Home Office “removing local authority autonomy on age assessments”, warns BASW

The Home Office is proposing to remove local authority autonomy over age assessments, and although the proposals are in its early stages, the potential implications for safeguarding, children’s rights and social work practice are too serious to wait and see what happens.

Recent court judgments have also confirmed BASWs long-held suspicion – that the National Age Assessment Board is an immigration function, and not a child safeguarding function – contradicting the Home Office’s claim that it is the latter. In the Home Office’s own evidence, they agreed that their role was primarily about immigration function. 

The National Age Assessment Board (NAAB) was created following the Nationality and Borders Act 2022, and compromises of social workers employed directly by the Home Office who carry out age assessments on age-disputed unaccompanied asylum-seeking children. The NAAB has repeatedly denied to BASW that there is any conflict of interest between the Home Office’s immigration function and the NAAB, and that the NAAB is child safeguarding mechanism, but a recent spate of judicial rulings finds that the NAAB is an immigration function.

BASW has campaigned against the NAAB since its introduction and continues to raise concerns about the encroachment of immigration enforcement into social work child safeguarding functions.

The Home Office has released a document made aware to us by BASW members which outlines government plans on age assessments and the NAAB, raising a number of issues that social workers and local authority managers should take note of:

1. Loss of Local Authority Autonomy Over Age Decisions

Currently, local authorities (LA’s) must make their own age decision when someone presents as a child, even if the Home Office or NAAB has assessed them as an adult (unless the LA has referred to the NAAB under s.50, in which case the decision is already binding), because Children Act duties are triggered by the LA’s assessment, not the Home Office’s view.

Under the proposal:

• Any NAAB assessment under s.51 would be binding on LAs
• LAs would no longer be able to reach a different conclusion
• The Home Office’s age decision would effectively override Children Act duties

The implication of this is that local authorities lose the ability to apply their own safeguarding judgement. If this becomes binding on LAs, this will have significant consequences on children’s rights and the ability of LAs to uphold these.

2. Increased Safeguarding Risk

The Home Office frames this proposal as preventing adults being placed with children. But the reverse risk (children being wrongly treated as adults) is equally serious and not acknowledged. The narrative is entirely focused on “stopping adults accessing children’s services”, with no reference at all to protecting children who are misclassified as adults. This messaging reinforces that the driver here is immigration control, not safeguarding.

Given that NAAB decisions are regularly overturned in court and have been heavily criticised for poor reasoning, inconsistency and failure to consider vulnerability, it is deeply concerning that the Home Office has not reflected on how often NAAB has failed to protect children in the past and therefore may not be the experts in safeguarding children.

If a child is wrongly assessed as an adult by the NAAB, LAs would be forced to:

• Deny accommodation
• Deny Section 20
• Deny a social work assessment
• Potentially leave a child street homeless

This directly contradicts:

• Section 17
• Section 20
• The statutory duty to safeguard and promote welfare

If a child is wrongly assessed as a child by the NAAB, LAs must accept the person as a child even if:

• Their presentation raises concerns
• Staff feel unsafe
• There is contradictory evidence

Implications for Local Authorities

Safeguarding becomes dependent on the accuracy of a centralised assessment body rather than the professional judgement of local practitioners who know the young person best. It also creates a two-tier safeguarding system where migrant children’s protection rights are considered under immigration policy, not by the Children Act.

3. Potential Erosion of Social Work Professional Judgement

If NAAB decisions override LA assessments:

• Social workers’ expertise is devalued
• Local safeguarding knowledge is sidelined
• The Children Act risks becoming secondary to immigration control
• The “corporate parent” role is weakened

This proposal does not demonstrate a commitment to partnership working. Instead, it implies that LAs “don’t know what they’re doing” and that the Home Office needs to take over. There is no recognition of the high-quality, trauma-informed, compassionate age assessment practice happening across the country, including cases where LAs have concluded someone is an adult with dignity, respect and careful reasoning.

Rather than respecting this practice, the Home Office is seeking to centralise control.

Social Work Staff: Speak Up!

Age assessments are complex, emotionally demanding and often uncomfortable and that’s exactly why they belong in social work, not immigration enforcement. We do hard things all the time in child and family social work, it is rarely easy. We sit with trauma, we make decisions no one else wants to make, and we hold children’s rights at the centre.

Handing over control of age decisions to a department whose primary function is immigration control doesn’t make children safer, it places them at risk.

If you are worried about these proposals, you should discuss them with your colleagues.

BASW Interim Chief Executive, Professor Sam Baron commented:

“With every further move that the Home Office makes on age assessments, it becomes clearer that for them, age assessments are for the purposes of immigration enforcement. The courts are now in agreement with BASW that the National Age Assessment Board is an immigration function, not a safeguarding one. 

“There is no reason that the NAAB should ever have been created when local authorities are more than capable of carrying out age assessments with support and training. It was planned to be an immigration function from the start, and this latest statement confirms it by further removing autonomy from local authorities.

“The Home Secretary continues to lose appeals on age assessments with rulings describing NAAB assessments as poor quality. Local authorities should think twice before entrusting the Home Office with these assessments and should fight back against this move to further minimise the role of local authorities.

“BASW believes the NAAB should be disbanded and the millions of pounds spent on it should be redistributed to local authorities.”