The home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, has announced plans for the biggest overhaul of the UK asylum system in decades. Some of the harshest criticism of the proposals has come from Labour peer Lord Alf Dubs, a former child refugee who came to Britain on the Kindertransport from Prague in 1939. He has said that the home secretary is seeking to “use children as a weapon”.
There is a long history of refugee children becoming moral touchstones in debates around asylum. For example, photos of the body of Syrian toddler Alan Kurdi, during the 2015 so-called refugee crisis, were a catalyst for an unprecedented outpouring of compassion among media, the public and politicians.
In the year ending June 2025, there were 88,738 asylum applications to the UK relating to 111,084 people. Of these, 15,123 were child dependents (children who are included on a parent’s asylum application).
Other children enter through family reunion visas once their parent has gained refugee status. In 2024, 10,728 family reunion visas were granted to children under the age of 18. However in September 2025, in the face of growing public discontent with the asylum system, the government paused new applications for family reunion from refugees.
Under the new plans, refugees will not be allowed to apply for family reunion, unless they are able to transfer to a work or study visa.
Removing support
The UK currently has a legal duty to provide accommodation to asylum seekers who would otherwise be destitute. The government argues that this incentivises people to make dangerous journeys across the English Channel, including with babies and children.
Labour minister Steve Reed has claimed that the new system would remove such incentives and save lives. This is a familiar justification for restrictive asylum policies and an example of what I call “compassionate refusals”, whereby politicians argue that the removal of support or the infliction of punitive measures will alleviate suffering or avoid future suffering.
The Home Office says that the current system allows people to “exploit the fact that they have had children and put down roots in order to thwart removal”. Currently, destitute families with children who are refused asylum and have exhausted their appeal rights can continue to receive accommodation and basic financial support. Under the new plans, the Home Office will look to remove financial support from families who have been refused asylum, even if they have children.
The most significant change appears to be in the government’s approach to removals. Currently, families are not prioritised by the government for deportation. “Our hesitancy around returning families creates particularly perverse incentives,” the proposals say. “To some, the personal benefit of placing a child on a dangerous small boat outweighs the considerable risks of doing so.”
Under the plans, people refused asylum, including children, could be deported if they fail to leave voluntarily.
For families who are granted asylum, the proposals also introduce a new level of uncertainty. Refugee status will be reassessed every 30 months, with the possibility of being returned to their country of origin if it is deemed safe. Some will have to wait 20 years instead of the current five years before they can apply for settlement.
This means that refugees brought to the UK as children could live their entire childhoods in Britain with no guarantee that they will remain in the place they have come to think of as home.
Facial recognition
Specific measures also focus on unaccompanied child asylum applicants. In the year ending June 2025, 3,553 unaccompanied children applied for asylum. They are looked after by local authorities in foster care, or shared semi-independent accommodation with social work support.
A recurring aspect of debate over asylum has to do with arrivals who are age disputed – that is, those who claim to be under 18, but may be older. The assumption is that they claim to be younger to try to access temporary leave to remain, services and support provided to minors. In the year ending June 2024, 6,270 age disputes were raised.
Under the new asylum plan, young people whose age is disputed will be subjected to facial age estimation technology. This technology uses artificial intelligence to estimate the age of the young person, despite concerns about its accuracy.
This issue of age disputes has been under regular media scrutiny, most notably when 220 children were transferred to the UK in late 2016 from Calais. As these (predominantly teenage) boys arrived in Britain, media headlines disputed their age, focusing on appearance such as facial hair and demeanour. Such an approach can reinforce Eurocentric understandings of age, and ignore the toll that conflict and arduous journeys take on bodies and behaviour.
According to current Home office guidance, when claiming asylum, if the young person claims to be a minor they should be treated as such unless their physical appearance and demeanour very strongly suggests they are significantly over the of 18. There have previously been calls to use invasive or discredited methods of age testing such as dental examinations and bone scans.
Currently, if a young person is age disputed, they are usually referred to the local authority who conducts a holistic age assessment. This takes into account appearance, demeanour, documents, the young person’s own account and observations by adults working with them, among other evidence. Given the uncertainties over the use of AI, introducing this technology to the age determination process is unlikely to resolve the existing challenges.
Ala Sirriyeh, Senior Lecturer in Sociology, Lancaster University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
