CA-2024-001818 - [2025] EWCA Civ 1273

Anchor children

The phenomenon of anchor children is not inherently implausible. A desperate family which could not afford to pay smugglers for more than one person, or which is unwilling to risk travelling with younger or sicker members, might well regard sending one child ahead, in the expectation that in due course they would be able to follow, as the least bad option, particularly if they had a poor understanding of the risks of the journey. (I would also add that a family might start the journey together but decide when they reach the English Channel to send a child ahead alone. (Footnote: ²⁰)) It is another matter how common such cases might be. What drives particular patterns of migration is of course not possible to judge definitively, but specialist immigration staff at the Home Office should have the experience to make a reasonable judgment.

So on the face of it the Secretary of State’s assessment that the anchor child phenomenon is real and significant is at least rational. I turn to consider the contrary evidence relied on by the Claimant, which is essentially the same as (some of) the evidence summarised in the justification schedule.

First, at para. 59 of the Summary of its 2016 report the HL EU Committee recorded its view that:

“We found no evidence to support the Government’s argument that the prospect of family reunification could encourage families to send children into Europe unaccompanied in order to act as an ‘anchor’ for other family members.”

The basis for that conclusion appears in paras. 56-61 of the report itself. The Home Office in its response made clear that it did not accept it. The relevant part begins:

“The Government believes that the reunion measures suggested in the recommendation will lead to more children setting out on unaccompanied journeys that will put their lives at risk. The Home Affairs Select Committee (HASC) acknowledged this in their recent report on the migration crisis published in August.”

(We were not shown the HASC report there referred to.) The response goes on to develop the point. If I were to undertake a detailed assessment of the cogency of the Committee’s reasons and the Home Office’s response, that would be liable to infringe article 9 of the Bill of Rights. It is sufficient to say that on no view was the Committee’s conclusion such that it could not rationally be disputed.

Second, the 2019 UNHCR report Destination Anywhere records research into three “common assumptions” about unaccompanied child asylum-seekers in the UK, including that “children arriving on their own are being sent by their parents or other adult family members in the hope that those family members can join them later”. The research took the form of interviews with 23 asylum-seekers who had arrived in the UK as unaccompanied children and with an unspecified number of frontline stakeholders. The results are said to “suggest a complex picture which casts doubt on the accuracy of these assumptions”. It is certainly true that the extracts from the interviews with the children show that they had varying degrees of knowledge about the UK as a destination and a variety of different reasons for choosing it (which may have been a late stage of their journey); but that is unsurprising and does not in itself exclude the possibility that they were sent ahead by their families with the intention of seeking family reunion when and if granted asylum in the UK. On that specific question, the report says that more than half “left in circumstances which strongly suggest that they were not sent ahead to the UK by their parents”. The circumstances are not identified, though it appears that the most significant is that a third left with their parents and only became separated from them later in the journey. I do not wish in any way to impugn the good faith of this carefully-expressed report, but such doubt as it might cast on the extent of the anchor child phenomenon is not even arguably of a degree that the only rational course for the Secretary of State was to change her previous belief in its reality: it is not of course necessary to her case that all or even most unaccompanied children are sent ahead in this way.

Third, section 4 of the Without My Family report (see para. 54 above) contends that research on the reason why unaccompanied children seek asylum in the UK “paints a more complex picture of decision taking”. However, as I have said above, that is not inconsistent with the belief that a substantial number of children are in fact sent ahead by their families in the hope of taking advantage of family reunion at a later date.

It is worth recalling that the Secretary of State was not alone in taking the view that the anchor child phenomenon was real: see the EMN query from the Belgian government and the responses to it. Mr Husain pointed out that the majority of the respondents to that query said that they did not recognise such a phenomenon; but where the question is whether the Secretary of State’s view was reasonably open to her it is sufficient that several did.