Briefings

The Refugee and Migration Children’s Consortium (RMCC), a coalition of more than 100 organisations working with refugee, migrant and separated children, is deeply concerned about the impact of the Immigration and Asylum Bill on children, young people and families. Our briefing for Second Reading of the Bill examines the impact of key provisions affecting children’s […]

Benchmarks and Borders: The use of Facial Age Estimation to assess the age of unaccompanied young people seeking asylum Determining whether a young person seeking asylum is a child or an adult is of fundamental importance to their life: it determines whether they receive care from children’s services; can access suitable accommodation and education; safeguarding […]

Age disputes have always been a key area of focus for the Refugee and Migrant Children’s Consortium (RMCC) and, in recent years, members have repeatedly raised concerns about the increasing number of children being denied the support and protection they need because they are being treated as adults. As the Home Office has taken increased […]

The Refugee and Migrant Children’s Consortium (RMCC) is deeply concerned about the government’s proposed asylum and settlement reforms, as outlined in Restoring Order and Control and A Fairer Pathway to Settlement. Key proposals include replacing five-year refugee status with short, renewable periods of “core protection”, extending routes to settlement to up to 20 years; restricting […]

Our new report shows that child refugees who come to the UK alone are continuing to face harassment, abuse and criminalisation as a result of being wrongly treated as adults and placed in accommodation with adult strangers.   The report, ‘Lost Childhoods: The consequences of flawed age assessments at the UK border’, revealed that in the […]

The Refugee and Migrant Children’s Consortium welcomes aspects of the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill (BSAIB), particularly the repeal of child detention powers, the Home Office accommodation powers over unaccompanied children, the Safety of Rwanda Act 2024, and other significant portions of the Illegal Migration Act 2023 (IMA). While we support the repeal of […]

The Refugee and Migrant Children’s Consortium is firmly opposed to the Safety of Rwanda Bill in its entirety. The Bill legislates that Rwanda is safe, something that has been authoritatively found to be false by the Supreme Court, and in doing so is likely in breach of international law. It is an affront to the […]

The Refugee and Migrant Children’s Consortium gave a submission to the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) on the care and human rights of refugee and migrant children in the United Kingdom. The submission was in response to the OHCHR study pursuant to Human Rights Council resolution 54/6 on the centrality […]

RMCC members are profoundly concerned by the Illegal Migration Bill which is designed to deny refugees the chance to seek protection. We agree with the UN Refugee Agency that the Bill undermines the very purpose of the Refugee Convention. It risks breaching the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. The government has not […]

The Refugee and Migrant Children’s Consortium welcomed the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care, and fed into the Review to highlight the specific needs of migrant and refugee children in the care system. The Review did not comment extensively on the experiences of migrant children receiving support from children’s social care but these young people […]