My Lords, I will channel my inner version of the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, since she is not in her place, as I introduce Amendments 162 and 163. I thank all colleagues who have signed them. I also make clear my support for Amendments 180 and 194.

Amendments 162 and 163 aim to address serious and well-documented flaws in the current approach to age assessment for unaccompanied children and young people seeking asylum. They are grounded in safeguarding principles and reflect the urgent need to prevent children being wrongly treated as adults, a practice that has led to significant harm, including wrongful detention, denial of education and even criminal prosecution. I feel like something of a broken record on this subject, having spoken on it so many times over the past few years.

The Refugee and Migrant Children’s Consortium, which is a coalition of more than 100 organisations—I am very grateful to it for its help—has repeatedly raised concerns about the Home Office’s approach to age assessment, particularly the use of visual assessments at the border and the previous push for unproven scientific methods. For too long, it and we were not listened to, so we very much appreciated the willingness of the noble Lord, Lord Hanson, to meet members of the consortium and a number of noble Lords and his patent and keen engagement with what was said. These amendments respond directly to the consortium’s concerns and propose a child-centred, rights-based framework for age determination. I will speak to each in turn.

Amendment 162 seeks to ensure that visual age assessments at the border focus on safeguarding rather than immigration enforcement, removing the power to assign a specific age and strengthening independent oversight and child protection safeguards. Unaccompanied children arriving in the UK often lack documentation due to the circumstances of their journey. Documents may have been lost, destroyed or, in some circumstances, never issued. Some do have documentation, but it tends to be disregarded, in some cases by non-specialist Border Force officials, on arrival. Instead, they routinely conduct what several Independent Chief Inspectors of Borders and Immigration have dubbed “perfunctory” visual assessments at the border, deciding whether an individual is over 18 and assigning arbitrary dates of birth, with no independent oversight or support provided. We do not think that that is satisfactory.

Assessments based solely on appearance and demeanour, in line with Home Office rules, are inherently flawed, and the notion that border officials can decide an individual’s date of birth based on looking at them is even more so. None of us could manage that. Concerns about visual assessments have been raised not just by NGOs but by the Children’s Commissioner, parliamentary committees and the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child. In his recent report, the Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration pointed to

“a significant body of academic, professional and practitioner research and commentary that argues that it is not possible to assess the chronological age of a child or young person through observation of their physical appearance and demeanour”.

His latest inspection found that

“many of the concerns about policy and practice that have been raised for more than a decade remain unanswered”,

and he noted, with reference to small boat arrivals, that

“the physical and mental condition of the migrants, after a long, arduous and perilous journey, make the already difficult task of assessing age even more challenging”.

We know that the consequences are really serious. While the Government do not publish clear data on this, evidence from local authority children’s services analysed by the Helen Bamber Foundation revealed that, over an 18-month period, over 1,300 children were wrongly assessed as adults by the Home Office. In 2024, over 600 children were misidentified—over half of cases where a decision on age was concluded at all. These children were placed in adult accommodation, denied access to education and legal support and, in some cases, prosecuted and imprisoned as adults.

This is a serious child protection failure but one which the Home Office has failed to address in any meaningful way, preferring to emphasise the safeguarding implications of adults misidentified as children. International and domestic guidance is clear that age assessments should be undertaken only when necessary and be conducted using holistic, multidisciplinary approaches, ideally with social workers and interpreters for the specific language concerned, yet this is far from the reality that we are currently facing.

The amendment would introduce a presumption of childhood in cases of doubt. We urgently need to move towards a system where a Home Office official treats someone claiming to be a child as an adult only in exceptional circumstances, so as to reduce the safeguarding risk to children placed in adult prisons and forced to share rooms with unknown adults. It would also mandate the publication of guidance on training, oversight and safeguards to ensure consistency and accountability. Those safeguards should include, for example, the automatic notification to local authorities when someone claiming to be a child is treated as an adult and moved into their area, so that they can make the necessary safeguarding checks. Finally, I should stress that this amendment is not about preventing officials from making decisions at the border; rather, it attempts to address the systemic failures arising from a lack of safeguards during the flawed visual process of assessing age.

Amendment 163 aims to ensure that age assessments are conducted fairly, accurately and in the best interests of the child, and sets out specific requirements. One of these restricts the use of scientific methods unless proven ethical and highly accurate. Since that amendment was tabled, the Government have announced their rejection of the kinds of scientific methods promoted by the previous Government, such as those including X-rays. This is very welcome and has received a very positive response from NGOs and from specialists in the field who rejected such methods.

However, there is considerable concern about the proposal to use AI and facial recognition techniques instead. Existing evidence suggests that AI can be even less accurate and even more biased than human decisions when judging a person’s age, with a similar pattern of errors. The Minister for Border Security and Asylum stated that the aim is to integrate the technologies into the age assessment system during 2026, subject to the

“results of further testing and assurance”.

Can the Minister give us more information about the findings so far and an assurance that results of this further testing will be published, and that Parliament will have an opportunity to debate them before they are integrated into the age assessment process?

The amendment requires the involvement of local authorities so that Merton-compliant age assessments are carried out by qualified social workers. It would ensure that age assessments are holistic, drawing on the expertise of professionals in healthcare, education, and child welfare. It also requires consultation with independent child trafficking guardians and local authority advocates, ensuring that the child’s best interests are central to the process.

Finally, the amendment stipulates that anyone overseeing age assessments must be operationally independent of the Home Office. This particularly addresses concerns about conflicts of interest raised regarding the National Age Assessment Board, whose social workers are employed by the Home Office and whose assessments have been found to be flawed in a number of publicised cases. Although the NAAB social workers assured the independent chief inspector and inspectors that they saw themselves as social workers first and foremost and denied any conflict of interest, the independent chief inspector’s report noted that inspectors found some blurring of the boundaries between asylum caseworking and the NAAB’s age assessment work. This is a source of particular concern to the British Association of Social Workers.

In conclusion, and to echo the independent chief inspector’s emphasis on the need for child-sensitive processes that ensure that the best interests of children are served, these amendments are needed to protect the rights and welfare of unaccompanied children in the UK. They respond directly to clear evidence of systemic failures in the current age assessment process, and they offer a practical, rights-based solution that prioritises safeguarding over enforcement.

The view of experts on the ground who support these children is that misidentification of children as adults poses a greater safeguarding risk than misidentification of adults as children. There are no safeguards in adult systems because children are not expected to be there. When they are, they are left vulnerable to abuse and exploitation. In contrast, child systems have robust protections in place that can be triggered when a young adult enters this environment. We need to remember that these are not comparable scenarios, since children in adult systems face significantly greater risks. The amendments that I and my colleagues are proposing aim to close this serious safeguarding gap.

It is shameful that in his foreword to his recent report, the chief inspector notes:

“Over the years, and again during this inspection, I have listened to young people who felt disbelieved and dismissed by the Home Office, whose hopes have been crushed, and whose mental health has suffered”.

By supporting these amendments, the Committee has an opportunity to ensure that, instead, vulnerable children are treated with the care, dignity and protection they deserve. I beg to move.