Three Syrian refugee children arrived legally in the UK by train from Calais on Monday, but a Labour and Conservative MP visiting the camps said the government needed to take urgent steps to help hundreds more children living in dire conditions.

Yvette Cooper, chair of Labour’s refugee taskforce, and Conservative MP Heidi Allen, described their anger and distress after meeting some of the estimated 450 unaccompanied child refugees living in caravans and tents in France on Monday.

Cooper and Allen returned to the UK by Eurostar in the afternoon on the same train with three Syrian boys who they have helped to travel to England legally.

The politicians were on a fact-finding visit before a key Lords voteon Monday evening in which the government was defeated in the Lords as peers voted to allow 3,000 unaccompanied child refugees into the country.

Peers voted by 306 votes to 204, a majority of 102, to amend the immigration bill in order to require the government to let the children, currently in Europe, come to Britain. Lord Dubs’ amendment to the immigration bill stipulates that “the secretary of state must, as soon as possible, make arrangements to relocate 3,000 unaccompanied refugee children who are in European countries to the United Kingdom”, in addition to the resettlement of children under the vulnerable persons relocation scheme.

Save the Children and UNHCR estimates that there are 24,000 unaccompanied child refugees in Europe; Dubs calculates that 3,000 would be the UK’s fair share to take. He said he had been overwhelmed with messages of support about the amendment.

“I believe that there is a real mood in the country that we can do more for refugees and I think that it focuses particularly on what we can do for children,” he told fellow peers last month.

Cooper and Allen met 12-year-old Kareem from Afghanistan, who told them he was exhausted after a night spent trying to hide in the back of lorries to get to England. “He wanted to keep hugging people, he wanted comfort. He has no one looking after him. He is about the same age as my son,” Cooper said.

They also met a 17-year-old from Syria who has spent the past year trying to reach his mother and brother who are already in Birmingham. He showed them the scars on his hands from barbed-wire injuries sustained during his nightly attempts to board trains and get to England. He told them he hoped to return to school and wanted to study to be a surgeon in England.

Alf Dubs, a Labour peer, was rescued from Prague and brought to this country as an unaccompanied child refugee in 1939 by Sir Nicolas Winton, the man known as Britain’s Oscar Schindler, who rescued many children from Czechoslovakia, and who died last year. Dubs said he would “like other children to be given the same welcome and opportunities” that he had.



Volunteers working in the camp. Photograph: Graeme Robertson/The Guardian

Cooper and Allen went to a section of the Calais camp where about 450 unaccompanied child refugees are living in caravans and wooden shacks. At least 150 of the children have family in the UK, and are in theory entitled under the rarely-used legal mechanism, the Dublin III process, to have their asylum claims transferred there, so they can be with their relatives . But delays to the system have meant that it can take up to nine months for the French authorities to issue a request to the UK to take over the asylum claim, followed by a further wait while the Home Office makes a decision.

Volunteers working in Calais told the two politicians many of the children had been badly treated by the French police, with some suffering from eye blistering after being hit with teargas, as they tried to approach the Eurostar tracks. Others have had their shoes removed by the police to discourage them from trying to walk to the railway. Others had been hit with water cannon, when much of the camp was destroyed last month.

“You are freezing cold, you have nowhere to go that is warm, you’ve got no clothes – and then you are sprayed with cold water - that’s worse than the tear gas,” said Inca Sorrell, a volunteer from England, who has been helping to look after children traveling alone.

The MPs also heard about the deteriorating condition of S, a 17-year-old Iranian boy, travelling without his family, who has been on hunger strike for the past three weeks, and who has stitched his lips together, to protest against human rights abuses in the camp.

Allen said she felt embarrassed that British volunteers were having to pick up responsibility for these children in the absence of effective help from the French and UK governments. She said immigration ministers should travel to Calais to understand the situation that unaccompanied children were living in.

The MPs said they were concerned about the absence of a clear process by which children could be registered and looked after by the French authorities.

“There is nothing in place for these unaccompanied children. They have been abandoned with no child protection in place. There are very disturbing stories about children, many of whom may have been trafficked and drugged to get them to Calais in the first place, disappearing mainly into the arms of gangs, prostitution, drugs trade - effectively modern slavery,” Cooper said.

Cooper has called on the government to emulate the Kindertransport scheme, to bring children to the UK in large numbers. She said she was shocked by the number of 11-, 12- and 13-year-olds living without their families in the camps. She was also moved to see copies of Where’s Wally? and We’re Going on A Bearhunt, in the children’s play centre, organised by British volunteers in a double-decker bus. “These children are totally alone,” she said.

“When the Kindetransport policy was debated there was huge cross-party support. I want to recreate that cross-party sense that Britain should do its bit in parliament,” she said.

“We have an immediate responsibility to those children with family in Britain who have family and we need to show leadership in helping those children who are on their own and have no one,” Cooper said. “I think the government is turning a blind eye. The problem is they are confusing immigration and asylum. They are treating this as part of immigration situation, but help for refugees and help for children should be something everyone should care about. No one should ever want to leave children in those circumstances”

Cooper, left, and Help Refugees co-founder Lliana Bird at the camp. Photograph: Graeme Robertson/The Guardian

Lliana Bird, who co-founded Help Refugees last August, showed the MPs the hut where young teenagers gathered in the afternoons to play table-football. She said the government urgently needed to do more to help the children.

“The British government are effectively saying they they have a choice – either the train tracks or the traffickers or stay by themselves here for months on end. It’s not good for the children, their mental health has declined,” she said.

“They have lived through a winter here, known people who have died, experienced police brutality. The longer we leave them here, the longer they are out school, and uncared for, and they become more and more desperate.”

Help Refugees has worked with Citizens UK to pay for legal fees of children with UK-based relatives to apply for asylum in Britain.

“The figure of 3,000 is small but it would make an important contribution to helping a vulnerable group,” Dubs told the Lords last month. He said he believed foster parents would come forward to care for the children if a nationwide appeal was made for families to volunteer.

“I hear from people who want to be foster parents: foster parents will be forthcoming. We cannot leave these children to fester somewhere in Europe, uncared for and vulnerable to trafficking gangs,” he said.

• This article was amended on 22 March 2016 to anonymise one of the unaccompanied children.