The issue of refugee children will not go away – both in reality and in terms of a decency-check on the current Government, including the Home Secretary in particular.

The Government is adamant that the decision to close the ‘Dubs’ scheme, which many believed would allow the country to accept a further 3,000 unaccompanied child refugees, was because local government did not have the capacity for more than around 400. The evidence for this is that the Home Office asked councils and this is what councils told it. Simples.

The problem with this is twofold.

First of all, why did the Home Office go to councils direct rather than through or at least alongside the Local Government Association, which is there to broker conversations between central and local government?

Worse still, some councils are now claiming that they did indeed have the capacity, as reported in the Guardian over the weekend. Even if you just tot up the handful of councils appearing in the article, there are over 200 places which could and should have been made available.

It becomes difficult to avoid the conclusion that the Government is not being straight with us. Whether this is because the Government has decided to dispense with evidence-based policy-making (we are surely not yet at the point when Theresa May accuses David Cameron of bugging 10 Downing Street?) or whether something went horribly wrong with the Government’s attempt to survey several hundred councils, we don’t yet know.

But the fact remains that we are dealing with children’s lives here and the UK has again let them down.

* Chris White is a member of the Liberal Democrat Voice Editorial Team, a Liberal Democrat Councillor from St Albans and Deputy Leader of the LGA Liberal Democrat Group.