Around 95% of unaccompanied children now say they want to remain in France compared with 15% last year, charity says

French children’s services are struggling to cope with a dramatic surge in unaccompanied refugee children who have abandoned plans to travel to the UK and now want to remain in France.

In the past three months staff employed by the main French charity working with refugee children in Calais have had to turn away between 15 and 35 unaccompanied refugee children every day because they have no beds for them in the emergency shelter.

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Since July around 95% of the unaccompanied children who come to the charity for assistance say they want to remain in France permanently, according to Jean-François Roger, director of the charity’s child refugee centre. This is a huge change from last year, when only 15% of the 1,483 unaccompanied children that staff registered at the France Terre d’Asile emergency shelter in Saint Omer, said they wanted to stay; the remaining 85% returned to the Calais camp after a five-day break, to try to travel on to the UK.



“A few things have happened that have persuaded children to stay. Since July, and the Brexit vote, the migrants are wondering what will happen to them if they turn up in Britain. We are not sure it is connected to Brexit, but there is a fear of what kind of welcome foreigners will have there now,” Roger said.



The rise in numbers opting to stay in France is also a reflection of the fact that increased security and fencing by the port has made it much harder and much more dangerous to attempt to cross to the UK illegally. This week, workers began to build the foundations of a four-metre high, kilometre-long wall between the camp and the motorway, estimated to cost £1.9m.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Unaccompanied minors seeking asylum learn French at the home for young refugees run by French charity Terre d’Asile. Photograph: Teri Pengilley/The Guardian

In parallel there has been a concerted drive by charities working in the Calais camp to inform children that, aside from the dangers of trying to make an illegal crossing, it is often easier to get long-term permission to remain in France than it is in the UK.

Last Friday a 14-year-old boy from Afghanistan died when he fell from a lorry and was hit by a car on the motorway leading to the port; he was the third asylum-seeking child to be killed in the Calais area this year.



“It is getting harder and harder to cross the frontier. There is a bigger police presence, there are more checks, the barrier is bigger. It was always dangerous, but it is much more dangerous now for the children, and so they are forced to take much greater risks,” Roger said. “It is also more dangerous in the camp in Calais itself. You have 10,000 people in a confined space and tensions are getting worse, and the children are more vulnerable.”



A census carried out by the charity Help Refugees estimated this week that the camp population has increased to around 10,188, a 12% increase on last month, with 1,179 minors, of whom 87% are traveling alone; the youngest unaccompanied child is eight years old.

Almost a third of the children are from Afghanistan, a quarter from Sudan and a quarter from Eritrea. Police clashed with camp residents on Wednesday, using teargas grenades, and violent incidents are increasing.



The current emergency provision of just 45 beds for refugee children in Saint Omer was completely inadequate, Roger said. Two further emergency centres, one with 70 beds and one with 75 places, will be opened in November and early 2017, but these are also likely to be insufficient to house the rising numbers, he said. Children eventually move into foster care or more permanent housing, but they often need to stay in the emergency shelter for weeks, while their application to remain is processed.

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“We do feel powerless. It is very hard psychologically for my colleagues who have to turn them away. It is difficult to explain to them why there are no places,” Roger said. “It will be worse when it gets colder, when there is water up to your knees in the camp.”



When the charity turns children away, staff alert the local social services, but usually they are also unable to offer a bed, so the children are forced to return to tents or huts in the Calais camp, or if they are relatively lucky, the newly-installed metal shipping containers.



The charity has been campaigning for more emergency beds for months, but has faced considerable political hostility. It took Roger three years to find a mayor willing to agree to accommodate a centre for child refugees. With the growing presence of the Front National in the region, there is a wariness of offering more facilities for refugees, even unaccompanied children.



“People don’t treat them as children, but as foreigners and migrants,” Roger said. “There is also fear that by creating better accommodation there will be a magnet effect, attracting more people.”



Facebook Twitter Pinterest A man walks past the fence designed to stop migrants and refugees trying to reach Britain. Photograph: Pascal Rossignol/Reuters

He said the French authorities had not reacted swiftly enough to the crisis. “Since 2014 the numbers are just going up and up. The 45 spaces we have here no longer corresponds to the reality of the situation in Calais. This system was created in 2009 when there were only 1,500 people in the camp, and perhaps around 100 children,” he said. “We have never had an ambitious, long-term plan. It is frustrating.”



A permanent solution to the issue needed to be worked out between Britain and France, he said. “This is a European problem. We need a joint solution,” he said. The former French president Nicolas Sarkozy visited Calais this week, and said it was not up to France to “be England’s border guards”.

Although the British government made a commitment earlier this year to offer shelter to a share of the 95,000 estimated unaccompanied refugee children across Europe, with the so-called Dubs amendment of the Immigration Act, no children have yet been transferred to the UK under this legislation.

Those children who do not want to remain in France and continue to attempt to get to the UK, often have strong family connections which make them determined to try to cross the channel to claim asylum in the UK. The boy who died on the road this week, had family in Britain, and consequently a legal right to be reunited with them – but because the bureaucratic process is so slow, he had given up waiting.



The Labour MP Stella Creasy launched a new attempt to amend immigration legislation on Thursday to force the government to take responsibility for unaccompanied children in Calais. This week the UK’s modern slavery commissioner, Kevin Hyland, criticised the government for its slow response to the crisis.

“It is absolutely unacceptable that these children are left in the camp at the disposal of the criminal networks and they continue risking their lives daily to reach the shores of the UK,” he wrote in a letter to the home secretary, Amber Rudd.