Immigration officers more likely than social workers to assess UK asylum seekers as adults

The Home Office is proposing strengthening the weight given to its own in-house assessments Photograph: Guy Corbishley/Alamy

Young asylum seekers in the UK are more than twice as likely to be assessed as adults by immigration officers as by social workers, according to Home Office data.

Between July 2025 and March 2026, 4,320 initial age decisions made by immigration officials found 1,363 new arrivals (32%) to be children.