CAMPAIGNERS gathered yesterday to welcome the paltry number of child refugees granted leave to travel to Britain from the Calais Jungle.

The welcome party came amid Tory bluster about the refugees lying about their age.

A bus with 21 refugees on board was due to arrive at the Home Office building in Croydon, south London, yesterday, with crowds of supporters brandishing balloons and banners waiting to greet them.

The crowds at the Citizens UK event chanted: “Calais kids are welcome here.”

West Croydon Baptist Church pastor Reuben Martin urged the government and Home Office to take a greater number of children from the soon-to-be-demolished camp, where more than 1,000 children are thought to be living.

His views were echoed by Doctors of the World’s executive director Leigh Daynes.

He said: “It’s right that the UK meets its obligation to take in unaccompanied children with family in Britain, but they need to come quicker to ensure they don’t end up going missing in France and risk further exploitation and abuse.”

The support for Calais refugees came as Tory rightwinger Philip Davies raised an urgent question in the Commons yesterday that a previous tranche of children didn’t “look like children” and called for dental checks to be imposed to reassure the public.

The member for Shipley told MPs that people only have to look at photographs of “so-called child refugees” arriving in Britain “to see that many of them are not children.”

But Immigration Minister Robert Goodwill insisted the government does carry out age assessments where they are deemed to be necessary and effectively ruled out the use of dental checks.

Shadow home office minister Lyn Brown described the suggestion of using dental checks as an “unworkable red herring.”

Joanna Cherry, the SNP’s home affairs spokeswoman in Westminster, said the urgent question and the coverage of the issue in some parts of the media was “symptomatic of the xenophobia that has arisen in this country” since the EU referendum.

She said: “To impose invasive treatment now when we are finally helping them would be a dereliction of the UK government’s moral duty towards them.”