Children go missing from ‘safe’ Kent asylum centres 160 times in three years
Children’s commissioner Rachel de Souza vows to raise findings with Kent county council, with almost all missing kids coming from Muslim-majority countries
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Kent’s flagship “safe” reception centres for young asylum seekers lost vulnerable children more than 160 times between 2022 and 2024, Hyphen has learned — and three still haven’t been found.
Children’s commissioner for England Rachel de Souza on Wednesday said she would write to Kent county council (KCC) about our findings.
The data, obtained via freedom of information law, shows 17 unaccompanied asylum-seeking children went missing from the centres — which cost an estimated £60m a year to run — 25 times in 2024. Most of the kids are from Muslim-majority countries, with five from Albania, three from Afghanistan, three from Iran and two from Syria. The others are from Egypt, Eritrea, Iraq and Nigeria.
On five occasions, children were gone for more than a month. Kids previously went missing from Kent’s centres 74 times in 2023 and 62 times in 2022.
Under the 1989 Children Act, local councils must house any lone children who present to them as homeless, leaving Kent — where the UK is closest to mainland Europe — on the front line of accommodating underage asylum seekers. A judge ruled in 2023 that housing the children in hotels was unlawful, forcing the council to open five new centres on top of the two it already had.
Kama Petruczenko, a senior policy analyst at the Refugee Council, said Hyphen’s findings were “deeply concerning” and called it a “national child protection scandal”.
“We cannot repeat the mistakes from the past, when hundreds of children went missing from Home Office run hotels,” she added. Nationally, more than 4,600 unaccompanied children were accommodated in Home Office hotels between July 2021 and January 2023, 440 of whom went missing.
Data obtained by Hyphen reveals that 81 children who had previously gone missing from Home Office accommodation were yet to be found as of 22 January 2025.
De Souza told Hyphen she was “deeply concerned about the welfare of children arriving in Kent — and subsequently those who have gone missing from facilities intended to hold them safely on arrival”.
She said she would “seek assurances that every possible action is being taken to return these extremely vulnerable children to safety” and would ask the council for “reassurance that it is prioritising effective safeguarding”.
National transfer scheme
Almost all migrants crossing the Channel in small boats arrive in Kent, with the council saying 5,128 unaccompanied child asylum seekers had been referred into its care since 2023.
Kent’s reception centres provide temporary accommodation for lone children before they move into the care of other local authorities under the national transfer scheme.
The council’s website promises the centres will be a “place of safety” for the children, who “are vulnerable to being trafficked and exploited”.
It said the reception centres have “dedicated KCC care staff and security on site 24 hours a day, 365 days a year” and would be registered with Ofsted, the childcare services watchdog. But the children are “not in detention” and can leave the centres for “short periods of time”, as agreed with staff, it adds.
Concerns were raised in previous years that missing asylum seeking children were “probably being trafficked or exploited”, said crossbench peer Shaista Gohir, chief executive of the Muslim Women’s Network UK.
She added: “I am shocked that children are not being properly safeguarded and still go missing and in large numbers.”
Increasing numbers
Latest government data showed there were 7,380 unaccompanied asylum seeker children looked after by local authorities across England as of March 2024 — up markedly on the pre-pandemic figure of 5,150 in 2019.
Kent county council leader Roger Gough said in a statement: “Any child or young person missing from our care or the care of their parents or others in Kent is a serious concern to this council and we take every effort to prevent this from happening.”
But he warned: “For far too long, Kent county council has been expected to shoulder this large and disproportionate burden to accommodate and care for every unaccompanied asylum seeker child, even on a temporary basis, by itself, simply because of its location on the shortest crossing from Europe.”
Kent police said most missing children were found “within a short space of time”.
The Home Office has been approached for comment.
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