There was a public outcry after photographs of the child refugees arriving in Britain suggested that a number of them were significantly older than their given ages of 14-17 years old.
Tory MP David Davies urged the Government to bring in dental checks to verify the ages of the migrants, saying the escalating scandal was seriously damaging public confidence in the asylum system.
Critics have also pointed out that there are serious child safety issues raised by the possibility of grown men being classified as minors, because they will be placed in schools alongside vulnerable youngsters.
But ministers stood firm, insisting that such tests were too "intrusive", meaning that instead each refugee will undergo a simple interview with a council official, who assesses their appearance and demeanour to confirm their age.
The soft touch response of the UK Government has been ruthlessly exposed by Denmark's hard-nosed approach, with the country more than doubling the number of migrants subjected to age tests over the last year.
Integration Minister Inger Støjberg said the large number of cheats being caught showed voters could have confidence that politicians would take action to ensure Danish hospitality was not being abused.
She told Jyllands-Posten: “The Danish Immigration Service makes a major effort to expose those who are cheating and is also working on how it can happen even faster."
Danish ministers are accelerating referrals and experts at the University of Copenhagen's Department of Forensic Medicine, which carries out the scientific checks, expect to have performed around 1,000 dental tests by the end of this year.
Some child refugee charities have claimed that the tests are not accurate enough and that most migrants coming from war-torn countries do not know their true ages, leading them to apply for asylum as children.
But Teresa McNair, from the Danish Immigration Service, said safeguards were built in to the process to ensure that borderline cases were always given the benefit of the doubt, and added that paperwork migrants carried with them was also taken into account.
She said the agency always “accepts a difference of one year between the youngest age within the likely age span and the age that the applicant reports”.
In a statement she added: “If the result’s most likely span is 18-19, for example, and the applicant as report 17 years, then we set the age at 17 years."
There are a number of advantages to being granted asylum as a minor rather than an adult in Denmark, including the ability to bring over close relatives such as parents to live with you.
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