I start by endorsing what my hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth East said about Dolores, Thomas Roberts’s mum, whom I met last night. She has gone through a searingly awful life experience. It is difficult even to think about that, let alone to offer any comfort. Unfortunately, I do not think that her experience would have changed much had scientific age assessment been in place, although the person in question had been assessed by his local authority as a child and was therefore in a separate environment from that which he would have been in had he not been assessed.
I am determined to see whether we can connect up our information about people coming from Europe, following Brexit and the disintegration of our access to Eurodac and various other pieces of information collected in Europe on asylum seekers and those arriving illegally—not all of them are asylum seekers. Reconnecting, if possible, to those databases would give us more comfort than we have at the moment. However, I emphasise that when people come to this country, we do check them against all our biometric records and the terrorism lists and watch lists that we have. It may be possible for us to do more in future.
We have had a debate about new clause 26 from the Opposition and new clause 43 from the hon. Member for Perth and Kinross-shire on behalf of the Scottish National party. That has again demonstrated the wide range of opinion that there is at both ends of the argument whenever we consider such issues. I will deal with both arguments in my response, and I hope to find a middle way.
First, repealing section 58 of the Illegal Migration Act, which the Bill seeks to do, does not stop our capacity to do age assessments. Listening to some of the contributions from members of the official Opposition, one would have thought that repealing section 58 will take off the table—completely and utterly—all age assessment. That is simply not true. The age assessments in section 58 were about the duty to remove somebody to Rwanda; they were not connected to anything else. As I understand it, the issue with that legislation was that the then Government’s intention was not to remove children to Rwanda, so it became more important to have a way of assessing whether somebody was a child. The Safety of Rwanda Act and the IMA—the previous Government’s approach to this issue—would have created even bigger incentives for people to claim that that they were children, because they would have avoided being sent to Rwanda, not that anyone ever actually ended up there. The previous Government’s approach of deportation permanently to Rwanda actually created even more incentives for people to lie about their age.
The fact is that there are people who are genuine asylum seekers who are children, people who are not genuine asylum seekers who are adults who claim to be children, and children who sometimes claim that they are adults. When that happens, one has to look at modern slavery issues and coercive control. There are safeguarding issues on both sides of the age assessment argument. Children pretend to be adults for reasons that we can imagine, but we will not go into those, because they are not very pleasant. There are also incentives created by the way in which the Children Act 1989 deals with unaccompanied asylum-seeking children. As a Kent MP, the hon. Member for Weald of Kent knows exactly what happens with the Kent intake unit and the pressure that her own local authority has been put under. However, she also knows about the Government support that her local authority has been given to disperse unaccompanied asylum-seeking children around the rest of the country so that some of the burden can be shared.
We are dealing with people who arrive without papers. Some of them wish to lie about their age, and some have been told to lie because the people-smuggling gangs perceive it as a way for people to access more resources than they could if they were seen as adults. As the hon. Member for Perth and Kinross-shire pointed out, the system can get it wrong on both sides. People who are children have been judged to be adults and put in inappropriate places, and people who are adults have been judged to be children and put in appropriate places. There is no guaranteed scientific way of making a judgment. We can make judgments about people who are much older, but we are dealing with that uncertain four to five-year range on either side, which is the difference between 18 and 24 or 17 and 23; you will know about that, Dr Murrison, from your work as a medical doctor.
On new clause 26, I want to reassure Opposition Members that there is already provision in law for the use of age assessment, and our repealing of section 58 of the Illegal Migration Act does not remove that provision. That is because the Immigration (Age Assessments) Regulations 2024, which followed scientific advice from the Age Estimation Science Advisory Committee in the Home Office, specify for the purposes of section 52 of the Nationality and Borders Act 2022 the scientific methods currently recommended for age assessment. We have retained those bits of legislation; neither the 2024 regulations nor section 52 of the Nationality and Borders Act have been repealed by the Bill, so the capacity to use scientific age assessments remains on the statute book.
The hon. Member for Stockton West did not seem to know which age assessment methods we were talking about. The 2024 regulations specify the power to use X-rays and MRIs, and that it is possible to take a negative view of the credibility of a person who refuses to consent, where there are no reasonable grounds for refusing that consent.
With those measures on the statute book, the Government continue to explore methods to improve the robustness of age assessment processes by increasing the reliability of the scientific methods being used. At the moment, we do not have enough certainty about the gap that exists in the current assessments, which are still being assessed. The hon. Member for Stockton West and the Conservative party put these things on to the statute book but then did not operationalise them. At the moment, we are doing as much work as we can to see how reliable they are, with a view to operationalising them. But as I wrote in a response to shadow Home Secretary, the right hon. Member for Croydon South, when he wrote to me about this issue, we are in the middle of that process. I hope that we will soon be in a situation to make announcements one way or the other, and those announcements will be made in the usual way.