My Lords, Amendment 43 concerns another very specific group of children—those who are privately fostered but who come from overseas. In some ways, this is a probing amendment to see whether the Government can revisit the regulations around these privately fostered children.
Currently, the number of children in this group in the UK is unknown. The majority will have arrived on visitor visas and will have overstayed. Most will be attending school and will be registered with health services. The adults caring for them have a duty to notify their local authority that they are caring for the child but, as the child is a visa-overstayer, no one does it. Given their other pressures, the majority of local authorities do not proactively look for these children, and schools do not check the visa status of children arriving mid-year or joining in years two to six.
The close relative exemption includes all relatives described under the Children Act 1989 and it exempts them from assessment by the local authority. The issue is that all carers claim to be an aunt or uncle. That is impossible to verify in most cases, and local authorities accept this as it reduces their workload. We should keep in our hearts Victoria Climbié as we think about this issue because that case, too, involved direct relatives.
The child protection issue is fairly straightforward. These children are in the UK without anyone who has legal parental responsibility. No one has overseen their placements and no one has asked about the child’s wishes or feelings. The real crunch comes when these children reach 18, having been brought up here
from childhood and English being their one language. They are probably on their way to further education. One young person for whom I was asked to advocate by Voice was in this exact position. Only when preparing to go to college did he find out that he was facing the alternative: deportation as an illegal immigrant. There is a range of these children. It is in their best interests to know their immigration status and to determine their future as soon as it is known, rather than when they reach 18. The organisation Children and Families Across Borders believes that the Home Office will accept this amendment.
There are real practice issues. We have spoken often about practice and its difficulties but in this matter, while the border agency and the children’s services are both governmental agencies and should be working together, the organisation has found that there tends to be little if any exchange between the two at either policy or working level. There seems to be no sense of corporate responsibility within government for the children who have reached British soil. The children’s services focus on the children’s well-being and rarely take the step needed to address durable, long-term solutions. They look at it in the narrow context of pathway planning, which is good for other children who are from this country.
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Furthermore, valuable information about the child, which could contribute to a comprehensive review of a durable solution in his or her best interests, is often withheld by social workers on the basis that either divulging the information could undermine the relationship of trust developed with the child, or a perception that UKBA’s treatment of such cases is simply driven by immigration controls.
Decisions about a child returning to join family members in a third country should be implemented within a specific timeframe once all safeguards are confirmed to be in place. There is a useful model for this from 20 years ago, related to the return of Vietnamese boat people. I have given documents to officials to save time here; I am sure that your Lordships would not want me to be reading the whole of them in this Committee. Alternatively, there should be a decision for a child to remain indefinitely in the UK, followed by prompt child welfare assessment and clarification of the child's immigration status. The child could then continue in the private fostering situation with proper security and, probably, without further intervention from social services. This may indeed need legislation and I beg to move.