Safe Passage Dorset

Dorset is to take a minimum of three refugee children a year, for the next ten years – provided the Government continues to pay for the project.

Charity Safe Passage has persuaded Dorset County Council to make the promise as its meeting in July. The resolution put by deputy council chairman Cllr Val Pothecary was unanimously approved.

Her motion read: “That, provided Government fully funds the programme, Dorset Council will give the strongest possible support to Safe Passage (Dorset) by accepting a minimum of three unaccompanied and vulnerable refugee children per year, over a ten year period.”

Cllr Beryl Ezzard said there were already volunteer foster carers in the county willing to take refugee children into their home, which assured the project a good start. The county is already host to around twenty young refugees.

Organiser of the Dorset group, Bernard Sullivan, said the campaign was launched 80 years after the UK took in 10,000 refugee children under the Kindertransport scheme where families from across Europe fled the Nazis.