Diolch, Llywydd. As Members will know, the legislative consent memorandum scrutiny timetable gives committees very little time to gather evidence. On 18 January, we, the Children, Young People, and Education Committee, and the Health and Social Care Committee, wrote jointly to the Minister for Social Justice and to organisations in the fields of children's health and social care, children's rights and refugees and asylum-seeker children to request their views on a range of matters relevant to the LCM. We set a response deadline of just 10 days later to enable us to consider their views during our meeting last Thursday. I'd like to place on record my thanks to the 13 organisations that responded to our consultation within such a tight time frame, and to the Minister for the valuable additional information she provided to us.

We considered the clauses of the Nationality and Borders Bill that the Welsh Government believes require the consent of the Senedd. We focused our scrutiny on the implications of those clauses for children and young people in Wales. The Health and Social Care Committee, with which we co-ordinated evidence gathering, focused on the implications for the health and social care sectors, as we've already heard from the Chair of that committee. 

Before I summarise our findings, I will highlight that not all committee members agreed with all of the committee's conclusions and recommendations. Our final report provides further details. Our first conclusions relate to whether the Senedd's consent is required. Currently, Welsh local authorities carry out age assessments of age-disputed asylum seekers presenting in Wales. They do so within the framework set out in the Welsh Government's age assessment toolkit. Amongst other things, Part 4 of this Bill gives powers to the UK Secretary of State to carry out age assessments via the proposed national age assessment board. It introduces scientific methods in age assessments and establishes a tribunal to hear appeals related to age assessments. This impacts on the devolved field of social care. We therefore agree with the Welsh Government that clauses 48 to 49 and 51 to 55 in Part 4, alongside clause 80 in Part 7, require the legislative consent of the Senedd. However, the UK Government maintains that no provisions in the Nationality and Borders Bill require the Senedd's consent. We could not reconcile this view with the impact of the provisions in the Bill. We're therefore concerned that the UK Government is acting without due regard to section 107(6) of the Government of Wales Act 2006 by legislating with regard to devolved matters without the consent of the Senedd.

Our report also sets out our views about the proposed approaches to age assessment. The 13 organisations that responded to our consultation, including the Royal College of Psychiatrists, the Royal College of Physicians, BMA Cymru and Public Health Wales, told us more or less the same thing: there is insufficient evidence that scientific age assessment techniques are accurate enough to justify the distress they can cause. We also heard from the children’s commissioner, the Ethnic Minorities and Youth Support Team, local authority representatives and others that scientific age assessments as proposed in the Bill and explanatory material are inconsistent with the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. Based on the consistency of the evidence we received, we recommend that the Senedd withholds legislative consent today.

The Nationality and Borders Bill is currently in the Report Stage in the House of Lords. There may be few further opportunities for the Welsh Government to seek any changes to the Bill to reflect the concerns of our committee and maybe the Senedd more widely. However, the Welsh Government is able to take action to try to influence any regulation that the UK Government makes using powers in this Bill.

We have recommended that the Welsh Government press the UK Government to ensure that scientific age assessment techniques are not introduced in Wales via regulations using powers set out in the Bill. As a committee, we have agreed that children's rights will be central to our work throughout the sixth Senedd. Not all the committee members were able to support all of the conclusions and recommendations in our report. However, we were able to coalesce around one important conclusion: whatever the approach taken to assess the age of asylum seekers or migrants, children's rights must be at the heart of the process. We urge both the UK Government and the Welsh Government to ensure that they are. Diolch.