Home Office Awards £322,000 Contract to Develop AI Facial Age Estimation for Disputed Asylum Claims

The Home Office awarded a three-year contract worth £322,000 to Akhter Computers Ltd on Friday to develop and test AI facial age estimation technology for young asylum seekers whose age is disputed. The technology will analyse facial photographs already taken of small-boat arrivals at Dover and produce an age estimate in seconds.

Final decisions on age will continue to be made by immigration officers.

The technology will undergo further testing, evaluation and assurance before any national rollout, which the Home Office has scheduled for 2027. According to Home Office data, young asylum seekers are more than twice as likely to be recorded as children in assessments by social workers than in assessments carried out by immigration officers at the border.

More than two-thirds of young asylum seekers are assessed to be minors, and the majority of lone child asylum seekers arriving in the UK are aged 16 or 17.

Minister for border security and asylum Alex Norris said the technology is intended to identify adults making false age claims. “For too long, adult migrants making false age claims have exploited the system and diverted vital support away from children at risk,” Norris said.

” A coalition of more than 100 refugee children’s organisations, the Refugee and Migrant Children’s Consortium, released a report titled Benchmarks and Borders: the use of facial age estimation to assess the age of unaccompanied young people seeking asylum.

The report, seen by the Guardian before its June release, does not rule out the use of AI but cautions against relying on it. The report urges the Home Office to use AI only in an advisory capacity, with safeguards including access to an appropriate adult, legal advice and a right to challenge decisions.

Kamena Dorling, co-chair of the Refugee and Migrant Children’s Consortium, said the government’s proposals are deeply concerning.

“AI cannot account for the factors that can affect a young person’s appearance after fleeing conflict and persecution and undertaking dangerous journeys, including trauma, malnutrition, and exhaustion,” Dorling said. ” Kama Petruczenko, a senior policy analyst at the Refugee Council and member of the consortium, said the government’s own figures already show that hundreds of children are being wrongly treated as adults following flawed visual assessments at the border.

“AI and facial age estimation technology are not a simple or risk-free answer to these longstanding problems,” Petruczenko said.

“Poor image quality and bias in datasets can also affect accuracy. There is a real danger that this technology creates a false sense of certainty in decisions that are already extremely difficult to get right.