CHILDREN’S charities accused the government yesterday of turning its back on lone child refugees after it refused to say how many would be admitted to Britain under new proposals.

Immigration Minister James Brokenshire said that Britain would provide resources to identify children in Greece and Italy who have family members in this country.

A £10 million fund will also be established to support young refugees in Europe.

However, he refused to state how many such children would be allowed into Britain, leading to concerns that the number would fall far short of humanitarians’ demands that 3,000 of those already in Europe be admitted.

“We want the government proactively to seek out refugee children in Europe with family connections in the UK and speed up the process of reunification,” said Save the Children.

The charity originally proposed the 3,000 target — which it said would represent a “fair share” of the estimated 26,000 children who arrived in Europe in 2015 without any family.

But Mr Brokenshire said the government would maintain its policy of mainly taking refugees directly from conflict zones in order to avoid creating what it claims would be a “magnet” for more to make the perilous journey to Europe.

“The crisis in Syria and events in the Middle East, north Africa and beyond has separated a large number of refugee children from their families,” he said in a statement.

“The vast majority are better off staying in the region so they can be reunited with surviving family members, so we have asked the UN High Commissioner for Refugees to identify the exceptional cases where a child’s best interests are served by resettlement to the UK and help us to bring them here.”

Save the Children campaigns director Kirsty McNeill said there was currently “confusion” around exactly what the government was proposing.

“What is new is there does seem to be action in Italy and Greece to help the authorities identify more children who are already in Europe and get them to safety here in the UK,” she told the BBC.

However, it appeared they would only be eligible if they had a “family connection,” she said.

More needed to be done to help child refugees in Europe, saying that thousands “simply disappeared” from the Italian system last year “into the hands of traffickers, or … the sex trade or the drugs trade,” she warned.

Labour refugee task force chairwoman Yvette Cooper said that Britain “cannot turn our backs on children who are already in Europe and desperate families who have already come to Europe because they are fleeing persecution.”