Coram Children’s Legal Centre is opposed to Home Office proposals to keep refugees in uncertainty; refugee children have a fundamental need for recovery, stability and integration.
The previous government had planned measures in the Nationality and Borders Act 2022 to give refugees only temporary status. However, in move that we welcomed, they then reversed their position and kept granting those recognised as refugees five years’ leave to remain, with recourse to public funds and rights to apply for family reunion, along with the ability to apply for permanent status after five years.
We are therefore disappointed to see the idea of making refugee leave temporary now appearing once again, this time under a Labour government. It was not clear then and it is not clear now that shorter refugee permission to stay will deter people from coming to the UK.
Granting lone children and children in families a new temporary protection status goes against refugee children’s well-established need for stability as they go through recovery and rebuild their lives. Article 39 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child requires measures to ‘promote physical and psychological recovery and social reintegration of a child victim of: any form of neglect, exploitation, or abuse; torture or any other form of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment; or armed conflicts’.
We are also concerned about the government legislating on how judges interpret the right to respect for family life, Article 8 of the European Convention in Human Rights. As we said in 2014 when a previous government tried to do this, the public interest is not only in immigration control. There is also a strong public interest in children’s upbringing and stable family lives.
Nor can family life be arbitrarily circumscribed. In 2025, ‘family’ must not be narrowly defined and must be a factual question of the important people in a child’s life. Children’s childhoods and family lives progress with time and the Home Office cannot somehow stop the clock and ignore children’s identities, integration and family connections. These must be given proper weight in decision-making.
The bottom line
Denying children clarity about their future hinders their recovery, with damaging consequences for their well-being and development. It is difficult enough to restart life and education in a new country and language, without the prospect of an even more disrupted education if you cannot stay on in the UK.
Long routes to settlement have been shown to be damaging for children and young people growing up in the UK. Putting refugee children – as well as potentially thousands of other children across the immigration system – on precarious visas with limited state support for extended periods of their infancy and childhood not only does them harm. It also undermines the government’s ambitions for raising the healthiest generation, for cutting child poverty, for 75 per cent of children reaching a Good Level of Development and for tackling educational inequalities.
Anita Hurrell, Head of Policy and Practice Change, said:
If we are going to offer international protection to children who have experienced conflict and human rights abuses, we need to offer stability, not an even more disrupted childhood. We all know that children integrate, so to say we’ll tear them away again from their new lives goes against the spirit of granting refuge in the first place.
After a damaging pause in asylum decision-making, we welcomed this government re-starting making decisions on asylum claims. But to recognise children, young people and families as refugees only to then deny them the chance to rebuild their lives makes no sense. It is doing wrong by these children and is not good for the communities where they make a new home.
Notes
- This announcement follows the suspension of family reunion rights for refugees in September 2025 and, earlier, a decision to make citizenship harder for refugees to obtain in February 2025.
- These proposals come in parallel with proposed longer routes to settlement across the immigration system, as outlined in the Home Office’s May 2025 White Paper, Restoring control over the immigration system: CCLC’s response can be read here.
- On the effects of short-term leave on children and young people growing up in the UK, see We Belong (2019) Normality is a Luxury: How ‘limited leave to remain’ is blighting young lives.
