TWO HUNDRED child asylum-seekers have gone missing from hotels in which they were placed by the Home Office, a minister admitted today.

Charities said the department had repeatedly ignored warnings against placing unaccompanied child asylum-seekers in hotels following reports that dozens have been kidnapped by gangs. 

After the ministry initially dismissed claims from a whistleblower that children were being abducted from hotels as “not true,” Home Office minister Simon Murray admitted the figure, including at least one girl and at least 13 children under 16, in the House of Lords. Most of the missing children were Albanian, he added.

A whistleblower from Home Office contractor Mitie said that traffickers were abducting children outside hotels and bundling them into cars. 

At one hotel in Brighton, 136 children have been reported missing in the past 18 months, with 76 still unaccounted for, according to a report in Sunday’s Observer. 

The whistleblower also told the newspaper that children had been taken from a similar hotel in Hythe, Kent, estimating that around 10 per cent of its youngsters disappear each week. 

Former children’s commissioner for England Anne Longfield said yesterday that the disappearances of child asylum-seekers were a “national emergency.”

She told Sky News that councils had been warning the government for months that the hotels were “not safe places”.

The Children’s Society policy and practice adviser Marieke Widmann said: “We warned the Home Office at the very start that placing unaccompanied children alone in hotels would put them at extreme risk of trafficking and exploitation. 

“These children are meant to be in local authority care. It’s completely outrageous that children are disappearing. 

“Hotels filled with lone children recently arrived in this country are obviously a prime target for criminals who want to exploit vulnerable children sexually, criminally and for labour.  

“The Home Office needs to stop putting unaccompanied children in hotels at once.”
  
It admitted in October that 222 children staying in hotels funded by the department had disappeared.

The Home Office began placing children in hotels along the south coast from July 2021 as an emergency response to pressures on the asylum system. 

Inspectors accused the department last October of effectively running “unregistered children’s homes,” with children as young as 10 placed in hotels. 

Kent Refugee Action Network, which works with asylum-seekers in the south of England, said in a statement that such hotels were unsuitable places, with limited access to case work support, activities and education, and that it was “appalled” by the reports of kidnappings. 

The Home Office had claimed that it was “not true” that asylum-seekers are being abducted from hotels.