Commentary on provisions of the Act Section 21: Transfer of children between local authorities
This section makes consequential amendments to section 69 of the 2016 Act which facilitates the transfer of responsibility for caring for particular categories of unaccompanied migrant children which the 2016 Act defines as a relevant child from one local authority in England to another.
	Section 69(9) defines a "relevant child" for the purpose of such transfers; subsection (2) adds an unaccompanied child within the meaning of section 16 of the Illegal Migration Act 2023 to the definition of a relevant child (new section 69(9)(d) of the 2016 Act). This relates to the definition of an unaccompanied child set out at section 16(5).
	The effect of this amendment is that once the Secretary of State has transferred responsibility for the accommodation of an unaccompanied migrant child to a local authority under the provisions in section 17, that local authority may subsequently transfer responsibility for the to another local authority in the UK under the powers conferred by section 69 to 72 of the 2016 Act. This means that an unaccompanied child in scope of the duty to make arrangements for removal can be transferred from one local authority to another under the NTS.
	This section is necessary so that changes to apply inadmissibility to children in the scope of the duty to make arrangements for removal do not prevent a local authority to local authority transfer of unaccompanied children who may not be captured by the current definitions of "relevant child". Section 69(10) of the 2016 Act enables the Secretary of State to make regulations about the meaning of "unaccompanied" for the purposes of the definition of a relevant child in section 69(9); subsection (3) of section 21 of this Act amends section 69(10) of the 2016 Act so that such regulations are confined to the definitions in section 69(9)(a) to (c) – new section 69(9)(d) draws on the definition of "unaccompanied child" in section 16 of the Act.
	The intention for this section is to enable the legal framework with respect to the NTS to continue to work effectively when a child is an unaccompanied child but is not considered to be an unaccompanied asylum-seeking child once their claim is deemed to be inadmissible.