BASW welcomes inspection into Home Office age assessments
BASW CEO, Dr Ruth AllenThe launch of an investigation is welcome, and we hope that this is the start of the dismantling of the National Age Assessment Board .
This move has been welcomed by BASW who have vocally opposed attempts by the Home Office to centralise and take control of age assessments in recent years.
Age assessments are carried out by social workers on age-disputed unaccompanied asylum-seeking children. It was previously the responsibility of the local authority of where the age-disputed child resides to conduct the age assessments through social workers, but the Nationality and Borders Act 2022 and the Illegal Migration Act 2023 extended powers to the Home Office to create the National Age Assessment Board which recruited social workers to carry out age assessments on behalf of the Home Office.
BASW opposed the measures in both parliamentary Acts, and released a public statement encouraging social workers not to work for the Home Office due to concerns including the politicisation and motivation of the age assessment process by the Home Office,
Responding to the announcement of the inspection, BASW Chief Executive Dr Ruth Allen said:
“BASW has been concerned about the Home Office’s motivation for involvement in the age assessment process since it was first discussed, and we have made these concerns very clear to our members and the Home Office.
“Former Home Secretaries have been prejudicial about age-disputed young people travelling to the UK through unsafe routes, and our fear was that these highly-charged political views would feed down into the daily work of social workers who feel pressured by their organisation to assess young people to deliver a particular outcome.
“There was never a need for the Home Office to be involved with age assessments, yet local authorities who are experiencing financial difficulties are referring to the National Age Assessment Board because they do not have the resources to do it themselves. The Home Office should instead have provided local authorities with the resources to be able to carry out the assessments fairly and timely.
“The launch of an investigation is welcome, and we hope that this is the start of the dismantling of the National Age Assessment Board and the move back towards local authorities being responsible for the conduct of age assessments. We also will be urging the Government to scrap plans for scientific methods of age assessments.”
