Home Office Family Returns Consultation – our response published 

In March 2026, the Home Office opened a consultation on reforms to asylum support and enforced family returns. It explores, among other things, plans to remove support from people, including families with children and adult care leavers, who’ve run out of rights to appeal against negative asylum decisions. Alarmingly, it also proposes to change the government’s Use of Force policy to allow the physical handling and handcuffing of children to enforce removals.

Read our submission as relates to how these proposals would impact on care leavers who’ve arrived unaccompanied as minors to the UK.

In essence: 

• Withdrawing leaving care support from young people with unresolved status will drive some of the young people we support into homelessness and exploitation – not out of the country. 

• Removing core leaving care rights (personal advisers, pathway plans etc.) based on immigration status alone strips protections that exist because of what young people have been through, not where they’re from. 

• Abusing social workers’ relationships with care leavers to facilitate removal will destroy the trust that is, for many of these young people, the first safe adult relationship they have had in the UK. 

• Barring care leavers from university support on immigration grounds closes off a vital pathway to independence for young people, as well as their abilities to develop and contribute meaningfully to society. 

• Crucially, the government launched this consultation without the Equality Impact Assessment, Children’s Rights Impact Assessment, or cost modelling that any serious policy proposal requires. 

The government’s own evaluation of the Section 9 pilot in 2004-05, which similarly linked continuation of support to taking steps to leave, concluded that it did not increase returns and caused serious harm to families.  

These reforms will not work for their stated purpose and will only further weaken safeguarding of young people in this country, making all efforts at rehabilitation and integration more complicated. 

Pease read our full response here.