A newly elected councillor said that 130 unaccompanied children seeking asylum have gone missing from hotels in Hove since July last year.
The revelation came days after Brighton and Hove News reported that 70 child refugees had disappeared in the past six months alone.
Nationally, the total number of unaccompanied asylum-seeking children to have vanished stood at 222, according to the Guardian newspaper in October.
Meanwhile, Brighton and Hove City Council has taken four children into care, another councillor said, after their ages were wrongly assessed by the Home Office and they were placed in a hotel for adults.
Labour councillor Bella Sankey, making her maiden speech after winning the Wish ward by-election just over a week ago, said it was shameful that “five classrooms of children have disappeared”.
Councillor Sankey said: “More than 130 children seeking asylum have gone missing from Brighton and Hove since July last year. Five classrooms of children have disappeared.
“This shocking situation has occurred for two reasons. First, the actions of Conservative Home Secretaries Priti Patel and Suella Braverman who have – without precedent and completely outside of the law – moved lone children into the city, abandoning them in hotels, with no meaningful safeguarding.
“The indefensible cruelty and neglect of the Conservatives at Westminster knows no bounds.
“Second, this situation exists because the Green administration has chosen to look the other way.
“The Greens claim that these children – resident in our city – are not our responsibility, choosing instead to nod along with Suella Braverman’s fiction that these hotels are – in quotation marks – ‘intake centres’.
“The Home Office speaks with a forked tongue because the chief inspector of borders and immigration reported in October that the Home Office does not accept corporate responsibility for these children.
“Will the leader of the council tell us who is responsible for these children legally and ethically? Why has the leader of the council not effectively challenged the Home Secretary – including legally if necessary – before now? Where is the leader’s concern? Where’s his urgency? Where’s his action?
“There is nothing progressive about an administration that brings motions on foie gras to our council in a ‘cost of living crisis’ while overseeing industrial-scale child neglect without effective challenge.
“I know from my work as a human rights professional that these children will be being groomed, exploited and worse.
“There are horror stories to come. And so our motion is the first step towards putting an end to this catastrophe.
“It requires the chief executive to probe the Home Secretary on the legal basis for moving children into the city instead of immediately placing them in foster placements across the country under the National Transfer Scheme.
“And it requires a report to members on what safeguarding steps are being taken by the council so we can assess whether our statutory obligations are being met.
“Tory and Green disregard, complacency and incompetence have reduced our city to this.
“We have no right to call ourselves a ‘city of sanctuary’ while 130 children are allowed to disappear.
“From gambling our finances on the i360 to failing to deliver basic public services and abandoning children, our city is being let down … We need to start to put things right.”
The Green leader of the council Phélim Mac Cafferty said: “We have written several times to the Home Secretary.”
Councillor Mac Cafferty told the meeting of the full council at Hove Town Hall: “We have repeatedly challenged the Home Office – not always in a public setting because that’s not always appropriate.”
Green deputy leader Hannah Allbrooke, who chairs the council’s Children, Young People and Skills Committee, said: “I’m really pleased that the Labour group, after 18 months of hotels being in this city, has finally chosen to wake up to an issue that we have repeatedly raised.
“We wrote to the Home Secretary within 24 hours of hearing that they had placed the first hotel in this city without consent or knowledge of this city council.
“I am and continue to be very worried about the Home Office’s response to providing care to vulnerable children.
“While the days of having two hotels housing unaccompanied asylum-seeking children in the city are thankfully gone, one remains, along with two additional hotels housing adults and families with children.
“Since the first hotel was opened in July last year, we have repeatedly raised many of our concerns with the Home Office.
“One of the most recent issues we have been dealing with as a city council is the incorrect age assessments of unaccompanied asylum-seeking children, meaning that they are being placed in hotels with adults.
“In the space of 24 hours, we took four unaccompanied asylum-seeking children into care to get them out of that situation.”
Councillor Allbrooke said: “This is incredibly troubling. And then on top of this, we’re having to correct the Home Office mistakes. The Home Office is in meltdown.
“Faced with Tory ministers who want a hostile environment to people fleeing war and persecution and the realities of needing to find care for these vulnerable people, civil servants are struggling to cope.
“A number of these unaccompanied asylum-seeking children are now being placed in residential placements which are more costly and often owned by hedge funds, meaning that private profit is coming at the expense of our children.”
Councillor Allbrooke added: “The Home Office has been very clear with us that they are the corporate parent to the children in the hotels.
“This motion – and the speech that Councillor Sankey just gave – contrasts with the really disappointing and toxic anti-migrant rhetoric from the Labour Party nationally.
“I had really hoped the days of Labour proudly displaying that they were anti-migrant on mugs were long gone.
“Yet Kier Starmer continues to disappoint. In the last month he has proclaimed that too many migrants work in our NHS – and that business must ‘wean themselves off’ cheap labour. He has also said there is a case for GPS tagging migrants.
“A refugee charity he was formerly a patron of said that they were pleased to no longer be associated with him due to his asylum and refugee policies.
“Labour don’t want to take the wider issues seriously.”
Conservative councillor Vanessa Brown said: “This is obviously an immensely difficult problem for the Home Office, for us as a local authority and most of all for the children concerned.
“The Home Office is struggling to deal with the numbers of unaccompanied asylum-seekers – and we are struggling to find sufficient and safe accommodation for these children and young people.
“Sadly, not all local authorities are as happy to help as we have been.
“The government does need to work more closely with councils right across the country to help develop more placements so children can move directly into long-term homes rather than hotels.
“From July to September this year, 1,322 children were put into hotels for an average of 16 days.
“Sometimes councils have not been informed in advance or been consulted about the use of hotels for these often very traumatised children.
“It is alarming that as many as 222 children have gone missing from hotels nationally – and sadly, as we’ve heard, many of these have gone missing locally.
“This council has responsibility for safeguarding any children in its care and we have to do our utmost to protect them.
“There is an immense amount of pressure on the Home Office and local councils so anything we can do to resolve these issues should be done.”
The council agreed to ask the chief executive Geoff Raw to write to the Home Secretary Suella Braverman.
She is to be asked to explain the legal basis on which unaccompanied asylum-seeking children are being moved outside the local authority area of their arrival in the UK and into hotels in Brighton and Hove which are being used as “intake centres”.
She is also to be asked to provide legal clarity about whether the Home Office accepts the responsibility of corporate parent for the children placed in those “intake centres”.
The council wants an urgent meeting with the Home Office to discuss the welfare needs of unaccompanied children and adequate funding for them.
Councillors have also called for a report or briefing to the next meeting of the council’s Children, Young People and Skills Committee to clarify a number of further details.
They want the report to say at what point in the process the council is informed by the Home Office that a child is being transferred out of area to a hotel or “extension of an intake centre” in Brighton and Hove.
They also want to know “what specific steps are being taken to safeguard children once officers are made aware of their arrival”.
The council’s Children, Young People and Skills Committee is next due to meet at Hove Town Hall at 4pm on Monday 9 January. The meeting is scheduled to be webcast on the council’s website.
More importantly the ages, what was the youngest that was lost? What is the average age of all the human trafficked children taken? How many have missing persons out? Of those can we see them all please, if they are missing. For me I think the duty of care is joint between home office and BHCC i wonder if there is room for legal action here, in that gross negligence and these weird privatised contracts
What a staggering failure by this council. A third of all the missing asylum seeking children were based in Brighton and Hove. And the council leaders response- ‘we wrote a few letters’. Complete lack of responsibility and accountability, or acknowledgment of the human cost, and once again more excuses. Utterly shameful situation and response.
What a staggering misunderstanding of the situation. The children were the responsibility of the Conservative Govt Home Office. Nothing to do with the council whatsoever.
The only thing I misunderstood is the scale of the problem. Over 1/2 of UASC who are missing, went missing while they were placed in Brighton and Hove. Over a HALF. The council has responsibility for the children in this city-wherever they’ve come from, and after 18 months of knowing UASC are being placed here the justification for inaction (more excuses) is inexcusable. Politicising and arguing over who is responsible for vulnerable children, while they go missing at this scale, from this city, is a scandal.
So you are saying that anything that goes on in B&H on this subject is all the responsibility of the Government and that the council is totally entitled to ignore all the consequences. I don’t think so. If these children are here they are under the immediate auspices of the council for as long as they are here and it’s incumbent upon the council to do something effective about any resulting issues, not just ignore it all, as they do routinely with most things.
Your comment is like saying that nothing whatsoever that goes on in B&H has anything to do with the council. If that’s the case, what is a council for?
Maz
The situation is this, Government have placed these poor souls into the care of BHCC, if or not they like it. BHCC have a duty of care to look after all it’s residents therefore has joint responsibility on this one.
My previous comment was a reply to the Maz comment, but seems to have got separated from it.
Funny how it is the new councillor fresh from working for immigrants who was looking forward to sorting out bins and schools for her ward is instantly back to immigrant work.
Are the missing children actually children? Or, do the ‘children’ have deep voices and full beards?
Why are there no photos of the missing children? Surely this would help identify them? Where is the MSM national news coverage? If they are indeed children then there needs to be massive national outrage. Where are they? Were they kidnapped? What happened?
If they are genuine missing children then those responsible for their protection should be held to account immediately.
I listened to the Police and Crime Commissioner’s last 2 Performance and Accountability Meetings, December and January, held with the Chief Constable of Sussex Police and other senior officers. No mention was made of these missing children, despite me submitting questions before and during the meetings. Children disappearing in such numbers, so completely, can only be achieved through organised crime. We all need to put pressure on the police to investigate, if not, they’ll be open to the charge that their complacency is enabling child abduction on a scale not seen since the days of legal slavery.
Surely the first few children missing would have sparked up a change of duty of care. Why on earth were they allowed out after some had already been taken ?how do they know it was gangs, someone saw it happening? So much about this doesn’t add up. Makes me sick to my stomach how child trafficking or slavery is rife in my community right next door and noone in power seems to care. Something is terrible wrong here.