High Court orders Local Authority to exercise its direction and provide asylum-seeking young person with leaving care support
The High Court has held that the London Borough of Enfield (“Enfield”) acted unlawfully in failing to make reasonable inquiries into the welfare of an unaccompanied asylum-seeking child (“UAS child”). In a rare step, the Court directed Enfield to exercise its discretion to treat him “as if” he were a former relevant child under the Children Act 1989.
Background
The Claimant arrived in the UK in October 2023. On arrival, the Home Office wrongly assessed that the Claimant was an adult and placed him in adult asylum support accommodation. He subsequently left this accommodation and sofa-surfed between different extended family members’ homes in unsuitable and overcrowded conditions.
In March 2024, his immigration solicitors submitted an Early Help referral to Enfield, requesting an age assessment. The referral flagged child protection concerns and included a copy of the Claimant’s birth certificate; the immigration solicitors highlighted the discrepancy between the Home Office's age determination and the Claimant’s documentation. In response, however, Enfield refused to make any assessment and did not make any further inquiries, stating that the Claimant was not a looked-after child and that no services were being requested.
Only following a second referral from the Refugee Council in July 2024 did Enfield assess the Claimant’s circumstances and accommodate him under s.20 Children Act 1989. By this point, the Claimant was 10 weeks from his 18th birthday and therefore fell short of the 13-week threshold to qualify for leaving care support as a ‘former relevant child’. He requested that Enfield exercise its discretion and treat him “as if” he were a former relevant child (as per GE (Eritrea) [2014] EWCA Civ 1490). Enfield declined.
Judgment
In R (LB) v London Borough of Enfield [2025] EWHC 2094 (Admin), Deputy High Court Judge Karen Ridge found that the failure to conduct further inquiries in response to the Early Help referral was unlawful: Enfield’s decision to treat the referral only as a request for an age assessment, and then close the matter, meant that it failed to establish whether he was a child in need. The Judge emphasised that given the known risks to UAS children (as outlined in statutory guidance), it was “incumbent on any reasonable local authority to make further inquiries as to what this child’s situation was” (§§51-53).
The Judge found that had Enfield made reasonable inquiries at the outset, it was likely that the Claimant would have been found to be a child in need and accommodated under s.20 Children Act 1989, and, consequently, would have met the 13-week threshold to qualify as a ‘former relevant child’ (§67). As a result, the Judge held that the Claimant had suffered “significant unfairness” in not being treated as a former relevant child (§71). Notwithstanding that Enfield had a discretion as to how to remedy the injustice, the Judge took the rare step of directing that Enfield exercise its discretion as the “sole justifiable outcome”; the Claimant’s ongoing vulnerability and that he fell only three weeks short of the 13-week threshold were significant factors in favour of making the mandatory order (§§69-71).
The judgment is available here.
The Claimant was represented by Donnchadh Greene, instructed by Rahul Kanani of Osbornes Law, supervised by Alex McMahon.
