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After years of campaigning, the Home Office has for the first time published its own data confirming that hundreds of child refugees arriving in UK alone are being wrongly treated as adults, with devastating consequences. These children are routinely placed in adult accommodation, where they are forced to share rooms with strangers; immigration detention; and even adult prisons. 

• In the second half of 2025, 326 children were confirmed to have been incorrectly assessed as adults by border officials. A further 377 children remain in limbo, still waiting for a final decision.  

• These findings are reinforced by new figures collected by the Helen Bamber Foundation, which show that at least 755 children were wrongly treated as adults in 2025.  

Many children from countries such as Afghanistan, Sudan and Eritrea are unable to show official identity documents, such as passports or birth certificates, because they have never had them, they have been destroyed, lost or taken, or the child has been forced to travel on false documentation. In thousands of cases, border officials will simply decide an individual’s age based on a cursory visual assessment of their ‘appearance and demeanour’. If they think they look significantly over 18, they will move them straight to adult accommodation or immigration detention. 

For four years now, the Helen Bamber Foundation has collected data from local authorities, which the government itself had failed to publish until today, warning that it has been wrongly treating hundreds of children as adults after a visual assessment of age at the border. The latest figures for 2025, gathered through Freedom of Information Act requests, showed that:   

• 85 local authorities in England and Scotland received 1,504 referrals to their children’s services department of young people who had been sent to adult accommodation/ detention but were claiming to be children.   

• Of the cases when a decision on age was made/age assessment concluded (1,454), 52% were found to be children - meaning that in that year at least 755 children had been wrongly placed in adult accommodation or detention at significant risk.   

The actual number is very likely to be significantly higher because not all local authorities have access to, or will share, the relevant data, and many children don’t get the support they need to challenge the Home Office’s decision in the first place.   

Last year’s report from the Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration highlighted that a decade of concerns around the Home Office’s “’perfunctory’ visual assessments” of age remain unaddressed. Home Office still relied on generic physical characteristics; young people felt pressured into signing documents stating they were adults, and Home Office data was ‘patchy and unreliable’.   

Our previous reports have shown that children as young as 14 have been forced to share rooms with unrelated adults, with no safeguards in place. Children wrongly treated as adults have also been charged with immigration offences, spending periods of time in custody with adults in adult prisons, and held in immigration removal centres before being removed to France under UK-France returns agreement.    

Deciding age based on appearance is fundamentally flawed and has been widely criticised internationally. Even the Home Office’s own guidance acknowledges that “physical appearance is a notoriously unreliable basis for assessment of chronological age”.  Last year, in response to legal challenges brought by children who had been wrongly prosecuted as adults, the Home Office also admitted that the policy results in errors.   

Instead of addressing these concerns, the government has proposed to use artificial intelligence (AI) and facial recognition technologies to assess age. These proposals do not resolve the underlying problems unless significant safeguards are put in place. Existing evidence has found that AI can be even less accurate and more biased than human decision-making when judging a person’s age, with similar patterns of errors. Crucially, AI cannot account for factors that can significantly alter a young person’s appearance after fleeing conflict and persecution and making dangerous journeys, such as trauma, malnutrition and exhaustion.   

We recommend that an ‘over 25’ threshold be used for all cases where an individual is claiming to be a child - this was Home Office policy from 2019 to 2021 and is commonly found in other areas where age needs to be decided (such as ‘Challenge 25’ for shops selling alcohol).    

Kamena Dorling, Director of Policy at the Helen Bamber Foundation, said,  

“It is a huge step forward that the Home Office has finally published its own full statistics on age disputes, showing for the first time how many children are taken into care from the adult asylum system. HBF and others have been calling for this for over ten years, and now finally we have the data to allow us to understand the full scale of this crisis.  

Despite the mounting evidence of the profound harm being caused, the Home Office continues its practice of wrongly assessing children who come to the UK alone to seek protection, as adults. The latest figures should that in the second half of 2025, at least 326 child refugees were incorrectly treated as adults after a visual assessment of age at the border. The final number could be as high as 700 in just six months. These are children who end up placed with strangers in adult accommodation, in immigration detention and even in adult prisons.  

Change is urgently needed to prevent many more children from being harmed. The Home Office must acknowledge this is as a serious safeguarding failure and take immediate steps to ensure that border officials only dispute a child's claimed age in exceptional circumstances. Children’s services must be routinely notified when a potential child has been determined by them to be an adult.”  

Notes for editors:  

Further information on the latest immigration statistics can be found here: How many people have their age assessed? - GOV.UK 

Of the 1,885 individuals first determined to be adults by border officials in an ‘initial age determination’ in July to December 2025, 949 had a subsequent age assessment. Of these, 326 (17%) were assessed to be a child and 377 are still waiting for a decision.