My Lords, I share the concerns of the noble Lord, Lord Scriven, about the way the Home Office has been looking after unaccompanied children—or not. I share the concerns that were expressed in this Committee by my noble friend Lord Touhig the other day in no uncertain terms. We think that about 100 children have gone missing from Home Office care, which is appalling negligence on the part of the Home Department.
I slightly smell a rat with Clause 15, because it is now creating a power for the Secretary of State to arrange accommodation. We are very fortunate to have, even at this early hour of a new day, a law officer answering on behalf of the Government. Does it mean that the Government have discovered that in fact they have been acting in breach of the law to date? We are now creating a new power for the Secretary of State to provide or arrange for this accommodation for unaccompanied children. Is that because currently, under the law as it stands, there is no such power? In other words, are the Government currently in breach of the Children Act? I think this Committee would probably be grateful for an answer to that question.
Whether or not the Government are in breach, of course it is open to Ministers to cite parliamentary sovereignty and say, “We are now going to override the Children Act with this new legislation and discriminate between unaccompanied British children and lawfully resident children, and these illegal entrants”. That is all very well except that, as was put so well in Committee not that many days ago by the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, the Children Act implements the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, which cannot just be trumped, even by parliamentary sovereignty. That convention, like other human rights conventions, does not allow discrimination between this child and that child. Their best interests come from the fact that they are children and are little human beings, and they cannot be treated so callously.
I particularly want to know what the legal basis has been for holding these children in hotels, losing them and, as far as I can tell, doing nothing about finding them, such is the responsibility, and care and concern, of the Home Office with its crocodile tears for these poor people who have been smuggled by the people smugglers. If people are illegal entrants and must be punished, I do not think the children should be punished. We have real concerns.
I hope that this is the last group, but I am conscious that this was the target group for yesterday and there may be a new target for today that I am not aware of. I am thinking that this might be the last group. I want to speak in support of Amendment 81A, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, about protecting medical confidentiality. It is yet another amendment that noble Lords have put down to restore some basic decency and humanity to these vulnerable people who have had so much stripped away by their circumstances and will now have so much more of their human dignity stripped away by way of this legislation.