My Lords, the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Manchester was in his place earlier but has had to go elsewhere for the evening. He has asked me to speak on his behalf on the amendments in this group tabled in his name alongside those of the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, and the noble Baroness, Lady Jones. I thank the Children’s Society and Barnardo’s for their support and helpful briefings.
The Church has a particular concern for vulnerable children. As far as the Church of England is concerned, there are 4,644 schools in which we educate around 1 million students. This educational commitment is combined with parish and youth worker activities that bring the Church into contact with thousands of families each year. Through the Clewer Initiative, many parishes and dioceses have worked closely on the issues of county lines and confronting the blight of modern slavery. Accordingly, we have seen at first hand and, sadly, all too frequently the terrible damage caused by serious youth violence and by the criminal exploitation of children. The latter is an especially insidious form of abuse, which one victim has described as “when someone you trusted makes you commit crime for their benefit”.
Amendment 50, as we have heard, seeks to create a definition of child criminal exploitation that would sit alongside other definitions of exploitation already in the Modern Slavery Act. The present lack of a single statutory definition means that local agencies are responding differently to this form of exploitation across the country. Research by the Children’s Society in 2019 found that only one-third of local authorities had a policy in place for responding to it. By its very nature, exploitation through county lines crosses local authority boundaries, so it is imperative that there is a national shared understanding of child criminal exploitation so that children do not fall through the gaps if they live in one area but are exploited in
another. A consequence of the current lack of a shared definition and approach is that many children receive punitive criminal justice responses rather than being seen as victims of exploitation and abuse.
Youth justice data shows that in 2019-20, 1,402 children were first-time entrants to the youth justice system due to drug offences, with 2,063 being first-time entrants due to weapon offences. Both issues are often associated with criminal exploitation through the county lines drug model. Despite positive work from several police forces and the CPS, many criminal cases are still being pursued against a child even when they have been identified as a victim of criminal exploitation.
Relatedly, too many children are coming to the attention of services only when they are arrested by police for drugs-related crimes, as early warning signs are not understood or are simply missed. We too often find that not all professionals involved in children’s lives fully understand this form of exploitation and how vulnerabilities manifest in children. There are countless serious case reviews that point to safeguarding interventions not being made earlier enough in the grooming process.
A statutory definition agreed and understood by all local safeguarding partners would enable professionals to spot the signs earlier and divert vulnerable children away from harm, in much the same way as the recently adopted statutory definition of domestic abuse is now helping to improve responses on that issue. I am sure that every Member of this House shares the desire to protect vulnerable children. Adopting this definition would send a strong message to those children that their abuse is seen, heard and understood.
This also leads me briefly to address Amendments 21, 23 to 27, 42 and 43, which would amend the serious violence duty. Concern with the serious violence duty, as presented here, is about a lack of clear commitment to the safeguarding of children. No differentiation is drawn between how this duty impacts on children as opposed to adults.
Children and vulnerable young people experiencing serious violence require a different response. Being involved in violence is often an indicator that children are experiencing other problems in their lives, such as being criminally exploited. It is important to understand these underlying causes of why children may be involved in violence, and for these underlying causes in a child’s life or in the lives of children within certain areas to be addressed. We need to intervene to protect and divert children, not treating them as adult criminals. This requires a co-ordinated approach to preventative safeguarding which focuses on offering support to a child and family through targeted or universal services at the first signs of issues in their lives to prevent them being coerced into activity associated with serious violence.
Safeguarding and protecting children and vulnerable young people from harm should be the first priority of statutory agencies, and in any subsequent duty for these agencies to co-operate with one another. The duty as currently drafted does not mention “safeguarding” once, nor does it signal the need for the specific involvement of children’s social care teams in creating a strategy to prevent violence in a local area. A failure to write into the duty the need to safeguard children
risks young people falling through the cracks in statutory support and receiving a punitive response from statutory services. It makes the duty all about crime reduction at the expense of safeguarding. It would also hinder the ability of the duty to be truly preventative if it did not specify the involvement of children’s services.
I hope that we shall receive some assurances from the Minister on the commitment to safeguarding, ideally on the face of the Bill, but certainly a commitment that the issue of how the duty relates to safeguarding will be more closely considered in guidance.