UK Home Office dangles £1.3M prize for algorithm that guesses your age

Contract tender follows 'alarming' safeguarding failure at border with undocumented kids

The UK's Home Office is offering £1.3 million ($1.7 million) to developers of age-determining software - a tech it wants to deploy widely across its systems.

A contract tender posted days ago states the government is looking for an "algorithm that can accurately predict the age of a subject."

"Home Office are seeking to procure an algorithm that can accurately predict the age of a subject," the contract's description reads. "This will have multiple use cases for Home Office, an example could/would be to assist in determining the age of those who are encountered without verifiable identity documentation."

While the tender does not cite any specific examples, the Refugee Council has previously highlighted the dangers of inaccurately assessing the age of asylum seekers, refugees, and migrant children.

The charity rebuked the Home Office in a report [PDF] earlier this year for wrongly classifying hundreds of children as adults at the UK border in just the six months leading up to the 2024 general election, which resulted in "a safeguarding failure on an alarming scale."

If children are wrongly judged to be adults, it can lead them to be placed in unsupervised adult accommodation or detention centers, potentially exposing them to abuse.

The Refugee Council more broadly scrutinized the Home Office's approach to assessing children's ages, saying its proposals to use scientific measures to more accurately determine undocumented children's ages would be "ineffective, expensive, and harmful."

It claimed these new methods would also fail to meet the core problem at hand – flawed at-port assessments.

Furthermore, it claimed the National Age Assessment Board (NAAB), a decision-making function run by the Home Office ostensibly to assist local authorities in determining children's ages, also has a "profound negative impact" on the mental health of those being assessed, wastes time, and costs an unnecessary £1.7 million ($2.3 million) per year.

The Refugee Council's report was echoed by the Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration, David Bolt, in a report [PDF] published in July.

In it, Bolt noted that the current methods of determining children's ages at the UK border "cannot be relied upon."

Bolt's report was published the same day that the Labour government announced a trial of AI technology to increase reliable border age assessments.

Angela Eagle, immigration minister at the time of the announcement, said the government was trialing AI tech, trained on millions of images where an individual's age is verifiable, that produces an age estimate to within "a known degree of accuracy," without specifying exactly how accurate that was.

The primary use of the Home Office's new algorithm will be for immigration purposes, but the winning submission will be one that can be baked into the Home Office's hardware and systems already in place, it said.

It listed age determination as the only use case, but the Home Office oversees matters such as crime, policing, drugs policy, and counter-terrorism, as well as immigration.

The Register asked the Home Office to expand on its ambitions for the technology, but it did not respond.

According to the tender, work shall begin on the algorithm on January 19, 2026, with completion expected on the same day, three years later. ®