LONDON
Forty children who went missing from hotels housing asylum seekers across the UK remain unaccounted for, according to a parliamentary committee report published Thursday.
In its report, Parliament’s Joint Committee on Human Rights said that all but two of the missing children are now adults, as England’s Children’s Commissioner Dame Rachel de Souza called the issue an “unacceptable failure” and demanded that the government set out what it is doing to locate them.
The report comes three years after hundreds of unaccompanied children seeking asylum in the UK were reported missing from hotels commandeered by the Home Office.
In a letter to the committee last year, Angela Eagle, then border security and asylum minister, said some who had been found were “in exploitative situations and may have been trafficked.”
The committee said it was “extremely concerned” about the number of minors who are still missing.
The committee urged the Home Office to explain its efforts to locate missing children, investigate the reasons for their disappearances and take steps to prevent similar cases involving unaccompanied asylum-seeking children.
“The Home Office-operated accommodation for unaccompanied asylum-seeking children closed in January 2024. Since then, the vast majority of children reported missing from those settings have subsequently been located,” a Home Office spokesperson was quoted by Sky News as saying.
The spokesperson added: “Police forces are responsible for investigating missing children cases, and we continue to review our records, share relevant information with them and work closely with local authorities and safeguarding partners to support those investigations.”
