The Home Office says it will continue to work with Kent County Council to ease the burden on social services caused by the number of asylum seeker children - despite a legal stand-off between the pair.

It says the government has made vital changes to its current policy on the dispersal of often highly-vulnerable young children.

It also says it has offered "substantial support" to the county council to help with the growing number of children arriving on its shores.

Kent County Council (KCC) has threatened to take the Home Office to court on the grounds it has failed to use its powers to introduce a compulsory dispersal scheme.

The Home Office was provided with a deadline yesterday to respond to a threat by KCC to sue it over the issue.

Social services chiefs say the council’s ability to look after the rising numbers of young children is being stretched to breaking point by the crisis.

But in a lengthy statement, the Home Office said it could not comment on the legal case but underlined in strong terms that it was already introducing steps to ease the impact on Kent.

The statement said: “The Home Office is grateful for the role Kent County Council has played in supporting unaccompanied asylum-seeking children and we have provided them with substantial operational support, including transferring those in need of support to other local authorities in the UK.

“We recently announced vital updates to the National Transfer Scheme to alleviate pressures on certain areas and continue to work closely across Government on provision for unaccompanied minors.”

Responsibility for unaccompanied asylum-seeking children will be more evenly distributed across the UK as part of new and vital updates to the National Transfer Scheme.

The new scheme, according to officials “has been intentionally designed to address key barriers to local authority participation and therefore we hope more will step forward to play their part".

Officials would continue to work with KCC to reduce the number of child asylum seekers in their care as well as seeking to transfer new arrivals directly to other local authorities.

They say 200 children were transferred between June and December last year.

The statement added while there were statutory powers to mandate local authorities to accept a transferred child “we have demonstrated that this can be achieved on a voluntary basis and successfully transferred more than 250 children directly from Kent since the beginning of 2020 up to 31 March 2021.”

A Kent County Council spokesperson said: “KCC has received a response from the Secretary of State to the Letter Before Action regarding potential legal action to mandate the National Transfer Scheme. The response is now under consideration and any further action will be announced in due course.”

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