Pressure grows on PM and home secretary over closure of scheme to bring child refugees to UK after only 350 arrivals

Theresa May has been criticised by the archbishop of Canterbury and a growing number of Tory MPs over her government’s decision to limit a scheme to provide a haven in Britain to unaccompanied refugee children in Europe.



Justin Welby said he was “saddened and shocked” by the decision to limit the Dubs scheme to only 350 children, saying he believed ministers had been “committed to welcoming up to 3,000”.

Daughter of 'British Schindler' urges May to help more child refugees Read more

The most senior Church of England cleric said it was “regrettable” to end the scheme when it had helped such a small number. “Jesus commands us to care for the most vulnerable,” he added.

He was joined by a string of backbench Conservatives, as well as Labour politicians and relief workers, who said the prime minister should lift the cap on numbers, while local councils made clear they could take more refugees if more money was made available.

Heidi Allen, the Conservative MP for South Cambridgeshire, said she and a number of colleagues were angry and would be pressing for the Dubs route to remain open, starting with a parliamentary debate on 23 February.

“Quite a few of us had sensed things were not heading in the right direction and had applied for a backbench debate anyway. That will be the first parliamentary opportunity. There are quite a lot of us that are not going to let this go,” she said.

“Our job over the next week or so is to make everyone aware of what has happened and I don’t believe we will let this go. All the government has to do is leave the system open and let councils come forward. There is just absolutely no reason to shut the scheme down.”

In the House of Lords, Alf Dubs, who originally designed the scheme, accused the prime minister of a breach of the “spirit of the commitment” she had given him during the passage of the Immigration Act last May. He said ministers were “arbitrarily closing down the scheme”.

Barbara Winton, whose late father Sir Nicholas Winton helped 669 mostly Jewish children – including the future Lord Dubs, flee Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia, asked May to remember the words the prime minister had used at her father’s memorial service as the world “once again teeters on the edge of dark times”.

An application to expedite a high court legal challenge is to be heard on Friday. The charity Help Refugees, which brought the challenge, claims the government has failed to properly consult local authorities over the number of available places for unaccompanied child refugees as required under the Dubs amendment.

But May and the home secretary, Amber Rudd, strongly defended their decision to close the scheme once one last group of 150 children have been brought to Britain, probably from Greece and Italy.

When May faced questions about the issue at a Downing Street press conference after talks with the Italian prime minister, she emphasised Britain’s financial contribution to refugee camps in the Syrian region and the number of refugee children who had arrived in the UK from outside Europe.

“We have been seeing quite a number of children and families being resettled here in the United Kingdom. I think what we are doing in terms of refugees is absolutely right, on top of course of the significant financial support and humanitarian aid we are giving to refugees in the region of Syria – £2.3bn, the second biggest bilateral donor,” she said.

Charity workers in Calais said an estimated 200 asylum-seeking children were now living rough in the forests and woodland around the demolished refugee camp, many of whom had expected to be eligible to be transferred to the UK under the Dubs amendment.

“They are not in tents because it makes them more visible to the police; they want to stay secret and out of sight. But it is quite dangerously cold,” said Amelia Burr, of Help Refugees. Throughout January nighttime temperatures have been around -5C (23F). “We give out sleeping bags and blankets at night; when we come back the next day the blankets are frozen.”

Young asylum seekers were once again attempting to get on to lorries travelling to the UK at night, she said. Last month, a 20-year-old from Eritrea was killed on the motorway. “There is very little legal option for minors who want to get to the UK now, so they are left with only one option, which is to risk their lives to try to get to England.”

Natasha Tsangarides, Greece field manager for the charity Safe Passage, which helps refugee children to find legal ways of seeking asylum in the UK, said there were more than 1,000 child refugees in Greece on a waiting list for places in children’s shelters who urgently needed help accessing appropriate places to stay.

“A couple of boys are prostituting themselves just to survive in Greece. There are over 1,000 lone, vulnerable and desperate children here, who don’t even have a home to sleep in. There is a huge problem here,” she said. “If they are going to take no more than 150 children more from across France, Italy and Greece, that’s simply not good enough.”

Ministers were careful not specify a number when the Dubs amendment made it into law last May, although it had widely been expected that several thousand unaccompanied children would be allowed to enter the UK and that the scheme would remain open in the long term.

Tania Mathias, the Tory MP for Twickenham, said: “It was never expected to be closed at any point. Britain should be leading the way, there should be more resources for local authorities.”

She said she was “hopeful because there was such a lot of criticism today” that the government would change its mind and keep the scheme open.



“I’ve asked authorities to be given more money because they’ve said it’s not a question of looking after the children for one or two years; these are complex cases,” she said.

Rudd said the government had fulfilled its obligations. She said 350 was the limit of the capacity of local councils this financial year to fund places.

She also said British and French authorities feared that the existence of the Dubs scheme was “a pull factor” for refugee children to head to Britain and provided opportunities for the people traffickers. “We don’t want to incentivise journeys to Europe,” she said.

David Simmonds, of the Local Government Association, which has estimated it costs £50,000 a year to look after a vulnerable lone child refugee, said it had long urged the government to put in place long-term funding arrangements.

The chair of the Commons home affairs select committee, Yvette Cooper, said she was shocked at the closure of a scheme that had ensured teenage girls from Eritrea who had been trafficked, raped and abused were now in school in Britain.



“Far from deterring traffickers, this decision to halt legal routes to sanctuary will encourage them instead,” Cooper said. “The government is pushing vulnerable children back into the arms of smuggler and trafficker gangs, and back into modern slavery. Already we are seeing hundreds of children starting to return to Dunkirk and Calais. Both France and Britain have an obligation to work together to make sure the dangerous Calais camp conditions don’t start all over again.”