Child migrants in local hotels

The Home Office has admitted that an unaccompanied nine-year-old child was placed in an asylum seeker hotel because of shortages of local authority care placements.

The disclosure surfaced during an urgent Brighton & Hove City Council application for an injunction in the High Court from which is trying to prevent the Home Office from resuming placements in a Hove hotel from which a large number of children have previously disappeared. Some of them are suspected to have ended up with traffickers or people who are exploiting them.

The council has said it believes that because the location of the hotel has previously been disclosed in the media, and because of known “county lines” drug activity in the area, any children placed in the hotel by the Home Office in future could be vulnerable to exploitation. The hotel’s location was described as “notorious”.

The High Court judge rejected the application, allowing the Home Office to continue placing children in the hotel. The department said it used hotels to accommodate some unaccompanied children seeking asylum for a short time because of delays in placing them in the care of local authorities, which are often overstretched.

The court heard that of the 144 children who had gone missing from hotels in England, 139 had been in Brighton.