UK Borders Bill

I am intrigued to know what line the Conservative Party is taking on this important amendment which has come from the Joint Committee on Human Rights. I shall look at it item by item. I suggest that subsection (5) is of crucial importance, come what may. I have reasons for saying that, the principal one being that the process of dealing with a probably trafficked person will be vitiated. The person will be sent perhaps to their country of origin, or perhaps somewhere else, and will be wide open to being retrafficked. They will be put into an extremely vulnerable situation. I hope that the Government will take that point very seriously. Subsection (6) brings us to the much-debated pause of time for reflection and recovery. Various Ministers over the years have said that if we legislated for such a pause, it would be a major incentive to traffickers to bring in more people. That is simply an assertion; no evidence has ever been given to support that argument. Even if the Government will not accept provision for such a pause in the Bill, will they undertake to do it in practice informally, without statutory backing? Will they please consider the best practice in Europe, where several countries already allow such a pause? Will they bring our performance up to the level of the best European Union practice? I am glad to say that I have received a letter today from Mr Kevin Brennan, the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State at the Department for Children, Schools and Families, who said that the Government intend to produce, "““revised statutory guidance concerning children missing from care””." Children who get into care and then go missing are a just a small subsection of the whole range of trafficked people, even of the variety of trafficked children, but they are the ones that we should be most concerned about because of the reasons why they go missing. It is widely thought and perhaps generally acknowledged that it happens because someone is waiting to take them away and abuse them, exploit them or put them into sexual slavery or some other fate of that kind. Statutory guidance alone is not enough; we need more positive action.