17% of initial adult decisions later found to be children, with hundreds of cases still pending
To accompany new data on age assessments in last week's immigration statistics, the Home Office published a one-off report looking at how many asylum seekers have their age assessed.
Image credit: UK GovernmentThe report, which is available here, shows that a significant proportion of asylum seekers initially classified as adults by immigration officials are later determined to be children. The Helen Bamber Foundation notes it is the first time the Home Office has published detailed outcomes on age disputes.
Figures in the Home Office report cover the period from July to December 2025. They show that border officials made Initial Age Decisions (IADs) that 1,885 individuals claiming to be minors were adults. Of those, 949 subsequently underwent a full age assessment by a local authority or the National Age Assessment Board (NAAB). To date, 326 of these individuals (17% of the original 1,885) have been confirmed to be children, while 377 cases remain pending.
The Home Office noted that the number of people undergoing age assessments has risen sharply in recent years, reaching 6,420 individuals in the year ending March 2026. This means 7% of all asylum claimants were subject to an age assessment, compared to between 1% and 3% annually before 2020. The report attributes this increase to the rise in arrivals via small boats, who are less likely to hold documentation proving their identity.
The statistics show a distinct variation in outcomes depending on the assessing body. Between July 2025 and March 2026, 51% of IADs conducted by border officials resulted in an adult classification. In contrast, local authority assessments determined the individual to be an adult in only 28% of cases, finding them to be a child in 68% of instances.
The Home Office stated that these outcome rates should not be directly compared due to fundamental differences in methodology, noting: "IADs are typically made at pace, often with limited or incomplete information, and are based solely on physical appearance and demeanour. In contrast, social workers in LAs and the NAAB usually have the time and expertise to consider a broader range of information as part of their age assessment."
In a statement, the Helen Bamber Foundation (HBF) welcomed the publication of the data, noting that it and other NGOs had campaigned for its release for over a decade. However, the charity warned that the figures expose a systemic safeguarding failure, pointing out that hundreds of children are being wrongly routed into the adult asylum system.
Independent data collected by HBF through Freedom of Information (FOI) requests to 85 local authorities throughout 2025 is further cited by the charity to illustrate the scale of the issue. The foundation's research revealed that children's services received 1,504 referrals for young people who had been placed in adult accommodation or detention despite claiming to be minors. Of the 1,454 cases where an assessment was completed, 52% (755 young people) were ultimately confirmed to be children.
HBF highlighted that minors mistakenly treated as adults face "devastating consequences," including being placed in unsupervised adult accommodation with strangers, immigration detention, or adult prisons. The charity noted that refugees from conflict zones like Afghanistan, Sudan, and Eritrea frequently arrive without documents, leaving them exposed to subjective visual assessments which even internal Home Office guidance acknowledges is a "notoriously unreliable basis" for determining chronological age.
The foundation also criticized government proposals to introduce artificial intelligence (AI) and facial recognition technology into the process. It argued that AI can replicate human biases and cannot account for physical changes caused by the trauma, malnutrition, and exhaustion experienced during dangerous journeys.
HBF recommended that the Home Office reintroduce the "over 25" threshold used between 2019 and 2021, meaning border officials should only dispute a claimed age in exceptional circumstances. It also called for automatic notification of local authority children's services whenever an individual's claim to be a minor is rejected at the border.