Protection of Freedoms Bill

Debate between Baroness Hamwee and Lord Sentamu

Wednesday 15th February 2012 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hamwee]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord McColl, and his co-signatories, as well as the organisations which have clearly done so much of the work of which we have heard. I commend them for ensuring that so many of your Lordships have been lobbied, which has led to an increasing understanding of the complexities of trafficking and the response to it.

In view of the Minister’s remarks, I shall cut down what I have to say this evening. What is needed for children in this situation is so multifaceted that the proposal for guardianship, if I can call it that, is appropriate, particularly because of the ability that such a person would have to look at the child’s interests as a whole and not as a series of separate issues with too much demarcation and not enough interconnection. What is also needed is somebody able to give time to the child. Adults who are trafficked can take a lot of time to articulate their feelings, their needs and their story. If that is so for them, how much time is needed for children?

Social workers—like the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, I do not criticise individual social workers—may be seen as representatives of the state by some children. Consistency and trust have also been referred to. Speaking more from instinct than knowledge, I rather doubt that all local authority children’s services can have as deep an understanding as is needed of the complexity of this problem. I would like to see more psychological services and a focus on specialised and supported foster care. Foster parents looking after trafficked children who have been rescued must have a hugely important role. If the reason for so many children missing from care is in part the bond that they have with their traffickers, who will be the people that they know best, whose language they may speak and who may well have taken steps to ensure that the child stays in contact, or if it is a matter of fear, voodoo and witchcraft, work needs to be done to counter that relationship. So we are talking about a range of actions, and this proposition addresses a lot of the issues.

In giving assurances to the House about how the Government hope to take this matter forward, the Minister referred to practical arrangements. I am sure that he did not mean to limit what would be looked at by the Children’s Commissioner to practical arrangements, because what is needed goes far wider than that. I appreciate that an enormous amount of negotiation must underlie the assurance today, so I do not want to push him into a place which is difficult for him, but if he can say anything about that, it would be helpful. Perhaps he could say something also about the work that might be done with the Children’s Commissioner for Wales, where a lot of work in this area has been done and where different arrangements perhaps apply.

[The Archbishop of York]

My Lords—