I've seen first hand how easily our asylum system can be abused – and there's no real way to stop it

Back then the trouble spots were Iraq and Somalia, and the UK would take refugees from these places if they were aged under 18. Because of this, many Iraqi and Somali men (there were typically less than 20 per cent women at the centre) would claim they were 17 when they were clearly in their mid twenties or thirties. The discrepancy was so laughable that staff would play regular games of “guess the age” with service users’ ID cards. The excuse from their lawyers was usually that they had had a tough life – or, as in one memorable case, that they were suffering from an as-yet-undiagnosed ageing illness.

On the flip side, I saw young men who wore the scars of war, some requiring dentistry after being shot through the face or counselling to cope with what they had seen. But for every truly awful tale would come a day where I stood agog as genuinely needy, frightened kids had to jostle for space with older, boorish men. These cheats would not receive huge amounts in cash, but would supplement it with black market gigs. Every day one would rock up at the office in a car, setting staff scampering off to get their number plate. All this shook my 19-year-old liberal beliefs. 

This is not simply a matter of wasting taxpayers’ cash. As I saw in Birmingham, lies about age can lead to hellish social problems. These men would be put into shared homes with genuinely young, vulnerable people, sometimes – as regular police visits to our offices testified – manipulating them into crime or stealing from them. They would be arrested and prosecuted on the assumption they were adults, only to face lesser penalties as “children”. Most worrying of all, they would even go to colleges alongside 16-year-old children.

Today I am a journalist, and I have been to the Calais “Jungle”. Most people I met were civil, kind, decent and genuine – truly ashamed to be living as they were and grateful to accept gifts of food and socks and hats. But most were also young men: in two days there the only person I met who was definitively under 16 was a 15-year-old boy taking the “night walk” to the Channel Tunnel entrance. Many, too, were economic migrants from the Horn of Africa or “safe” states in the Middle East. We should still help these people – if we can send aid to India with its space programme, we can afford it. But we should not be naive enough to let everyone in on a whim.

The problem is that there is no sure way to sort those who pass our criteria from those who are attempting to game them. The UK quite rightly accepts gay people from countries where homosexuality is punishable by death, but how, in a court of law, can you ever “prove” that someone is truly gay? Just so, you cannot prove – without dehumanising medical examinations, and perhaps not even then – that someone is 27, and not 17. Britons have birth certificates, passports, National Insurance Numbers – a raft of ID to prove who we are and where we are from. In other states births are not recorded or are easily lost. 

This leaves us with an awful dilemma. If we err on the side of caution, we will reject some genuinely deserving cases. If we err on the side of kindness, then cheaters will take advantage. We could stop drawing the line at 18,  but we would always have to draw it somewhere. Either way, we are deluding ourselves if we think that we can make clean, pain-free decisions.

I still believe in Britain taking refugees. Those who oppose it should understand how much real need and desperation is out there. But liberal campaigners such as Lily Allen must be under no illusions that their generosity has risks. We can either accept a level of deceit, or leave some of the world’s most suffering children in the cold. It is a matter of which horror we find it easier to live with.