Baroness Barker
Main Page: Baroness Barker (Liberal Democrat - Life peer)
Baroness Barker
My Lords, perhaps I may very briefly draw to your Lordships’ attention a bit of information about the campaign that has been run by Missing People, which has got the Bill to this point.
Missing People is a very small organisation. For the past two years it has run a missing people campaign. It has taken to doing that digitally via Twitter. In the first year of the campaign the organisation took 48 people who were missing and over 24 hours a team of people sent out Twitter messages about that person. The teams continued to work on each person for four hours. Missing People has some very well known celebrity supporters such as Victoria Beckham and Stephen Fry; they did that too.
The net effect of the campaign was that the issue was raised. It trended on Twitter and there was an awful lot of traffic to the Missing People website, and I believe it generated some income. But the really important thing is that Missing People managed to find at least six of those 48 missing people. That has set a completely new standard in charity campaigning. The way in which, with comparatively few resources, Missing People has managed to achieve not just its purpose as a charity but the legislative advances that we are going to help it with today, as well as raising awareness within the general public of these technical and difficult issues, is truly commendable. I encourage all noble Lords to go and look at the Missing People campaigns.