between, into the far north—west but between, clear skies, widespread frost is likely. monday should be a dry day. shower from the cloud in the western isles and showers running into the north sea coasts. fog in wales in the morning. many places will be dry with spells of sunshine. hello, this is bbc news with ben brown. the headlines... air accident investigators are travelling to establish why he had a culture belonging to the owner of leicester but all club crashed yesterday even inc. the bbc understands the owner vichai srivaddhanaprabha was on board at the time. prosecutors in the united states have filed hate

crime charges against the suspect in the murder of ii people at a synagogue in pittsburgh on saturday. robert bowers is accused of opening fire at the tree of life synagogue during its sabbath service. glenn hoddle, the former england manager is said to be "responding well" to treatment after being taken to hospital in a serious condition on saturday. hoddle was taken ill after appearing as a pundit for bt sport earlier in the day on his gist birthday. local councils in england will get an extra £420m to tackle a growing number of potholes. the chancellor will make the announcement in monday's budget and says an end to austerity depends on what kind of brexit deal the country gets. those are the headlines. now on bbc news, inside out. aged as young as eight, they travel thousands of miles to the uk, all alone.

i thought i was going to die because i was very young, so my journey was very scary. from afghanistan to here, we had just been sold from one person to the other and we ended up in the uk. the government is meant to ensure young asylum seekers are cared for. but charities say there is a culture of disregard and disbelief pervading the home office, and it is proving deadly. in alex's case he was not believed about how old he was. he had been through a lot of very traumatic experiences and as a consequence of that he took his own life. many children have been put through very, very hostile age assessments. the extreme, tragic outcome that can come from this process is suicide. are the government's hostile immigration policies contributing to suicides among the uk's child refugees? if you leave these young people

abandoned without support then you get awful things happening. over half of the world's refugees are children, separated from their families. many flee to europe, where the majority settle in spain and italy. they also come to the uk. according to the home office, last year one in ten asylum claims were lone children, arriving without their parents or anyone to care for them. my family emigrated from eritrea to england when i was a child, so stories of young asylum seekers have a special meaning for me. recently i was desperately saddened to discover four teenage refugees had taken their own lives within months of arriving here. like my family and i, they came hoping for a safe haven, but were they welcomed?

croydon is home to around 400 unaccompanied child asylum seekers, a higher number than other boroughs. over 90% of these children are male, and a local charity has been trying to help some of them assimilate into the area, using the universal language of football. of course, the first thing that comes to mind is they don't have the language skills and they really struggle to understand. so that is the first barrier. along with that, some suffer from post—traumatic stress disorder. they can have a range of emotional difficulties. it is important they get access to the correct support. what type of difficulties have led these young people to seek refuge in the uk? well, the young people we see are fleeing war and persecution. that could be because of them belonging to a religious group, a certain ethnic group. sometimes they flee because of their family's

political activities. sometimes they might be persecuted because of their sexuality. there is a variety of reasons. nas says he was smuggled into the uk from afghanistan after his family was targeted by the taliban. he is now 22, but his journey began when he was just 13 years old. they kidnapped my dad in the middle of the night and they took him. since they took him, we have never seen him again. after that, the people, the taliban, was coming again. they used to take me to a place where they were training people to become suicide bombers. and then one day, from that place, they came to my house and they said your brother and sister have been killed. in desperation, nas says his mother secretly plotted his escape from the country. my mother was crying and she said you have to go with this man. and i said, i don't want to go.

she said, you have to go, your life is in danger. so she gave me to that man, who took me from oruzgan to kandahar, and then from kandahar to kabul, which is the capital city. i couldn't escape from them, they put me on cars, in trucks, in dangerous places. there were passing me from one to another. to different countries. one year later, aged 14 and having travelled over 4000 miles, nas was dumped in the uk. i didn't even know the name of england. i was very young. i was in the back of the lorry with two other guys. wejust started making noise and the guy called the police and the police came and they took us to a police station. nas was granted discretionary leave to remain in the uk, and placed with a foster family. he settled down and did his best in school. however, six months before his 18th

birthday he was told that he would have to leave the country. my foster family received a call from my solicitor and he said, this is two and a half year status, and the home office gave you this because you are a child under 18. i grew up here in the uk. and now, you are telling me to go back to my country? nas' story is not unusual. last year, while 56% of unaccompanied children were granted indefinite leave to stay, the fate of the remainder hangs in the balance. the young people we are talking about today, they are liable at any point, any day, to be picked up and detained and removed from the country. for some, it happens very quickly. for others, they can wait weeks, months, years, before it happens to them, living in fear every day. some of these young people could still be children when this process kicks in. and of course they are more vulnerable, because they do not have a network.

they do not have any family here. and they are now illegal in this country. in order to avoid being deported back to countries where their lives might be at risk, many resort to going off radar. scraping by on poorly paid black—marketjobs, ending up as rough sleepers. ismaf was refused asylum after fleeing from afghanistan as a child. he went underground before he could be deported when he turned 18. i stay with my friends sometimes. i can't work, i can't even rent a room. it is like, just, homeless. some take the option, rather than face the risk of being returned to eritrea or afghanistan or sudan, they will take the risk of going underground, which is horrible, terrible for them, but bad for all of us. we do not want a country where people are forced to live underground to survive. immigration has become a subject

of increasing public tension, and the focus has centred on bogus claims. politicians have responded to this with tougher policies, but campaigners say such measures have led to children in genuine need being turned away. we have raised concerns, the home affairs select committee, about what should happen for people who come here as children and then suddenly, their cases change when they reach 18 and they are not getting the kind of support they need. they shouldn't simply be returned to the country they came from and there needs to be a proper system in place. when an unaccompanied minor arrives in the uk, they must first present themselves to the government screening units for their application to be processed. but many of them struggle to convince officials they are the age they claim to be. as an asylum seeker you are given, nowadays, i think it is about £36 a week you are given to live on. liz clegg runs a national charity

based in birmingham. since opening its doors earlier this year dozens of unaccompanied children have come seeking support. we deal with a lot of people who are destitute. so they have got nothing at all. hanok appeared on the charity's doorstep hungry and dirty a few months ago. he says he is a child who fled from ethiopia after his family were caught up in a political conflict. we are still unravelling it, but it appears that when he arrived in the uk he claimed asylum as a 16—year—old. and at some point he was age assessed and deemed to be an adult. and placed in adult accommodation. and he of course had no idea what to do next. so as a result, he has literally been sleeping on the streets for nearly two months. translation: it was sad

when they did not accept my age. i have told many people but i cannot do anything other than be homeless. i have no choice other than to beg for food and drink. all the time, i used to cry. i was hungry. no shower, stressed, and worried. hanok insists he is 16, and liz believes him. i am convinced he is a child, through his behaviour and his abilities to kind of look after himself and day to day stuff. however, the local authority disagrees. they have declined to review hanok‘s case and are standing by his original assessment, concluding he is an adult. yet every day he remains on the streets sleeping rough is another day when he is vulnerable and at risk. we've been working, along with some of our partners in the city, to try to identify ways whereby we can get the case looked at and some kind of resolution.

it has been about three months now. sadly, nothing has progressed at all. hanok is still not receiving any support. either accommodation, financial support, and importantly, emotional and psychological support. from any statutory organisation. when unaccompanied minors don't have the documents to prove their age, social services usually make an assessment based on their physical appearance or demeanour, and they conduct interviews to suss them out. statistics reveal that last year, one in four of those assessed were deemed to be adults, not children. but there are claims that cash—strapped councils are making these assessments under pressure. undoubtedly the times of austerity we are going through means there is tremendous pressure on all sorts of services,

and there has been research whereby social workers have told researchers they are under extreme pressure not to accept children, to come back from a meeting and say that they are over 18, because of those huge pressures on budgets. there is a financial incentive, in a way, for the local authority to be able to say that that person is not a child. so unfortunately those decisions are quite frequent. and they are then appealed against, or sometimes even go to judicial review, a higher level, and quite often those decisions are overturned, and the local authority is forced to accept that this is a child and they have a responsibility for them. across the capital, hundreds of young asylum seekers are struggling to access the appeals process due to an extensive backlog of unresolved cases at the home office. nas has been appealing his case for the past four years and the latest stage of the process has been pushed back yet again. it is a bit like drama,

to be honest with you. when my case was refused, in april this year, the solicitor said to me, you have to bring evidence, pictures, references, character references from people, and then when he called the home office for the interview, the home office said, you know, he can come in three months. we are busy and stuff. so that is six months. that is six months already gone. i have cases in my own constituency office and i know only too well how slow and inefficient the home office can be. there is an institutional problem. the home office is so slow in dealing with people's cases. and if you are a child with no extended family it can be a really traumatic situation. i think the immigration system isn't working to take account of the kinds of traumas they face. sometimes you even have the immigration system making things worse by adding long delays.

from those who are dismissed when they claim to be children to the teenagers who face being deported at the cusp of adulthood, many working in the sector say that failures in the system are having a devastating effect, exacerbating the pain and mental health problems of children who are already profoundly traumatised. the author of a recent study into the mental health of unaccompanied minors believes the government's hostile environment campaign is having a direct negative impact on the well—being of child migrants. our research on the mental health needs of unaccompanied young people did find that the hostile environment is one of many contributing factors. the risks with regard to self harm and suicide, how big are they? there is this really high risk of self harm and suicide. and actually, we are concerned that it might be an increasing risk because the issues that are affecting these young people are remaining unresolved. if they are having to wait years

to receive a decision from the home office, or if they are not getting an education or health care or not being put into accommodation that would be appropriate to their needs, all of these things can accumulate, and unfortunately create this really high risk of self harm and suicide. over the last year, at least four teenaged asylum seekers in london, all originally from eritrea, are believed to have taken their own lives. solicitor olivia annis is representing two of the families. the first is alexander tekle. the second is osman ahmednur. both arrived in the uk from eritrea. they were children seeking refuge in the uk. very sadly, alexander died when he was only 18, and osman died when he was 19. we are aware that osman

and alexander are two of four deaths that have happened in about the last year of young people who came to the uk as asylum seeking minors. and it appears that they have all died in similar circumstances, which is obviously extremely concerning. inquests into the two deaths are ongoing. however, people who knew the boys said they were deeply stressed with the protracted process of applying for refugee status in the uk. ben met alexander tekle when he was volunteering at the calais migrant camp two years ago. that was the two of us in calais. so he would have been desperately six or seven months by the time i met him. he lived there for a whole year in the worst of circumstances for a teenager to be living and to be growing up in. and without any family, without any supervision, without any, you know, education. alex was, i don't know, you know,

so stubborn and funny and, you know, so interested in everything, in the world, and he was just so childlike, and i really miss him. i really miss him a lot. so do you know how alex came to be in london? he crossed at the end of 2016 in the back of a refrigerator lorry with a bunch of other people. it was a dangerous crossing. that is a risk he was putting himself in. when alex arrived in the uk, there was an issue with his age and the age that he gave was disputed by the authorities. so they placed him in an adult asylum seeker‘s hostel. asa minor? how old was he at this time? 17. and while he was there he was assaulted in his accommodation.

he decided to stop going back to his hostel and became homeless. eventually the home office reassessed alex and concluded he was indeed just 17. a child. but by then, benny says it was too late. in alex's case, he wasn't believed about how old he was, and i think that he had been through a lot of very traumatic experiences that he would have been thinking about. so after a few months of being in the uk, his mental health, his mental state started to deteriorate. as a consequence of that, he took his own life. the home office has to ask itself whether it — in the — putting children through immigration control is worth the risk of their well—being. they are experiencing trauma and they are experiencing stressful environments and not adequately being supported through that. the home office declined our request for an interview,

but in a statement they said... they did not comment on the recent deaths. we do need to find a balance between our immigration policies by treating these young children unfairly. when young people are driven to suicide or are otherwise made to feel desperate because of the way they are processed when they get here, that must be changed. i think it is deeply distressing that you have teenagers who may have gone through all kinds of awful experiences that end up taking their own lives. and that is deeply distressing to happen. but it shows the level of support and often mental health support as well that some of these young

people really need. and the home office needs to recognise that and not add to the stress by long delay is — in home office processes. in the year before he died, alex made friends with other asylum seekers in london. 18—year—old tess shared a room with him from time to time and says alex was happy and hopeful about his future when he first arrived. but things quickly changed. translation: he had stress. they didn't get a passport. they didn't get enough money. the experiences had been bad. i'm angry. alex died three or four months ago. he lived with me as well as osman. he died too. tess travelled to london two years ago from eritrea. he says alex took the same route as him at a later date and was haunted by the experience until his death. translation: ourjourney was very dangerous and scary because we travelled without family, no money, and with no communication or language. it was very dangerous and unthinkable. if you come to europe from my country — i went

through sudan, then libya. travelling through libya was one of the worst experience in my life, because it was very hot with no water or food. then while travelling to libya, one tuesday morning, kidnappers turned up. i think they were kidnappers. they would like to kidnap us so we needed to protect ourselves. seven months, six months, and then too many people from eritrea as well. so many from ethiopia as well. they came in one boat. our boat was very small and there were many women, men and children. when the boat started to approach, we moved with happiness. the boat tilted, so many people died in the sea. no child should have to suffer the way that these have. no child should have to see people die around them in order to get to a safe place. the psychological and emotional damage done to these young

people is extraordinary. they arrive here, they think they are safe, and will be taken care of, then someone says as they do not believe that they're a child. a campaign is now growing for britain to adopt a system similar to europe, where, upon arrival, unaccompanied minors partnered with a guardian throughout the asylum process. it's really important that the national government, local authorities, and health—ca re professionals are working together to ensure that these people are properly supported. that means that they are getting thorough assessments so their needs are properly identified, and also that they get nominated an independent guardian, someone that the government is providing, that will actually help them through these processes. and is interested in their best interests. another month has passed, and nazis still waiting to hear from the home office. he is trying to keep fit as he wants to be a firefighter, but due to his unstable immigration status, he is not allowed to work. before, i was working in the pizza

shop, i was paying taxes, i was paying for my rent, and for other things. so now i — they refuse my case, and i'm not allowed to work. naz has been given a flat to live in and some money for food. but as a care leaver, he is not given the same level of support as young british adults who have recently left care. fairly recently, they have put the age up to 25, where young people leaving care can access support packages. you know, so they can get support workers to check in with them, make sure that they are going in the right direction if they need help with further application. all sorts. children who have failed the process and reach 18 are then denied any of that support, because they become no recourse to public fund. life for hanok has change

in the past few weeks. when irial met hanok, and became alerted to his plight, she said she instinctively felt that he was a child and offered him a home. he is definitely a teenager. he has just the beginnings of some facial hair on his upper lip. he has mood swings and temper tantrums. he has that childlike thing where becoming obsessed with little things like drawing. he has been through a lot. he's been on the road and hisjourney from long time. he has clearly experienced some trauma. you can see that in the way that he relates to certain situations. meeting new people, he is often withdrawn. hanok is out of immediate danger, but this offer of a place to sleep is only temporary.

and time is running out. the home office says it never returns unaccompanied children to their country of origin, until it is safe to do so. yet unless hanok can convince them that he is a child soon, there is every chance he will be deported. i fear that the home office and everybody in positions of authority trying to deal with this case, they are postponing dealing with this case until he turns 18, which isn't that far away. i worry that he will get to that stage and they will say it over, look, even he is now saying his 18, so we can wash our hands of him. some of the children who arrive in the uk in search of a safe haven are being failed by us. instead of compassion and care, they are being met with suspicion and disdain. there will always be fraudsters that

try to con the system, but i believe we are capable of rooting them out without causing further harm to those children who are in genuine need. shallow. another cold day, sunny spells, a scattering of showers, fewer showers this afternoon, across

eastern scotland, eastern parts of england, one or two getting into the midlands as well. for wales, northern ireland, north—west england and parts of scotland, the afternoon should be dry and sunny. here towards the north—west, lighter winds, stronger winds in the south—east bringing showers, taking the edge from the temperatures. buried quickly, temperatures falling this evening under clear skies and light winds. some show responding into north sea coasts, the chance of showers coming from the north—west, clear skies, light winds, widespread frost likely, temperatures down to -3 frost likely, temperatures down to —3 or “11. tomorrow should be a dry day, showers running into the north sea coasts, morning mist and fog in wales and the west country, some patchy cloud likely, many places try with spells of sunshine. this is bbc news.

the headlines at 11. the bbc understands the thai owner of leicester city football club was on board the helicopter that crashed last night outside the club's stadium. a man suspected of killing 11 people at a synagogue in pittsburgh has been charged with murder — president trump called the attack a "wicked act of mass murder". this evil anti—semitic attack is an assault on all others. it is an assault on humanity. chancellor philip hammond — who will present his budget tomorrow — says an end to austerity depends on what kind of brexit deal the country gets. once we get a good deal

with he the european union and a smooth exit from the eu we will be able to show the.