The Home Office has been banned from accommodating lone asylum seeker children in hotels apart from for very short periods “in true emergency situations” after a long-running high court case. The home secretary’s practice of routinely and systematically accommodating these children in hotels has been ruled unlawful in an order finalised on Thursday. The order states that since December 2021 this practice has “exceeded the proper limits of his powers”. Some of the children placed in hotels have been as young as 12 and many had recently arrived in the UK after traumatic journeys across the Channel in small boats. News that children were being placed in hotels where some subsequently went missing, many within 72 hours of arriving in the UK, with some falling into the hands of traffickers, was revealed in the Observer in January this year. Since June 2021, 440 children have gone missing from asylum hotels. Officials told a recent session of parliament’s cross-party home affairs committee that 132 of the children who went missing had not been found – 103 of them have now turned 18. Kent county council, which receives a disproportionate number of these children due to its geographical location, was found to have failed to discharge some of its duties towards some of them under the Children Act. But Thursday’s court order held the home secretary partly responsible for this failure as they had not devised a plan to use a mechanism known as the national transfer scheme – which is supposed to share responsibility for this group of children fairly between different local authorities – more efficiently to eliminate the use of hotels. The case has been a complex one involving the charity Every Child Protected Against Trafficking (Ecpat), three local authorities and two government departments – the Home Office and the Department for Education. Ten barristers represented the various parties in a series of hearings. The situation of accommodating children in hotels has improved, partly as a result of the high court action and partly because of the recent reduction in small boat crossings. The Home Office has not accommodated any children in hotels since 18 November and has stopped using six of the seven hotels it was previously using to accommodate this group of children. There is still one hotel open in Kent but the Home Office says it plans to close that by 31 January 2024. According to the order, hotels must not be used by the home secretary to accommodate these children apart from for very short periods in “true emergency situations”, and must not be used as a substitute for local authority care. Patricia Durr, the chief executive of Ecpat, welcomed the high court order. “We are pleased that our legal challenge has resulted in no children in hotels and the closure of all but one. Thousands of children have been denied care on the basis of their immigration status and too many remain missing at risk of significant harm as a result,” she said. Roger Gough, the leader of Kent county council, said: “The court has now instructed the Home Office to urgently review the national transfer scheme and submit an appropriate, effective plan to facilitate timely transfers of these children out of Kent and equitably into the care of other UK local authorities.” A Home Office spokesperson said: “The safety and welfare of unaccompanied asylum-seeking children is our utmost priority and providing care placements for them is a national issue that requires participation from local authorities across the UK. “We are carefully considering the judgment and will continue to work with local authorities across the UK to support them to fulfil their statutory duties to accommodate unaccompanied children nationwide.”