This amendment deals with a totally different subject. There are three amendments in this group but I do not propose to speak to Amendments 43 or 234 because I understand that those who tabled them will in due course ask to degroup them. Therefore, I shall speak exclusively to Amendment 39.
This amendment relates to the most disadvantaged group of children who come into this country. Very often, they are children brought here against their will, or certainly without any knowledge of what is going to hit them when they get here. They may be sexually exploited or they may be victims of domestic service or forced labour, such as the Vietnamese boys who run the cannabis farms in rented accommodation. Among them are boys who are trained, Fagin style, to steal, and there are other children who go through appalling
sorts of slavery. When they escape, or if they are fortunate enough to be picked up at the border control, they are not as well looked after as adults.
This is an area where adult victims of human trafficking—modern slaves—are quite well cared for in this country in many ways. It is much to the Government’s credit that they have signed the European directive on human trafficking and, indeed, are in the process of implementing it. However, we fall far short of what should be done with the children. They are placed in the care of a local authority, not under care proceedings, which we discussed earlier today, but under Section 17 of the Children Act 1989, which requires local authorities to look after a child in their area. They are placed with the nearest local authority by whoever has identified them as trafficked, and the local authority has an obligation to look after them under Section 20 of the Children Act. I repeat: it is an obligation to accommodate.
We know that very worrying numbers of children go missing from local authority care. Local authorities do not even know why or how some of these children have come into care because it takes anything up to 48 hours to register a child into care, and these children often go missing within 48 hours. In another place, Peter Bone MP sent a message to all local authorities asking how many children who go missing are trafficked children. No local authority responded with any figures at all, and only about eight out of all the local authorities responded at all but they had not identified the children who were missing as trafficked children.
If the children have a mobile phone, as they usually do, they are given a number and are told to ring the trafficker. The trafficker waits outside the care home, or very often the home of the short-term foster parents who have not had time to get organised with this child who is suddenly dumped on them: the child gets the telephone call, goes out of the front door and is never heard of again. Those children are trafficked or retrafficked. Something like 300-odd children have been identified as being trafficked, and that, I suspect, is the tip of the iceberg.
The reasons for asking for a local authority to have parental responsibility are twofold. One is that these foreign children do not have anyone in this country with any responsibility for them until they get to the local authority—perhaps with the exception of those who are trafficking them, who may be relatives. Secondly, the local authority does not have parental responsibility, as defined in the Children Act, for these accommodated children; it simply has a requirement to accommodate them. It is right to say that there is a requirement to look after them but if they do not have parental responsibility—and local authority social services know exactly what parental responsibility means—that is what they receive after they get a care order. Even an interim care order gives them a joint parental responsibility with the family. However, for these foreign children there is nobody with parental responsibility.
Parental responsibility may not be the best way of dealing with this; there are two views on it. I have tabled this amendment because I am concerned that, currently, local authorities are not treating these children with the seriousness that they should. Local authorities
are overworked and very often under-resourced. These children are dumped on them at very short notice, identified as having been trafficked and are not given the same degree of care as a child who goes through the care process in this country. It seems that there are two ways forward here. Either the local authority makes a care application, which costs money—and it is getting more and more expensive for local authorities to make care applications—or, as I suggest, there should be an automatic parental responsibility. It would not cost a penny but it would flag up to local authorities the actual responsibility they have for these children who are dumped on them. They cannot just accommodate them and not really take that extra step of being a joint parent.
I am extremely concerned about the standards for the children we have been talking about last Wednesday and today. They are only a small number of children but, my goodness me, we are failing them. It is a blot on the England and Wales system, under which we are failing to deal with them. I do not know whether I really need to declare again an interest as a trustee of the Human Trafficking Foundation or as co-chairman of the All-Party Group on Human Trafficking and Modern Day Slavery, but this is a truly serious matter for a small group of children. One way of dealing with it is to give local authorities parental responsibility. It would hit them with the fact that they have to do something practical about these children.
Barnardo’s was given some money—I believe by the Government—to trial having specialist foster parents to look after trafficked children. I was told by one of the representatives of Barnardo’s that it was not taken up. I think that 15 specialised foster parents were trained and that local authorities were told they could have this for nothing. They were not being asked to pay a penny and they did not take it up. I think there were two or three places where local authorities did not do it, which is an indication of the degree of concern that I understand the overworked social services have for this group of children. Something absolutely has to be done. I beg to move.