Pledge to resettle hundreds of child refugees in Britain

The Government’s announced it’s to resettle hundreds if not thousands of unaccompanied child refugees in the UK.

Home Office ministers are working on plans to provide sanctuary to children from UNHCR run Syrian refugee camps and from the arrival camps in Greece and Italy.

Last week a judge ordered immigration officials to allow in three teenage boys and an adult from camps in Calais.

He accepted they had a right to claim asylum in the UK because they had family already settled here.

The Home Office said family reunification would be a decisive factor but it would not be seeking to place more children from Calais on this new resettlement programme.

£10 million funding will come from the foreign aid budget.

The Home Secretary Thersa May opted out of the EU programme last year and agreed to take 20, 000 Syrian refugees directly from UNHCR camps in the Middle East over the next 5 years. So far 1000 have arrived in the country.

The Home Office is now to provide more resources to support asylum seekers in Europe ‘to help in hotspots such as Greece and Italy to identify and register unaccompanied child migrants.

The anti-slavery commissioner Kevin Hyland is to visit the area to gauge the risk traffickers pose to child refugees.

Today’s announcement did not give any figures for how many children will come to the UK or how long this programme will run.

Reports at the weekend suggested 3000 child migrants would have a new life in the UK.

George Gabriel, from CitizensUK which brought last week’s successful legal challenge against the Home Secretary said: “This announcement is very welcome…..The question over the coming days will be the fine print, whether this announcement will ensure as a country we’re living up to those moral and legal responsibilities and Friday’s court ruling will give us a much clearer picture.”