56 children vanished after arriving alone in Kent
Plus assessing Reform's running of Kent, a Dartford defection, new truck stop proposed, and more
Good morning and welcome to your Monday Kent Current briefing. We hope you managed a quiet weekend and avoided both the rain and any unexpected fireworks displays from overly enthusiastic neighbours. It’s that time of year when Kent feels permanently damp and everyone is quietly rethinking their relationship with daylight.
We start with something serious. New figures show 56 unaccompanied asylum-seeking children who arrived in Kent are still missing, part of a wider pattern of vulnerable young people disappearing after entering the UK’s care system. Kent warned for years that it couldn’t shoulder this alone. Now we are left counting children who came here for safety and somehow slipped through the gaps.
Elsewhere, we’ve got the return of unitary manoeuvres at County Hall, cabinet meetings across what feels like half the county, a defection in Dartford, new housing and planning battles, pods for homeless residents in Gravesend, and a surprisingly lively campaign over a bong shop in Margate. Plus, Jordan Ibe is now at Sittingbourne, because apparently, football careers are as unpredictable as Kent politics.
Let’s get into it.
Catch up
If you missed any of our reporting over the past week, here’s your chance to catch up:
Over the weekend, we sat down with the Green Party leader of Maidstone Borough Council, Stuart Jeffery. He talks about his rise from being the only Green on the council to leading it within a short period of time, recent struggles over developments, and his conflicts with the leader of Kent County Council.
Last week, we looked at the introduction of competition to the cross-Channel rail line, with Virgin clearing the first hurdle to run between London and the continent. While Kent voices span this as some kind of victory, we ask how much it really means for the county, given that the operator was one of the few not to commit to returning services to Ashford and Ebbsfleet.
56 children vanished after arriving alone in Kent
Another week, another uncomfortable statistic out of Kent’s front-door asylum system. Figures released by Kent County Council show 345 unaccompanied asylum-seeking children have disappeared after arriving here since 2020. 56 remain missing. Children who crossed borders and seas alone somehow managed to vanish inside the UK’s care network.
The uncomfortable numbers: Of those 345 children, 213 disappeared from Kent County Council reception centres. 32 are still missing. Another 132 vanished from two Home Office-run hotels used between 2021 and 2023. 24 of them have not been found. The largest group were Albanian minors, followed by Afghan and Iranian children.
To be clear, this is Kent’s record, not a national figure. If that doesn’t land heavily, read it again.
Kent’s line: The council says it takes every disappearance seriously. A spokesperson said: “Any child or young person missing from care is a serious concern and we take every effort to protect them.”
They also spelt out the obvious risk: “Unaccompanied asylum seeker children are vulnerable to being trafficked and exploited due to their separation from family and circumstances of their journeys to the UK.”
Social workers assess each child’s risk, the council says, and cases are escalated into formal child-protection systems, including the National Referral Mechanism and the Independent Child Trafficking Guardian Service. Agencies, including Kent Police and the Home Office, are involved. Yet as the council admits, “even then it is challenging to prevent all children from going missing.”
It’s hard not to read that as a quiet admission of the scale of the problem.
The frontline strain: Kent has said for years that it cannot cope alone. Geography turned the county into the UK’s de facto reception service for unaccompanied children, and capacity has repeatedly buckled. Most of the country sees this story through headlines. Kent sees it in real time, on the ground, and often without the backup it asked for.
The hotel years: Between 2021 and 2023, the Home Office pushed children into hotel accommodation in Kent rather than directly into council care. A High Court ruling later found the routine use of hotels for lone children to be unlawful.
The numbers that emerged from that period are not subtle. 132 children went missing from two Kent hotels. 24 remain missing.
Hotels are good for seaside minibreaks. They are not good at protecting deeply vulnerable children from trafficking networks.
Whitehall’s view: A Home Office spokesperson said the department takes these disappearances seriously, adding: “The safety and welfare of unaccompanied asylum-seeking children remains a priority.” They say systems are reviewed and information is shared with local authorities and police when children disappear.
It is a familiar tone from government departments under strain: concern, commitment, and a lingering question of why the figures look like this if the systems are working.
A hostile backdrop: To add another layer, this hasn’t happened in a neutral public climate. Far-right activists are intimidating refugee children outside reception centres for child refugees in Kent. Vulnerable minors, already isolated, are placed in settings where they are met outside by hostile crowds. Even for a county used to headline-fatigue on asylum, that’s bleak.
Where accountability sits: Kent spent years warning Westminster that the county could not cope with the volume of unaccompanied children arriving at its borders, yet the burden remained firmly on its shoulders. National policy continued largely unchanged, the Home Office pressed ahead with hotel placements that courts later ruled unlawful, and all the while, children continued to go missing. We are now in the bleak position of still counting vanished minors in Britain, as though their disappearance were an unfortunate administrative inevitability rather than a profound moral and institutional failure.
Kent’s local system strained and ultimately cracked under pressure, but it did not break in isolation. It happened because the national system allowed it to. The consequence has been felt by the most vulnerable people in this process: children who crossed the Channel seeking safety, only to slip through gaps that should never have existed, and disappear long before they had any real chance of finding stability or support in the UK.
What happens now: Pressure will fall on Westminster to strengthen the national transfer scheme and fund safe placements across the UK, so Kent is no longer expected to shoulder this burden alone. At the same time, Kent County Council will face scrutiny over how it monitors children in care and communicates progress in locating those who are missing.
The public deserves clear updates on the search for the 56 children who have disappeared. These young people deserve more than expressions of concern and procedural language about capacity. They deserve to be found.
Bottom line: This cannot become another Kent story that fades into background noise, dismissed as a structural problem that everyone is too tired to fix. A child who arrives here alone should be safe. Instead, 56 are missing somewhere in Britain. That is not a situation to manage. It is a failure to correct.
Three big reads
1️⃣ Does Reform’s rocky running of Kent give us a clue as to what happens when a populist party gets into power? A little known journalist called… checks notes… Ed Jennings tackles the subject for the New World magazine.
2️⃣ The Telegraph have also looked at the situation in Kent, concluding that the county demonstrates that the party is far from ready to exercise power.
3️⃣ Local Democracy Reporter Simon Finlay has profiled KCC leader Linden Kemkaran in a piece that offers some fascinating new insights into her background and character.
Council matters
Meetings this week:
Kent County Council: Devolution and Local Governance Re-organisation Cabinet Committee will meet on Monday to discuss the council’s business case for a single unitary authority covering Kent. This is destined to go nowhere and has been described by the council leader as trying to put a spoke in the works of the process.
Canterbury: Cabinet meets tonight (Monday) to discuss increasing car parking charges and the draft capital and revenue budgets for the coming year.
Dover: Also tonight (Monday), Cabinet meets to debate the Infrastructure Funding Statement, a walking and cycling plan, and the council’s parking strategy.
Gravesham: It’s definitely the day for Cabinet meetings today (Monday), where Gravesham’s will get together to work through a packed agenda, including housing, budget monitoring, and town centre improvements.
Swale: Planning and Transportation Policy Working Group will hold an extraordinary meeting on Tuesday to discuss the consultation launch for the council’s new Local Plan.
Kent County Council: Full County Council meets on Thursday in what promises to be a lively meeting following recent developments at County Hall. Debate will include the council’s questionable strategic statement, the LGR business case, and motions on social care and treasury management.
Swale: Planning Committee will gather on Thursday to decide on an application for 160 new homes near Borden, which officers have recommended for approval.
In brief
➡️ A Dartford Reform councillor has defected to the Conservatives, despite only winning his seat in a by-election in July. Cllr James Buchan said he had become “uncomfortable” with his party. The local Reform branch accused him of “opportunism and lack of commitment.”
🔵 Maidstone and the Weald MP Helen Grant has written for KentOnline about how the UK should withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights.
🚛 Plans for a new lorry park have been unveiled to serve traffic passing through the Port of Dover. The new 70-acre site would be located west of Dover on the A20, operated by the same group that runs the Ashford International Truckstop.
🏗️ Eight modular pods for homeless people are set to be built in Gravesend in the new year.
📄 Ashford Borough Council are to relax planning restrictions on the Elwick Place development in an effort to fill long-empty units.
👷 Work to refurbish Margate Winter Gardens is set to get underway next year as part of an £8m project.
📚 Creative Folkestone has proposed a plan to bring the Folkestone Library back into use.
😮💨 Hundreds have signed a petition asking Thanet District Council to reconsider its closure order on Margate’s Bong Shop.
⚽ Former Liverpool footballer Jordan Ibe has joined Sittingbourne in the Isthmian League South East Division on a free transfer to ‘rediscover the joy of football.’
🍲 Food critic Grace Dent visited Franc in Canterbury and gave a rave review.
Footnotes
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