A Child is a Child: The Human Rights of All Children in the Social Care System

The Joint Committee on Human Rights has published a landmark report on the human rights of children in England’s social care system, and its findings are a damning indictment of a system that has failed too many children for too long.

At Baobab, we welcome this report, and what it documents demands urgent attention.

The failures it describes extend beyond policy shortcomings; they are violations of children’s most fundamental rights: the right to family life, repeatedly undermined when children are placed far from their siblings and support networks; the right to liberty, eroded when children are restricted from leaving placements without proper legal process or oversight; and the right to safety, disregarded when children are housed in unregistered accommodation with adults who pose a risk to them. These failures affect every child in the care of the state, regardless of where they were born or what passport they hold.

Our sector has spent years advocating for unaccompanied asylum-seeking children, young people who arrived here having fled war, persecution, and exploitation, and who have consistently been met with suspicion rather than the protection they are owed. We have had to argue, and argue again, that a child is a child before they are an asylum seeker. But the Committee’s report makes something vital and uncomfortably clear: the failures of the social care system are not limited to children who seek asylum. Around 400,000 children are in the social care system in England at any one time, and for too many of them, their fundamental rights are simply not being upheld.

The Children Act 1989 and the Human Rights Act 1998 already require that local authorities treat any child who presents as without family support as a child in need of protection. The Court of Appeal has affirmed that this duty extends to unaccompanied asylum-seeking children.

And yet the report documents, in detail, the scale of the gap between law and lived reality. Children are being placed in unregistered accommodation. They are sleeping in settings where drugs circulate unchecked, where they are housed with adults significantly older than them, and where they do not feel safe. Siblings are separated and placed far apart. Care leavers are pushed off a “care cliff” at 18, losing the support and stability they rely on at the moment they need it most.

At the same time, the Government is actively proposing to reduce protections for children. In its Family Returns consultation, the Home Office has asked for views on expanding the use of physical force in enforced removals, including handcuffing and physically carrying children, and including in circumstances where a parent refuses to release a child’s hand. This is being proposed, openly, in 2026. As we have long argued, the Home Office is a security and immigration enforcement agency, not a child-centred safeguarding body. As an institution it has never been designed to put children’s well-being first, however well-intentioned its personnel might be as individuals.

When protections for some children are reduced, they are reduced for all children, regardless of citizenship status. When the state fails to treat some children as human beings to be safeguarded and nurtured, then all children are at risk.

There are several recommendations in the report that we at Baobab fully support.

1. The incorporation of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) into domestic law in England is, without question, the most significant. Scotland became the first UK nation to incorporate the UNCRC into law in July 2024, under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (Incorporation) (Scotland) Act 2024). Wales has similarly built obligations to children’s rights into its legal framework through the Rights of Children and Young Persons (Wales) Measure 2011. England alone has not followed. Without incorporation, children in England cannot enforce their rights in domestic courts, and public authorities face no binding legal obligation to treat children’s best interests as a primary consideration in all decisions that affect them.

2. The report also calls for universal standards of care across all settings, including the supported accommodation that many of Baobab’s young people move into as they approach adulthood. These settings carry the label “looked after” without providing the reality of care. Young people often receive little day-to-day support, and the report documents on-going concerns about illegal providers and accommodation where young people do not feel safe. We know this directly from the young people we work with. The Committee makes clear that these conditions are not unique to asylum-seeking young people. They are the conditions that too many children in care across England face.

3. We support the call to end the abrupt care cliff at 18 in full. For young people navigating unresolved trauma and, in many cases, complex and ongoing immigration proceedings, the transition to adulthood demands sustained and holistic support, not a sudden withdrawal of services based on age alone. For asylum-seeking care leavers, the care cliff compounds an already destabilising transition including when their legal status changes and they receive a protection decision, all their existing support is thrown into doubt once again, and whatever fragile stability they had begun to build is disrupted.

4. Finally, the report notes that 40 unaccompanied asylum-seeking young people remain missing since 2023, with two still minors as of today. In a system that has so consistently failed to treat these young people as children first, this is one of the most appalling outcomes. Their disappearance is the result of years of policy decisions that have treated the immigration status of a child as more important than their safety.

The Joint Committee on Human Rights has been clear, and so are we. Every child in the social care system in England, regardless of where they were born, deserves a system built on the recognition of their rights. We call on the Government to act on these recommendations in full, to incorporate the UNCRC into English law, and to approach every child in its care with the same standard of protection, dignity, and humanity.