Author-Family law week
107,000 children under 16 applied under the EU settlement scheme in last 10 months
Migration statistics from the Home Office
The Children’s Society has welcomed the inclusion in the UK’s quarterly immigration and asylum statistics release, for the first time, of the number of European nationals applying for settled status through the EU Settlement Scheme. The Children’s Society is co-chair of the Refugee and Migrant Children Consortium (RMCC). The charity says that this has meant that there is much more detail about applications, beyond nationality, outcome and UK area which include a breakdown by age categories.
Between 28 August 2018 and 30 June 2019:
- 107,110 children under 16 applied to the EU settlement scheme
- 92,600 (86%) have had a conclusion to their application
- 59,830 (65%) got Settled Status
- 32,580 (35%) got Pre-Settled Status
- 180 applications were withdrawn/void or were invalid
- 0 were refused.
This leaves 14,510 who are presumably waiting for their application to be concluded.
Ilona Pinter, Policy and Research manager at The Children’s Society and co-chair of the Refugee and Migrant Children’s Consortium, said:
“We welcome the age breakdowns, but this is not the whole picture. Legally children are all under 18s, but 16 and 17-year-olds have been subsumed into the adult data. Some of the most vulnerable young people – those leaving care or are estranged from their families – often fall in this age bracket. Putting them with the adult population means we have no way of knowing whether these young people have applied for settled status. We want to see ages broken down further so under 18s and 18-25 year olds.
“Additionally, only 12% of the applications to the EU Settlement Scheme have come from children aged under 16. But analysis from the Migration Observatory suggests that there were 700,000 EU children under 18 in the UK in 2018, meaning hundreds of thousands of children may still need to apply for settled status or secure British citizenship. If they do not, they risk being left without a lawful status in the UK which means being unable to access education, employment, healthcare, housing and other vital services.”
Source-https://www.familylawweek.co.uk/site.aspx?i=ed202436
