Migrants will soon be subject to age tests, the Government has announced, after a 41-year-old man posed as a child to claim asylum in the UK.
Immigration minister Robert Jenrick has told MPs that officials will carry out medical assessments when people arrive in the country.
X-Rays and MRI scans are reportedly among the methods being considered to foil false age claims, which would land people preferential treatment in the eyes of the law.
Speaking in the House of Commons, Mr Jenrick said the new measures would be introduced “over the course of this year” as he condemned people who “abuse the system”.
He also addressed the recent case of a man who was nearly 30 years older than he claimed.
The minister said that immigration officials recently discovered a man who claimed to be a child was, in fact, 41.
The man was the “oldest individual we’ve encountered” posing as a youngster after arriving in the country, he added.
Lone children arriving in the UK to claim asylum receive immediate access to assistance, support and protection from authorities, and they are taken to specialised centres.
Asylum-seeking adults, on the other hand, often spend months being processed as they wait for their asylum applications to be approved.
The difference in treatment can lead to cases of migrant adults attempting to pass as children, as Mr Jenrick said, with age assessments often deemed imprecise.
At present, methods include skeletal and teeth examination and assessment of physical appearance.
In the coming year, the Home Office may complement these with X-rays of wisdom teeth, hands and wrists, and MRI scans of knees and collar bones.
But in January 2023, the Government’s own scientific advisory committee warned these plans would put children at risk of radiation, cause distress and that they would not clarify age “with precision”.
The minister said the Home Office takes age assessment “extremely seriously”, and added that those who take advantage of the system can place “genuine children” in danger.
He said: “It’s important that we weed out those cases of abuse because it poses such a risk.”
He briefly touched on a case in which a man posing as a child murdered an aspiring Royal Marine.
He said: “I’m afraid we’ve seen some very tragic instances such as the murder that occurred in Bournemouth at the behest of somebody who had posed as a child.”
Royal Marine Tom Roberts was murdered by Afghan asylum seeker Lawangeen Abdulrahimzai in 2022 while on the run from murder charges in Serbia and was later convicted in absentia of gunning down two people using a Kalashnikov assault rifle.
As the Home Office redoubles its efforts to catch adults posing as children, it also faces calls to address an opposite issue – a pattern of treating genuine children as adults.
Earlier this year, a joint report from the Helen Bamber Foundation, Humans for Rights Network and Asylum Aid found via freedom of information responses that two-thirds of young migrants deemed to be adults by the department were later confirmed to be children.
Approximately 867 out of 1,386 children taken in by local authorities were wrongly classified, meaning they could have been placed alone with adults in unsupervised accommodation, raising new safeguarding concerns.
