Of the 590 asylum applicants who had their age disputed, 574 had an age assessment.
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A Conservative MP’s calls for dental age checks to be conducted on child refugees arriving in Britain ignore the fact the tests can be wildly inaccurate.
Labour council cabinet member Waseem Zaffar said: “We are on standby to support the Home Office in bringing children under the Dublin III regulation, which relates to children who already have family links in the UK”.
The answer of the British Dental Association (BDA) followed immediately, the doctors said such checks would be unethical.
“Such is the seriousness of Mr Davies’s unethical and divisive remarks that we are asking his party chairman to consider disciplinary action”.
French authorities are expected to clear out the 6,000 to 8,000 migrants from the camp in the coming days.
A Home Office spokesman said the screening process verifies a person’s age based on their “physical appearance” and “demeanor”.
“We’re not actually going to be able to help the people who need our help, what we’re just going to end up doing is exhausting the well of hospitality that exists in Britain”, he told Radio 4’s Today programme.
The British Dental Association (BDA), which represents dentists and dental students in the United Kingdom, disputed claims that dental radiographs could accurately determine whether someone was under 18 or not.
The first batch of youngsters to cross the Channel from the controversial camp have started to arrive in the United Kingdom, as part of a fast-track scheme to provide a safe haven for children before it is pulled down.
Ben Bano, from Seeking Sanctuary, told Premier’s News Hour: “We think this is unethical, unnecessary and un-Christian”.
Brian Larkin, co-ordinator of the Edinburgh Peace and Justice Centre, said: “Although a handful of children who have a legal right to asylum in the United Kingdom are at last being brought to the UK and reunited with their families this week, hundreds of others are being left behind”.
Mr Straw insisted he would not have ruled out the move when he ran the Home Office as he insisted that the asylum effort would be undermined if it turned out people had been lying about their age in order to gain entry to Britain.
It states that Britain will take in “vulnerable unaccompanied child refugees” who arrived in the European Union before March 20, even if they do not have relatives in Britain.
Ruth Allen, chief executive of the British Association of Social Workers, said Mr Davies’ campaign missed the “real issue” – that hundreds of children who’d been through “trauma, torture and abuse” were in desperate need.
She said: “It is important that all necessary checks are robustly carried out, but done in a way that reflects the age and vulnerability of these children”. “They could disappear and be put in a very vulnerable situation trying to survive outside the community”.
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He wrote: “Didn’t see any children in the camp, just (thousands of) young men and activists offering advice what to say to get into United Kingdom”. “David Davies should hang his head in shame”.
