Council left with multi-million gap in care funding as UK struggles to cope with refugee children

Turmoil: migrant children are pushed onto a train in Budapest, Hungary, after police stopped blocking their entry to the Keleti train station
Laszlo Balogh/Reuters
Benedict Moore-Bridger3 September 2015

There has been another big surge in the number of migrant children smuggled across the Channel and taken into care in Britain.

New figures show 720 unaccompanied children seeking asylum are in Kent county council’s care, up from about 630 at the start of August and 368 in March. There were 220 in March last year.

The local authority said last month that it had no more foster beds available, BBC Radio Kent reported.

The surge has left the council with a multi-million pound funding gap in care costs.

It comes despite Anglo-French efforts to tighten border security in an effort to stop migrants stowing away on UK-bound lorries at Calais.

Under the Children Act 1989, it is the council’s legal responsibility to care for under-18s who arrive in the county from abroad seeking asylum.

Last month it emerged that some teenage migrants who have arrived in Britain are being driven by private taxi to temporary accommodation outside Kent at a cost of up to £150. Translation and interpretation costs in the county have also risen sharply, according to figures disclosed to Radio Kent under the Freedom of Information Act.

The authority spent £829,652 on the services in 2014-2015, compared to £683,566 in 2013-14 and £638,393 in 2012-13.

In addition, new evidence about the impact on the Kent tourist economy this summer due to the implementation of Operation Stack has emerged. Stack, in which lorries are queued on the M20 when cross-Channel services go into meltdown, has been imposed repeatedly due to the crisis in Calais.

Sandra Matthews-Marsh, chief executive of Visit Kent, said the cost of lost revenue to the local tourist economy ran into tens of millions of pounds.

She said: “Early indications from our research is that the impact has been ‘extraordinary’ and ‘much more serious than expected’.”

Dover Castle reported a seven per cent drop, about 11,000 visitors, in the three months from June compared with the same period last year.

Port Lympne and Howletts Wild Animal Parks said that across the two sites about 30,000 visitors were lost during July, costing nearly £300,000 in lost revenue.

There were chaotic scenes at Budapest’s main railway station today with people pushing themselves and their children into carriages.

Thousands of desperate migrants poured into Keleti station in the Hungarian capital after a two-day stand off, despite announcements that there were no services to western Europe.

Many of the migrants in Hungary have been refusing to register there, in order to continue their journeys to Germany before seeking asylum.

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