Children: Sexual Exploitation

Baroness Hughes of Stretford Excerpts

Tuesday 1st February 2011 Grand Committee

[Baroness Hughes of Stretford]

I, too, congratulate the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leicester on securing this debate on this very important topic. It is a privilege to speak after the knowledgeable contributions of so many colleagues.

While recent cases have brought this issue to the fore, there has in fact been a growing awareness of this problem for some considerable time. In a previous life, I spent some years as a research fellow investigating what was then called organised sexual abuse of children—paedophile gangs, trafficking and so on. I was a senior lecturer at Manchester University and spent many gruelling hours reading the transcripts of children’s evidence and interviews. Like other Members here, I know what a vile predatory crime this is, targeting the most vulnerable children.

This is also a challenging issue for professionals—possibly one of the most challenging—as well as one of the most dangerous for children. The crime is becoming increasingly sophisticated, as modern communications technology makes it easier for paedophiles and perpetrators to keep their tracking and contacting of children hidden from parents and carers.

There has been progress over recent years but, as the Children’s Society and Barnardo’s have reported, the implementation of government guidance, best practice and so on is patchy as regards local safeguarding children boards and local authorities. The extent to which progress has been made is variable. It is clear that, for an effective local response, we need a child-centred approach that is sensitive to listening to children, the capacity for early intervention and identification, close integration and interagency working—as was reinforced again today by the Munro interim report—the capacity of professionals to share information easily and early, and the dissemination of knowledge and best practice.

As well as adding to the calls to the Minister asking what progress he is going to make, I should also like to express some concerns about decisions that the Government have already made, which I think will create new and unnecessary barriers to that progress. The first relates to the cuts to local authority budgets. I have to raise this issue, because the worst levels of cuts are being experienced by the local authorities with the highest children-in-need scores; they are in exactly those places where most vulnerable children are going to be.

Secondly, why has the Minister distanced himself from Every Child Matters, the acclaimed multi-agency framework that is making it much easier for agencies to work together? Under the Education Bill, schools will now be absolved from the duty to co-operate with other agencies locally. Thirdly, the abandonment of ContactPoint will make it much harder for professionals even to know who else is working with them, let alone how to contact them. Finally, absorbing CEOP into a national crime agency with border control, immigration and all those things will harm the dissemination of the best practice that CEOP has been achieving.