Home Office ‘Ignoring Offers to Give Homes to Child Refugees’
The Home Office has been accused of ignoring more than 1,400 offers from local councils to house child refugees, prompting criticism that Boris Johnson’s government is defying its obligations to offer sanctuary to vulnerable minors. Councils across the UK have volunteered to take hundreds of unaccompanied children from across Europe, the Middle East and Africa. However, numbers of arrivals are said to be “pitifully low to nonexistent”.
Wiltshire, Leicestershire, Brighton and Hove, along with the London boroughs of Islington, Hammersmith and Fulham, and Lewisham have each pledged to take at least 100 children, according to charity Safe Passage.
Birmingham has offered to support 80 more minors, Bristol 60 and Leicester 50. More than 400 of the offers come from Conservative-run local authorities, 950 from Labour councils and the remainder from SNP and independents. It is estimated that about 200 child refugees are living in terrible conditions in northern France, with thousands more trapped in Italy and Greece, where camps are vastly overcrowded and conditions are described as dire. Many are eligible for transfer to the UK.
The claims of Home Office resistance to the councils’ offers comes after Johnson told parliament on Thursday he was reducing legal protections for refugee children in his new Brexit bill. The legislation, passed last week with a majority of 124, jettisons a commitment in EU regulations that secures safeguards for asylum-seeking minors in Europe who want to reunite with family in the UK.
Read more: Mark Townsend, Guardian, https://is.gd/aR26jM
