Charities urge PM to stop using hotels to house migrant children

More than 100 charities person written to Rishi Sunak calling for an extremity to lodging kid asylum seekers successful hotels aft astir 200 went missing.

The organisations warned the premier minster that children were astatine hazard of exploitation, with 1 calling it a "child extortion scandal".

They person besides called for an autarkic enquiry implicit the situation.

On Tuesday the authorities said the missing children were mostly Albanian teenage boys.

Immigration Minister Robert Jenrick told MPs that of the 4,600 kid asylum seekers without an big who had arrived the UK since 2021, 440 had gone missing and only fractional had returned.

He told MPs that 13 of those who are missing are nether 16 and 1 is female.

He clarified helium had not seen grounds the children were being abducted but said helium was "not going to fto the substance drop".

The unfastened letter, co-ordinated by children's rights organisation ECPAT UK and the Refugee Council and signed by much than 100 exile and children's charities including the NSPCC and Barnado's, condemned the government's "failures to support susceptible children from harm".

The missive said: "There is nary ineligible ground for placing children successful Home Office edifice accommodation, and astir 2 years into the cognition of the strategy - which is some unlawful and harmful - it is nary longer imaginable to warrant the usage of hotels arsenic being 'temporary'."

The charities added that the Home Office has "repeatedly failed" to perpetrate to an extremity day for the scheme.

But Mr Jenrick stressed that a shortage of alternate accommodation means helium cannot acceptable a date.

Enver Solomon, main enforcement of the Refugee Council, described the nonaccomplishment of dozens of refugees arsenic "a kid extortion scandal".

He said: "We cognize from our enactment that children who person experienced unimaginable fearfulness and upheaval coming to our state successful hunt of information are highly traumatised and vulnerable.

"The authorities has a precise wide ineligible work to support them but is failing to bash truthful with the equivalent of respective classrooms of children seemingly having disappeared into the clutches of those who volition exploit and maltreatment them.

"This is simply a kid extortion ungraded that councils, the constabulary and ministers indispensable urgently code to guarantee each azygous separated kid matters and is kept safe."

Labour's Shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper accused ministers of a "dereliction of duty" and claimed determination was "a transgression web involved" successful taking the children distant from their accommodation.

Caroline Lucas, Green MP for Brighton Pavilion, wherever immoderate of the children are thought to person gone missing, accused the authorities of "staggering complacency" and compared the concern to girls being ignored successful Rotherham, in reference to the wide kid enactment maltreatment successful the Yorkshire town.

Sussex Police said 137 unaccompanied children had been reported missing since the Home Office began lodging them in hotels successful Brighton and Hove.

On Wednesday night, a protestation was held successful Brighton by exile groups demanding "urgent enactment to springiness children seeking information the extortion they deserve".

The Home Office says astir 9 successful 10 unaccompanied children successful Home Office-approved hotels are Albanian males who assertion to beryllium 16 to 17 years old.

Police sources accidental galore person been trafficked by transgression gangs.