Child migrants finally get cash to find families

Children forced from their families and sent abroad will be helped by a new fund set up to assist   them find the relatives left behind.

On February 24 2010, Prime Minister Gordon Brown finally apologised for the UK’s Child Migrant Programme.

It was responsible for sending more than 130,000 children abroad between 1920 and 1970 to countries including Australia and Canada.

Children between the ages of three and fourteen were sent away with many being made to believe their parents were dead.

The mothers and fathers were often lied to about the location to which their children had been sent.

The children were sent to foster homes and orphanages with many being physically and sexually abused.

Now a £6m Family Restoration Fund, administered by the Child Migrants’ Trust, will go some way to helping reunite former child migrants with their families.

It has been officially launched by Health Secretary Andrew Lansley who said: “For far too long, the trauma and suffering experienced by former child migrants were ignored. We know that that pain cannot be erased, but I hope that the funds now available will make a real and positive difference to their lives, and those of their relatives, in making reunions possible.”

“As a member of the Health Select Committee in 1998, when we took evidence about the dreadful impact on child migrants, I remember how strongly we felt that they should be supported and reunited with their families. It is right, if much delayed, that we are now providing this further help.”

Explaining more about how the funds will be allocated, director of the Child Migrants’ Trust Margaret Humphreys said: “In order to meet the anticipated demand for support, priority will be given to first-time family reunions and urgent cases such as end-of-life situations for the first twelve months of the fund.”

For more information about the Child Migrants Trust, visit: www.childmigrantstrust.com