Children and Social Work Bill [HL]

Debate between Baroness Butler-Sloss and Baroness Massey of Darwen

Wednesday 29th June 2016 Grand Committee

[Baroness Butler-Sloss]

My Lords, first, I apologise for Amendment 28A. That is my fault because, having been asked to table the amendment in something of a hurry—I endorse very much what the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, said about this all coming rather quickly—I am afraid I did not read through the list of amendments sufficiently carefully. Nor, I have to say, did the Public Bill Office, which happily tabled it. I have apologised to the Minister’s Bill team for the fact that two identical amendments have been tabled. However, I would like to speak briefly to it.

Various groups of children, such as those under the age of 18 or children who are leavers from care, may need legal advice. One such group are English children caught up in their parents’ unhappy divorce or separation proceedings, where they, or one parent—usually the mother—may be the victim of very serious domestic abuse. Currently, there is absolutely no legal aid in private law family proceedings. The judge or magistrates have to try to find out what is going on. A report, the name of which escapes me, talks about this great concern in relation to the private and public law sectors. On the nub of those two areas, some children who are the victims of what is going on in the family are not discovered, so their problems come up in the private law sector where their parents are not entitled to legal aid and there may or may not be good CAFCASS support because CAFCASS may or may not be asked to become involved until a very late stage. The welfare of such children is paramount under the Children Act, yet at the moment they are unlikely to get proper representation in proceedings where their parents have no representation and where their manifest needs may be overlooked because the judge or the magistrates do not have the information that is needed. That is one group who need this legal representation for children and young people.

As many Members of this House know, I spend a lot of my time involved in combating child trafficking. The children involved in this are a very special group. Generally, they come from overseas and many lack much, if not all, English. They may or may not go through the national referral mechanism. Some of them emerge on the streets of London and other places. They very much need all the help they can get. One of the things they need is legal representation to fight their way through the absolute maze of the various aspects that may hit them. Immigration is the most important but is by no means the only one. They need someone to help them. They need an independent trafficking advocate, who we have talked about. The Minister in the Commons has said that that issue is being looked at again with further pilots. However, these children also need legal representation.

I remind the Minister that the Government have now said that they will look after some at least of the 26,000 or 28,000 unaccompanied children who are stuck somewhere in Europe, although they do not seem to have begun to implement this policy. There has now been a promise to have some of them in this country. They perhaps more than almost anyone else will need the help of lawyers. This is therefore a very important amendment. I commend it to the Committee.

[Baroness Massey of Darwen (Lab)]

My Lords, these are extremely important amendments from the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, and, by default, the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss. I too want to talk about child migrants and children who are trafficked. I am not a lawyer but I know that there are lawyers in the Room, so I hope that they will be able to reinforce these issues if I am right about them. It seems to me that child victims of trafficking from abroad are often left entirely on their own to navigate the immigration system, the criminal and family justice systems and the national referral mechanism mentioned by the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, without the support of anyone with parental responsibility for them. There seems to be no further announcement on the second pilot for independent child trafficking advocates, so I would like to know what is happening there.

UNICEF has pointed out that for children who have been trafficked there are apparently no monitoring systems to track outcomes for them once they leave care. Therefore, it is difficult to review cases and analyse long-term outcomes. Recent evidence presented to the Refugee Children’s Consortium suggests that there is not enough access to legal advice in a child’s care plan. There should be an active duty to promote this access for these children, who are extremely vulnerable.

Currently, the guidance on unaccompanied asylum-seeking children sets out that social workers should understand how to access specialist immigration legal advice. However, this advice is often sought too late for children. Further, it is important that children in local authority care are able to access legal advice on other areas of law. Children can require a broad spectrum of legal intervention to ensure that their best interests are represented: for example, to stay in education, to access support for their special educational needs or to gain compensation from a perpetrator.

The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child’s concluding observations on the UK Government’s fifth report noted that some children in care do not feel listened to and that unaccompanied migrant and asylum-seeking children may not receive independent legal advice. Figures gathered by the Children’s Society show that almost all unaccompanied children’s immigration cases would be out of the scope for legal aid. This is not a satisfactory picture, and I would like reassurance from the Minister that it will be looked at. We may well need to bring it back at a later stage of the Bill.