Kids In Care Moved Away After Refugee Influx

Something sounds very wrong here...unaccompanied children under 5 ?



https://uk.news.yahoo.com/kids-care-...133929486.html


Kent Council is having to place children in its care system with other counties because young asylum seekers are taking up its capacity.

Council chiefs say they have no choice but to place local youngsters elsewhere due to the influx from across the English Channel of those aged under 18 seeking sanctuary.

Kent County Council (KCC) currently has 924 unaccompanied asylum seeking children (UASC) in its care.

The number has risen from nearly 630 at the start of last August.

Councillor Peter Oakford, KCC's cabinet member for specialist children's services, said the number of children being looked after by the council had risen by 30% in the last seven months.

He told a council committee: "This has affected our ability to place citizen children within Kent ourselves.

"We have had to place Kent children outside of Kent due to the influx of UASC, which is not a good position to be in and is not a position we want to be in.

"It's actually costing us more financially because we have had to place, I think, six children into residential care either short-term or longer term, which is far more expensive than normal foster care."

It comes after International Development Secretary Justine Greening told Sky News that the UK is looking at taking thousands more unaccompanied Syrian refugee children from migrant camps.

Under the Children Act 1989, it is a council's legal responsibility to care for under-18s who arrive in their local authority area from abroad, seeking asylum.

With Kent being the closest British county to Calais, which many migrants and refugees who want to enter Britain use as their jumping off point as they try to reach the UK, KCC has seen large number of youngsters arrive since start of the migrant crisis last summer.

So far, 22 other councils have offered to help Kent out by accepting full responsibility for 56 UASC.

One of those councils said it would only accept UASC under the age of five.

The number of unaccompanied asylum seeking children arriving has slowed to around 15 a week since the winter hit, but there are fears the numbers will pick up again as spring approaches.

Mr Oakford said he expects the number to rise to around 40 to 50 a month