My Lords, I will begin with the story of a boy from Vietnam whose parents needed to borrow money for essential medical treatment. They were later forced to hand over their son to the gang that had loaned them the money. He was brought to the UK and forced to cultivate cannabis to work off the debt to the criminal gang that had brought him here. I will also tell the story of the girl from Nigeria who was told that she was being brought to the UK to go to school and receive an education. Instead, she was forced to do work around the house where she was held captive. Her passport was taken from her, she was not allowed to leave the house, and she was even made to eat separately from the rest of the household. Not only was she used as a domestic slave and violently beaten, but she was sexually abused by the man of the house and by his friend, became pregnant and was forced to have an abortion.
These are just two of very many stories. Over 500 children and young people believed to be victims of human trafficking were identified in the UK Human Trafficking Centre’s A Strategic Assessment on the Nature and Scale of Human Trafficking in 2012. It is with these children in mind that I move Amendment 13 today.
On 15 February 2012, we discussed a similar amendment during the debate on the Protection of Freedoms Bill. Your Lordships might ask why I am returning to this now. When I moved Amendment 57A of the Protection of Freedoms Bill on Report there was considerable support for it among your Lordships but the Government pressed us not to divide, offering to commission research to evaluate the current arrangements for the care of trafficked children. In the light of these assurances I agreed not to divide. I tabled an amendment to this Bill in Committee and move Amendment 13 today because the evidence produced by the very research commissioned as a result our first intervention compels us to do so.
The research commissioned by the Home Office following that debate was undertaken by the Children’s Society and the Refugee Council and the resulting report, Still at Risk, was published on 12 September this year. The report demonstrates that what was said during the debate on the Protection of Freedoms Bill in 2012 about the inadequacy of the care was true and remains true today. It echoes the call we made then and make again today for the provision of an independent trusted adult who will work to ensure that each child victim is able to understand their rights, has their voice heard in decisions that affect them and is supported effectively through the different legal processes in which they are engaged. Amendment 13 calls that role a “child trafficking guardian”.
I will first restate the arguments for child trafficking guardians, as I set out in February 2012, and then consider the findings of Still at Risk. Before I do so, I want to be really clear about the rationale for the child trafficking guardian as set out in Amendment 13. Sometimes we can get into a bit of a muddle when considering the appointment of guardians, thinking that they conduct a role that an existing body or agency should conduct. If the guardian proposal is seen in this way, arguments in favour of it are inevitably seen as a criticism of existing agencies. This, however, is to misunderstand fundamentally the role of child trafficking guardians, which is different from that of any existing actor or agency.
The child trafficking guardian model is based on the UNICEF guidelines and international best practice because the problems that child victims of trafficking experience have remarkable similarities from country to country. Rescued victims are children in a foreign country who have to engage with multiple state agencies such as the courts, the police, local government, education and so on. In each agency they have to deal with a different set of people. They have to retell their painful story again and again. This is disorientating and distressing for the children and in this context of being passed from pillar to post children become alienated and particularly vulnerable to retrafficking.
This is not a distinctly British problem. It is a problem of being a trafficked child in a foreign country and having to engage with different state agencies. The child trafficking guardian solution provides an entirely new role that no existing agency provides. It does two things. First, the child trafficking guardian, while regulated by law, is independent from those state agencies that make decisions about the child’s immigration status or which finance a child’s care. Trafficked children are
invariably afraid and tend to distrust authority figures representing the state. A child trafficking guardian can speak to and for the child without any other conflicting interest. Secondly, the child trafficking guardian is not a new level of bureaucracy with which a rescued trafficked child must engage to be processed by the state in addition to the police, courts, local government and so on. Rather, their role is to be a constant in an ever changing world and to accompany the rescued trafficked child as they relate to all the different state agencies. To enable the child trafficking guardian to do this, they have legal recognition so that all the agencies are obliged to recognise them, allowing them to accompany the child. They also have the right to speak on behalf of the child if the child requests it so that the child does not have to repeat their painful stories again and again if they do not want to.
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Having established the rationale for child trafficking guardians, I now turn to the problem I highlighted in February 2012, which child trafficking guardians are designed to address, and the findings of the resultant research. I argued that we badly needed to make provision for child trafficking guardians because of the extraordinarily large number of rescued trafficked children who were being lost from local authority care—301 out of 942 trafficked children looked after between 2005 and 2010. I pointed out that this national disgrace was hardly surprising given that our child trafficking provisions did not and do not comply with the international best practice set out by UNICEF. I also examined each provision in the Children Act that the Government have argued has the effect of providing a child trafficking guardian function, explaining why it does not provide this function and I will briefly recap, explaining why this is still very much the case.
First, independent advocates appointed under Section 26 of the Children Act act only on the child’s behalf in relation to the care that a child receives from a local authority. Quite apart from the obvious and immediate problem that Section 26 advocates do not engage with a child’s interaction with any other state agencies, a child is not appointed an advocate from the moment they are identified as possibly being a trafficked child, which is key requirement of the EU anti-trafficking directive. The advocate is appointed only if the child wishes to avail themselves of this opportunity. Moreover, there is currently no guarantee that the advocate provided for a trafficked child who requests one would have any knowledge or understanding of human trafficking, even with the proposed new statutory guidance. Secondly, independent visitors can be offered if a local authority considers a child would benefit from such support but this is simply a befriending role. Thirdly, independent reviewing officers do not accompany or support the child in their interactions with all state agencies. They meet them only to talk about their care plan.
When I made the same points in Grand Committee the Minister referred to each of these roles without addressing my arguments that none of them amounts to the provision of a child trafficking guardian. However, she did refer to one additional role, that of the child social worker. I have already explained that the child
trafficking guardian is a unique, separate and complementary role to that of other professionals caring for a trafficked child. It is not appropriate to expect social workers to fulfil the role of a child trafficking guardian, physically accompanying rescued children in all their interactions with the state. A child trafficking guardian alongside a trafficked child will enable social workers to provide the best support for all the children in their care.
Having set out these arguments, I agreed to withdraw the amendment in response to the promise of research. That research, published in September, makes for deeply distressing reading. The researchers found a great variation in the quality of the care provided to trafficked children. There are examples of best practice by local authorities and caring, supportive social workers but many other children had multiple social workers or social workers who were unfamiliar with human trafficking and the risks of retrafficking, resulting in children being placed in unsuitable accommodation.
Of very specific and direct relevance to my amendment of 15 April 2012, the research concluded that,
“the immediate provision of intensive, one-to-one support for these children by an adult who the child can form a trusting relationship with and who could help them to make sense of the different processes and professionals that they encounter, would reduce the risk of the child going missing”.
There can be no pleasure in being proved right when, because of the time taken to produce the report, we have lost nearly two years—two years when rescued trafficked children could have been assisted by the provision of a child trafficking guardian, but have not been. It is for this reason that I and my co-signatories have seized the first opportunity since the publication of the report to retable the version of our amendment which I commend to the House.
Having already defined the role of child trafficking guardian, I will pick up on just two features of Amendment 13. First, the training, skills and expertise of a child trafficking guardian are extremely important. The strength of the system proposed by this amendment is in the specialist care and support that these guardians would provide. Proposed new subsection (8) of the amendment would require that guardians meet the training requirements set out by the Secretary of State and that appropriate structures for supervision of the child trafficking guardians are put in place. Secondly, in the current economic climate, the Government must rightly take into account the need to spend public money wisely and most effectively. Amendment 13 seeks to give the Government flexibility both now and in the future for how these guardianship services are provided by enabling this to be done through public sector employees or the employees or volunteers of recognisable charitable organisations as designated by the Secretary of State. Creating a new public sector agency to provide these services could be expensive, but equipping and empowering charities and volunteers to fulfil this role could be very cost effective. Some may have concerns about the role of volunteers but I have already emphasised the importance of training and supervision enshrined in the amendment. This country has a long-standing system of volunteer magistrates and well trained volunteer child trafficking guardians could provide similarly excellent support to children who have been trafficked.
While I was, of course, grateful for the Minister’s response to this amendment in Committee, I was none the less extremely disappointed. The reasons she gave for not supporting it were exactly the same as those advanced by the Minister responding in February 2012 without in any way responding to my critique of that reasoning. It was almost as if the Still at Risk report had not been commissioned.
I recognise that the Government are taking steps to reform social work and to improve statutory guidance for local authorities caring for trafficked children following the Still at Risk report. However, I return to the fact that this same research, which was commissioned by the Government in response to our original proposal for child trafficking guardians, has demonstrated not only the need for the various changes the Government are proposing for the guidance but also the need for a system of child trafficking guardians. For the sake of children such as those whose stories I shared earlier, we must take on board all the recommendations of the Still at Risk report.
In conclusion, I note that in the 18 months since we first considered this issue, the Joint Committee on Human Rights, the Group of Experts on the Council of Europe convention against human trafficking and the US State Department Trafficking in Persons Report have all recommended we introduce a system of child trafficking guardians. We must not miss this opportunity. I beg to move.