My Lords, my name is also on this amendment. This is a goal which the noble Lord, Lord McColl of Dulwich, and I have pursued for not far short of two years. If I may put it rather bluntly, we were fobbed off last time. The fobbing off produced the report to which the noble Lord referred, which only underlines the importance of bringing this amendment back in a slightly different form, as he said. In speaking to it, I declare an interest as the co-chairman of the human trafficking parliamentary group and a trustee of the Human Trafficking Foundation. I am also very much involved with Frank Field MP and John Randall MP in an inquiry into modern slavery with a view to advising government on the proposed modern slavery Bill. However, this amendment is appropriately tabled to the Children and Families Bill as it deals with children. We are talking about children and young people under the age of 18.
The Government have produced excellent guidance on unaccompanied trafficked children and other vulnerable children and, as far as it goes, I have nothing but praise for it. However, it does not begin to meet the amendment that the noble Lord and I are putting forward. The excellent guidance presupposes that social workers and independent reviewing officers will be able to give a trafficked child what is needed to help that child from the moment of identification of the child having been a slave until the moment that that young person’s future is determined. How on earth is a social worker with a child accommodated under Section 20 of the Children Act—not even with parental responsibility—to do more than treat him or her as a looked-after child among many other looked-after children?
Trafficked children go missing and are retrafficked. Some local authorities do not even know that a missing trafficked child has been identified as having been trafficked. Therefore, they do not alert the police to the fact that this is a particularly vulnerable child who might be picked up if immediate action is taken to try to find that child. All too often these children are treated like any other missing children, many of whom run in and out of care and are technically missing but may return after 24 hours. That is a totally different group of children.
The statutory guidance does not provide what is needed, which is continuity, regularity, responsibility and a trusting relationship from the moment the child is identified to the moment his or her journey to whatever solution is arrived at is met. We have to bear in mind that this will generally be a foreign child, as the noble Lord, Lord McColl of Dulwich, said—I do not apologise for saying it again—because English children who are slaves are dealt with differently. The foreign child will probably speak no English and will have been brought into this country and enslaved in a wide variety of ways such as labour exploitation, prostitution or domestic servitude. Whichever method is used, the child is identified and is then known to be a victim. The child will not necessarily speak English and will not have papers. It will be difficult to work out exactly how old the child is and whether he or she is 15 or 18. Different arrangements apply according to the child’s age. The child will almost certainly be traumatised and, as the noble Lord, Lord McColl, said, frightened. He or she will have been told that they must not talk to the police, social services or to anybody else because they will put the child back on a plane or a boat and send them back to the place where people—very often the parents, as the noble Lord, Lord McColl, pointed out—have sold that child into slavery because they need the money. That is not just the case with Vietnamese children; it is across the world.
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Therefore the child is already in a very poor state and there is a danger, which is occurring, of the child being abused—I use the word “abused” deliberately—in the administrative process. This is a blot on the landscape of the United Kingdom. There is administrative abuse if the system does not adequately care for the child. What is needed is not well meaning officials who come and go—and there will not be a social worker or independent reviewing officer available all the time—but somebody on the end of a telephone, to whom the child can speak or leave a message. If that child goes missing, having been given to one of these independent people, they will then be able to get in touch with the police and say, “The child has gone missing. Please pull out all the stops to try and find the child”.
The sort of thing you want is a constant presence for counselling, therapy, mental health issues, education, immigration and a host of other things that this traumatised child who has been rescued from slavery has to go through in our administrative process before a decision is made. What is asked for is not someone to see the child every day of the week, or probably not more than once a week or once a fortnight, but someone
to whom the child can turn, who can ring up and find out from the foster parent or whoever, how the child is getting on; someone who the child knows will be a constant presence in this period from identification to resolution. The excellent guidance does not provide that one person.
I know what the Government have been saying. The Minister said to us last time that what they do not want is yet another tier on top of all the other tiers. However, each of the other tiers is involved only from time to time. What we are talking about is somebody who will be constantly in the background—and in the foreground—when it is necessary. There is nobody for a child in that position at that moment and it is not good enough. To say that this is an extra tier is absolutely to misunderstand—if I may be polite about this—what is actually being asked for: not another tier, but a specific person to be there instead when that person is needed.
There is no shortage of agencies that would be prepared to take on this role for what I suspect would be quite a modest sum, but what they must have is the statutory power to require the agencies to give them the information that is needed. They must be able to be in touch with the police, social workers or the Department of Health, because unless they have statutory power, those other agencies will not listen to them. There will be well meaning volunteers who will not make much progress. Therefore, this is absolutely crucial. Time and again we have been fobbed off. Now is the moment not to be fobbed off any more.