PARIS: British delegation heads to France for crisis talks over hundreds of children trying to cross Channel
British councillors are to today (Thursday) visit the notorious "Jungle" in Calais for a crisis meeting on its unaccompanied refugee children, as charities say numbers at the camp have doubled to 9,000 in recent months.
The meeting comes as a camp census by NGOs found the migrant population, who are mostly waiting for a chance to sneak into England on the back of a lorry, had jumped by 29 percent in the last month alone.
Councillors from the Local Government Association (LGA) will visit the squalid camp that lies next to the ferry port and meet with Natacha Bouchart, the mayor of Calais, in an attempt to better coordinate measures to keep unaccompanied children and young people safe.
More than 4,000 lone children are claiming asylum in Britain, with councils tasked with ensuring they are resettled and cared for.
The LGA has called on the French authorities to speed up the processing of lone child asylum seekers in the Calais camp and settle them in new homes or reunite them with their families.
The LGA's asylum, refugee and migration task group's chairman David Simmonds said: "If children do come to the UK, councils want to get it right so that children who have experienced horrendous conditions within and since fleeing their country of origin are able to settle into UK life as quickly and easily as possible."
Tim Farron. the leader of the Liberal Democrat leader, was scathing about Britain's handling of the situation, saying that only 20 of an estimated 88,000 unaccompanied child refugees in Europe have been allowed into Britain.
He added that a further 40 children who were allowed to leave the camp in Calais join their family in Britain, "all needed a legal challenge by UK citizens or charities against their own government".
"A meeting of British and French officials to sort out Calais is long overdue; they must establish a concrete plan of action rather than simply offer warm words over the next few days," he said.
According to a census conducted by L'Auberge des Migrants and Help Refugees, another charity, the camp is currently home to 865 children, with more than three quarters of them unaccompanied. The survey also said the camp's total population is now 9,106 migrants, which it said was an increase of 29 per cent in just one month, with 70 new arrivals every day.
The French government insists the numbers at the camp have dropped to 4,500 from around 6,000 earlier in the year due to its drive to relocate asylum seekers around France.
Around 1,750 residents on the site are housed in semi-permanent accommodation in containers provided by local authorities, but most live in tents or shacks. A French court last week rejected a state request to tear down more than 70 "illegal shops" inside the camp.
The court in Lille ruled that while the informal shops and restaurants were undoubtedly illegal, they served an important social purpose as "calm meeting places between migrants and volunteer workers".
In another migrant camp near the ferry port of Dunkirk, two men were taken to hospital to be treated for gunshot wounds after a fight broke out on Monday night.