with. Under this Scheme, the UASC to child population in a Local Authority is not expected to reach more than 0.07%, at which point the Authority can arrange for the transfer of the child to one that is under this figure. At Kensington and Chelsea, we have been at or in excess of this 0.07% figure since the Scheme was introduced in July 2016.
We therefore fully recognise the importance of helping this vulnerable group, and do pledge to resettle at least three unaccompanied ‘children at risk’ for ten years from countries in the Middle-East, Africa and Afghanistan, contingent on the scheme being fully-funded by Central Government.