Expert Comment: Are asylum-seeking children to blame for the care crisis?

A prevailing and polarising narrative blames the increased demand on the growing numbers of unaccompanied asylum seekers arriving on British shores. The figures show that there has been a near doubling of unaccompanied asylum seekers entering care in the last 6 years, from 3,500 in 2020 to 7,000 in 2025. It is also true that more males and older adolescents aged 16-18 years old are coming into the care of local authorities each year.  

However, when looking at the bigger picture, the rise in children entering care preceded the influx of unaccompanied asylum seekers by 15 years: starting in 2005. And, even in the last 6 years (since 2020) where the number of unaccompanied asylum seekers has increased, these numbers account for a relatively small proportion of children entering care in 2025 – only around 20%.  In 2024 (the highest year for unaccompanied asylum-seekers), out of males, almost 13,000 children were not of asylum-seeking status, and out of adolescents, around 2,000 were not of unaccompanied asylum-seeking status. These numbers show us that, even if we take every unaccompanied asylum seeker out, there would still be tens of thousands of children entering care each year. 

What is more, the estimated number of unaccompanied asylum-seeking children entering care is now known to be artificially inflated because they are over ten times more likely than non-unaccompanied asylum-seeking children to be transferred between local authorities and therefore double counted in the total figures. 

Geography provides another clue. If unaccompanied asylum-seeking children were to blame, then we would expect the areas caring for the largest numbers of these children to also experience the greatest increases in children entering care. But our regional analysis, which runs from 2011 to 2024, tells a different story: they do not neatly align.  

For example, Kent has been documented to shoulder most unaccompanied asylum seekers with very few being placed in the North of England. But it was Northern regions, like the North East and Yorkshire and The Humber, that showed some of the largest increases in children entering care during this period - 75% and 55%, respectively.  

The data show that the rising trend in children entering care: 1) happened fifteen years before the rise in unaccompanied asylum-seeking children entering care; 2) dwarfs the number of unaccompanied asylum seekers; and 3) is concentrated in parts of England that are not experiencing high numbers of unaccompanied asylum seekers. 

Unaccompanied asylum seekers may be part of the picture, but the figures show that they cannot fully explain why more children are entering care. They are therefore not to blame for children’s social care sector reaching ‘breaking point’. 

Poverty, not migration, is a better explanation for why some regions and local authorities in England have experienced many more new children entering care in the last 20 years.  

Overall, there was a similar increasing pattern in levels of child poverty and these types of care entries which echoed a structural North-South divide, with The North having higher child poverty and more children entering care for abuse and neglect. At the local authority level, this translated to 38% higher care entry rate per 10 percent point increase in child poverty. However, our analysis found that the relationship between child poverty and care entry reflected entrenched structural disadvantage across England rather than recent fluctuations in child poverty.  

This means that short-term changes in child poverty did not predict increases in care entry that year or the following year at the local authority level. This instead suggests that the link between child poverty and children entering care is more entrenched than previously thought, and that to break it, we need long-term structural interventions to address persistent social disadvantage. 

In parallel to increasing poverty and widening social disadvantage across England, our social care system has shifted downstream from prevention to reactive protection due to unprecedented funding cuts to early intervention services. There has been a slashing of spending, and now, for the first time in recent history, more money was spent on children entering care than on early intervention services.  

This has resulted in a social care system that is characterised by ‘too little, too late‘. More time and effort is now dedicated to investigating families in crisis, rather than supporting them before they get to that point. This can be seen in the number of emergency protection orders, which have increased almost ten-fold in the last 15 years, and by the fact that more children than ever before are now perceived by the system to be at risk of child abuse and neglect. In fact, it is this risk that accounts for the majority of cases of children entering care (around 60% of all children each year).

England's children's social care system has reached crisis point. But if we are serious about protecting the next generation of children and building a sustainable social care system, we need to stop looking for scapegoats in asylum-seeking children and start asking why so many children are only coming to the attention of services once they require state protection.  

Rather than continuing to respond to crises after they occur, we need to shift the focus back towards prevention. That means taking a longer-term view: tackling the structural disadvantage that leaves some children and communities at persistently higher risk, while ensuring child protection services have the capacity to respond to periods of economic and societal disruption.  

Until we invest in both prevention and protection, we will continue managing crises rather than preventing them. 

For more information about this story or republishing this content, please contact [email protected]