More than 50 lone child asylum seekers who disappeared soon after arriving in the UK and while in the care of the authorities are still missing, according to data obtained by the Guardian.
Many of the missing children arrived in small boats or hidden in the backs of lorries and are thought to have been taken by traffickers. Kent is often the place where they arrive.
Freedom of information data from Kent county council (KCC), which is controlled by Reform UK, has documented 345 children going missing from their area, with 56 of those still missing.
Between 2021 and 2023, when the Home Office operated two hotels for children in Kent, along with hotels in other areas, 132 children went missing from those two hotels. Of these, 108 were later found but 24 are still missing. Between 2020 and August 2025, 213 children went missing from the council’s reception centres for this group of children, with 182 found and 32 still missing.
In both cases, Albanian children were the largest group to go missing, making up half the total from the Home Office hotels, 68, and more than a quarter from the reception centres, 65. The second and third largest nationalitiesto have gone missing from both places are Afghans followed by Iranians.
Esme Madill, of the Migrant and Refugee Children’s Legal Unit at Islington Law Centre, said: “These figures are shocking. Behind each number is a frightened child who will already have experienced egregious human rights abuses before arriving in the UK seeking safety. When we represent children who have escaped after being trafficked whilst ‘missing’ in the UK, we see how their mental and physical health is permanently harmed by the abuse they experience during this time.
“For one child to go missing represents an abject failure of the state to protect the most fragile and abused in their care. These numbers are in the hundreds.”
She said more needed to be done to find the missing children. “They have not chosen to ‘go missing’. These children should be playing football in the park and preparing for their GCSEs, not servicing trafficking gangs in conditions we know include being chained to furniture, physically and sexually assaulted, and punished by being starved of food.”
In December 2023, following a long-running high court case relating to lone child asylum seekers missing from all Home Office hotels, the practice of routinely accommodating children in hotels was ruled unlawful. KCC instead agreed to increase protection for these children by expanding the use of reception centres. Since that court ruling another 44 children have gone missing from these centres, with 10 still missing and 34 found.
Patricia Durr, the chief executive of Every Child Protected Against Trafficking UK, said such data was always alarming.
“Once a child does go missing, the risk that they are being exploited increases significantly and they are certainly more vulnerable to exploitation and trafficking,” she said.
“Our research over many years shows just how [much] more at risk unaccompanied children are as they are separated from home, families, friends and communities and may have been trafficked into the UK, trafficked en route, or trafficked after arrival.”
after newsletter promotion
She called on the government and public authorities “to prioritise child safeguarding over other considerations, to afford unaccompanied children the care and protection they need and ensure that all decisions are made in children’s best interests”.
A KCC spokesperson said: “Any child or young person missing from care is a serious concern and we take every effort to protect them.
“Unaccompanied asylum seeker children are vulnerable to being trafficked and exploited due to their separation from family and circumstances of their journeys to the UK.”
The spokesperson said skilled social workers assessed the children’s risk of being exploited with safeguarding protocols used in partnership with other agencies, such as police and the Home Office.
“KCC also refers children to mechanisms and services to help manage the risk of exploitation in the UK, including the national referral mechanism and the Independent Child Trafficking Guardian Service. Even then it is challenging to prevent all children from going missing.”
A Home Office spokesperson said: “The safety and welfare of unaccompanied asylum-seeking children remains a priority, and we take children going missing extremely seriously. We continue to regularly review our systems for updates if this takes place, sharing relevant information with local police forces and local authorities investigating the matter.”
