My Lords, as your Lordships will see, I have formidable names supporting me on this amendment. I should declare that I am a trustee of the Human Trafficking Foundation and the co-chairman of the parliamentary group on slavery and human trafficking.
We all know that slavery and trafficking of victims are wicked crimes. When the victims are children and young people under 18, the horror of those crimes reaches a new dimension. Amendments 55A and 62A are designed to alleviate to some extent, but never entirely eliminate, the consequences of the effect of being trafficked into this country or through the United Kingdom. Children are particularly vulnerable to exploitation. Children of all ages, from babies to teenagers, are brought into this country by traffickers, who use them or pass them on to other traffickers. Kent Police, for instance, prevented several foreign children being exported to France. Girls and boys are exploited in the sex trade—as I say, it is boys as well as girls. There are children working a seven-day week as domestic servants or begging on the streets and the Tube, having been trained, Fagin-style, to thieve. Some of the boys who I saw running up and down the Edgware Road were, I was told by the Metropolitan Police, called mobile surfers. Your Lordships might tell your children and grandchildren, “Don’t leave your mobile on the table because a child will run in and pick it up, come out and throw it to someone else”. They are the ones called mobile surfers. There are Vietnamese boys cultivating cannabis farms, of which there are 7,000 to 8,000 in the United Kingdom, and there are other forms of forced labour.
The United Kingdom has signed up to the Council of Europe convention and the European Union directive against the trafficking of human beings. The previous Government, and the present Government, have put in place strategies for helping victims and the proposed modern slavery Bill will, I hope, make a breakthrough in the conviction of traffickers and the support of victims. It is, however, a sad reflection on successive Governments that the help for foreign children brought to the United Kingdom and identified as victims is less appropriate and less effective than it is for adults. They are treated as unaccompanied children and looked after under the provisions of the children legislation. A few are subject to care orders, which would involve a CAFCASS guardian for the period of the court hearings only. Most are accommodated under Section 20 of the Children Act 1989 and the local authority with which the child is placed does not have parental responsibility for the child. Moreover, a teenager over 16—many of them are brought into this country—is above the age for a care order.
These children and young people under 18 have been removed from their own country, family and home to a foreign country where most of them do not speak English. Some do not even know which country they are in. If they are lucky, they will be picked up by UK Visas and Immigration at the airport or port. However, others who are found later, particularly the Vietnamese boys who look after the cannabis farms, are treated by the police and the CPS as criminals and not as victims. Trafficked children are vulnerable to being retrafficked and a distressing number go missing before the social workers have even identified them as trafficked victims, so most local authorities do not even know which of their missing children are victims. These children have presumably been removed by the traffickers and many do not get found again.
Many children will have been subjected to the worst kinds of abuse imaginable. They may be traumatised, confused, disorientated and facing a bewildering variety of people who do not speak their language. Yet they are expected to cope with immigration officers, the police, social workers and other agencies, including the law. Some of them are groomed by their traffickers to give a false story. There are also cultural as well as linguistic barriers, a suspicion of public authorities and an unawareness of their rights. They need support, sympathy, continuity of care and, almost certainly, counselling or therapy or other medical and psychological care. Most need schooling. They are pushed from pillar to post, telling their story again and again in order to access welfare, medical and legal assistance. No one person—no identifiable friendly face—is there to whom they can turn throughout this period of their ordeal.
The purpose of these amendments is to give these children that one person who can be mentor, friend and support and a stable person in the lives of these unhappy, traumatised and ill treated young people. The first amendment sets out the duties of a child trafficking guardian. There are certain basic requirements. The guardian must be appointed as soon as the child is identified as a potential victim of trafficking and not 24 or 48 hours later, when the child may already have gone missing. The same person must be there until the conclusion of all the inquiries and the child is settled. The guardian must be the link for the child with all the agencies and make the arrangements in the best interests of the child. Perhaps most important of all is the requirement that the guardian has statutory authority in order to have the right to information about the trafficked child from, for instance, the police, social services and the NHS. It is also important to bear in mind that the role defined by Amendment 55A is not that of a social worker. Quite apart from anything else, the international best practice that defines the role of a guardian makes it clear that this role must be discharged by someone who is not involved in providing statutory services to them beyond the child trafficking guardian advocacy services. This makes the role quite different from that of a social worker.
The number of children involved is quite small compared with the 66,000 who go into care. There were 372 such children in 2012, according to the national referral mechanism. It would therefore not need a large number of guardians or a great financial
outlay. However, the cost may not now be a major consideration in the light of the current government proposal for child specialist advocates, to which I now turn.
3.15 pm
This is the fourth time, I think, that the noble Lord, Lord McColl, and I have brought before the House an amendment in these or similar terms. On the three previous occasions, the approach of the Minister has been to say that a child trafficking guardian was unnecessary as the safeguarding team of social workers gave to the child all that was needed to be done, together with independent reviewing officers and advocates. None of these functions begins to meet the role of the child trafficking guardian. Significantly, before our present amendment was put down, the Government at last recognised that the present arrangements for these children are inadequate and do not begin to meet the requirements for children set out in the convention and the directive. The Home Office news release of 28 January stated:
“Child slavery victims are to be given individual support through a new network of specialist independent advocates … the specialist advocate will act as a single point of contact throughout the care and immigration process”.
I was naturally delighted by this change of heart but somewhat concerned about the paucity of information about how these specialist advocates will work. There will, it appears, be two types of pilot scheme. According to the evidence of the Minister, Karen Bradley MP, to the Joint Committee on the Draft Modern Slavery Bill, of which I was a member, 22 local authorities have signed up and a service provider is about to be appointed.
However, I have a number of concerns. If this is to be done by local authorities, where is the additional money to be found? Are the personnel to be social workers? They are already overburdened by their existing duties. According to Karen Bradley, the purpose of these advocates is to steer the children through the complexities of the local authority care system and the immigration system. But most trafficked children do not go through the care system and those aged 16 and over cannot go through it. However, all those children outside the care system need advocates/guardians more than those inside the care system. Under these proposals, advocates will cater for only a minority of trafficked children.
Perhaps the most important point is that if the advocates are to be truly independent there is no suggestion that their role should be statutory, and consequently their ability to access relevant information from agencies will be limited and probably ineffective. I wonder, although perhaps I should not, whether these Home Office proposals are more designed to counter the very convincing evidence about the need for a guardian for trafficked children in the Frank Field review of slavery, of which I was a member, and the additional, equally strong evidence given to the Joint Committee, as well as our guardian amendments. I am truly concerned that the Government’s proposal, which is lacking in detail, is a poor substitute for the real thing and may not even get off the ground as effective support for these children who so desperately need help.
A large number of children’s charities and immigration organisations support these amendments, notably CARE, Barnardo’s, Coram, the Children’s Society, ECPAT and, particularly importantly, the British Association of Social Workers. They are also supported by the Refugee Children’s Consortium, which includes some 40 NGOs. UNICEF UK sent me its paper in which it strongly supports these amendments. In it UNICEF UK reminds us of the importance of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. The UNICEF 2006 guidelines on the protection of child victims of trafficking stated:
“As soon as a child victim is identified, a guardian shall be appointed by a competent authority to accompany the child throughout the entire process until a durable solution that is in his or her best interests has been identified and implemented”.
Now is the time for the United Kingdom Government to follow the UNICEF guidance and the views of the leading child charities and accept the amendment. I beg to move.