Crime (Overseas Production Orders) Bill [Lords]

Ann Coffey Excerpts

3rd reading: House of Commons & Report stage: House of Commons
Wednesday 30th January 2019 Commons Chamber

[Mr Wallace]

I am going to stand up for the security of our citizens and a responsible Government have to balance abstract, theoretical, minute probabilities with keeping our constituents safe. Perhaps I should remind the hon. Gentleman of what we found in one of the cases. It is not related to this data, As I have clearly said, this Bill produces not a single example in the last 20 years, but under the MLAT process in the past no assurances have been sought and indeed the Government of the day indicated there was potentially a death penalty. It was a Labour Government who did not seek the assurances and did transfer the data. What does that mean? It means a responsible Government know the balance between keeping our citizens safe and making sure they comply with our international obligations. Members on the Opposition Benches have managed to do that in the past and I hope they do it again.

I have been absolutely clear. The hon. Gentleman may say he would do a better job in the negotiations if Labour was in power but, as I pointed out, we do not have equality of arms. Our negotiating position is this: there is 1% of data here versus about 90% of data there, which means our leverage is minuscule when it comes to demanding strings attached of the United States.

[Ann Coffey (Stockport) (Lab)]

Does the Minister agree that this should not be a point of political division in this House? It is the overwhelming priority of Parliament to protect children who are being raped, abused and exploited, and data sharing is very important. One of the barriers to protecting children has been getting data to identify people who are doing this. We want to prevent the exploitation of children and to do that we need to identify those who would exploit them. Does the Minister agree that this should be the issue, not views about Donald Trump or otherwise?

[Mr Wallace]

I totally agree. The hon. Lady will have heard the example I had to listen to. That was a sobering and scary experience. It is an experience that our law enforcement officers hear every single day and it is our duty to find a balance. I wish we had our own Google. I wish that all my constituents’ data were held in the United Kingdom so we would have more control over it. But the fact is we live in the world we do. That is the tragedy and it makes us have to make deals that might not always be, as we would wish, perfect. But in this case, I am concerned, like her, that what must come first is the children’s needs and dealing with terrorists, illicit finance and all the oligarchs we worry about—and Labour Front Benchers also worry about—and how we are going to get them. Until we can crack that data map, this is something that is important.

County Lines Exploitation: London

Ann Coffey Excerpts

Wednesday 17th January 2018 Westminster Hall

[Ann Coffey (Stockport) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Dame Cheryl. I thank my right hon. Friend the Member for Enfield North (Joan Ryan) for securing this important debate on county lines; I thought her contribution was absolutely fantastic. I was interested in the description that the hon. Member for Colchester (Will Quince) gave of the impact of county lines on the community he serves. He said that despite the fact that his community is away from London, the county lines have a corrosive effect on it.

The National Crime Agency report “County Lines Violence, Exploitation & Drug Supply 2017”, published in November, mapped the growing extent of the exploitation of children and young people and the shocking levels of violence, intimidation and coercion used. That this has reached such levels in what we all believe to be a civilised society is shameful. The NCA accepts that it does not have a national response at this time, but following its report, it will prioritise county lines and take a co-ordinating role with local and regional police forces. I think we would all agree that that is long overdue, and it would help if the Minister expanded a little on what that might look like.

There has been concern for some time about the growing county lines operations of organised crime gangs based in the big cities. In 2015, Missing People and Catch22 presented their report “Running the Risks” in Liverpool. It explored the links between gang involvement and young people going missing. In 2016, our all-party parliamentary group, which is supported by the Children’s Society and Missing People, reported on the safeguarding of absent children. We found evidence that children reported as absent who the police decided were at no apparent risk ended up falling through the safety net, exploited by adults for sex and/or for supplying and selling class A drugs.

The majority of those recruited by gangs are 15-to-17-year-old boys, but boys are more likely to be recorded as absent and at low risk than girls. That is why county lines operations have been able to exist below the radar. Girls who are exploited along county lines are at increased risk of sexual exploitation and trafficking. We should not forget that children can suffer multiple exploitation. We cannot simply deal with that by putting the issues into particular silos; it all has to come together in an understanding of the exploitation of children.

In 2017, the all-party group held a roundtable on children who go missing and are criminally exploited by gangs. We warned that the safeguarding system was failing children because of a lack of understanding of the signs of exploitation and because many children were still being seen as criminals and not victims—a point made by my right hon. Friend the Member for Enfield North and the hon. Member for Colchester. Looked-after children are particular targets for grooming by criminal gangs, and those placed out of the borough can be especially vulnerable, as are young people in pupil referral units. Such children are particularly vulnerable to exploitation because of the circumstances of their lives and their exclusion from schools.

Preventing young people from becoming embedded in gangs has to be a priority. Key to identifying early risk is the sharing of data on missing children. Frequent missing episodes and being found out of area, returning from missing episodes with injuries and unexplained absences from school were all highlighted as being signs that a young person could be involved in county lines activity.

There are issues about how missing data is collected and shared. I welcome the new missing persons database that will be operational later this year, but how effective it will be will depend on the information gathered by local police forces. Will the Minister say when the missing persons strategy will be updated? Recognition of missing episodes as indicators of potential criminal exploitation, followed by appropriate and timely responses, might prevent further exploitation of vulnerable children and young people. Disrupting county lines and convicting the criminals behind them is vital. Organised crime has been getting the message that, provided they use children and young people, we are powerless to do anything about it.

On 4 December, our APPG held an event at the House of Commons, attended by experts, professionals, police and practitioners to discuss the disruption of county lines and how children and young people can be better protected. There was overwhelming support for more use of trafficking legislation and the Modern Slavery Act 2015.

The national referral mechanism was set up in 2009 to identity victims of human trafficking or modern-day slavery. Acceptance by the national referral mechanism clearly identifies the young person as a victim, even if they have committed a criminal act, which is very important in the context of criminal exploitation. Evidence from the Children’s Society and ECPAT shows that the knowledge, understanding and implementation of the national referral mechanism is patchy. ECPAT is also concerned that the national referral mechanism does not necessarily trigger any safeguarding response and should be embedded into the child protection system.

As my right hon. Friend the Member for Enfield North mentioned, there have been very few prosecutions under the trafficking legislation. One of them was at Swansea Crown court—the case that she mentioned, the first of its kind, against the gang operating out of London. There are ongoing cases in London, but, as with any new legislation, the police and CPS will be waiting to see how successful those cases will be.

We need effective tools to prevent young people from being used as drug mules by organised crime. Lewisham has used criminal behaviour orders, which can prohibit a young person from travelling to certain places, which makes them less attractive to the criminal gang. Child abduction warning notices can also be served on individuals suspected of grooming children and young people. Although there are some issues with those, such as the need to consult with parents—we can all see what the problem with that might be—they clearly identify that it is an individual adult who is exploiting children and it is the child who is the victim, which puts the responsibility where it belongs. That might encourage communities to look at the people operating in their communities as exploiters of children and might help to change attitudes towards those people.

However, there should be a notice that is more in keeping with the trafficking legislation than the Child Abduction Act 1984 is, and it should apply to all 16 and 17-year-olds, which child abduction warning notices do not. Breach of the new notices could then be used as evidence to apply for orders that carry penalties under the trafficking legislation. Will the Minister support such an approach?

We have a fragmented safeguarding system that responds to the child as a victim or as an offender and does not recognise that a child can be both. The most powerful contribution to our December meeting was from a parent who had battled hard to get safeguarding agencies to understand that her son, who was being groomed into criminal activities, was an exploited child. Her son became more and more embedded into county lines and ended up being stabbed. The parent said:

“It became so frustrating as all services that were assigned to working with my son in this period were all working as separate entities. With this came, on many occasions, lack of communication, oversight or duplication of what was meant to be done or not take place, and this caused me great distress.”

In the end, she herself set up an email group for all the many agencies to co-ordinate information about her son, which proved helpful. It is important to learn from the experience of parents to make sure that the safeguarding response that a system provides is helpful to both the young people and parents and does not make a bad situation worse. It is important to understand the impact of out-of-borough placements on young people, which can expose them to further risk rather than protect them.

We need to challenge public attitudes that blame the young person for their own exploitation. This echoes the early cases of child sexual exploitation where the young girls were written off as prostitutes. But who can blame the public when that was the view of the agencies tasked with safeguarding children? Education is crucial. The Greater Manchester police “Trapped” campaign focuses on county lines, aims to raise awareness of the grooming process in communities and schools, and encourages communities to spot and report exploitation of young people.

Greater Manchester police says that county lines is a much broader issue than drugs and also involves the transportation of firearms and money. It is a developing business model, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Enfield North has already said. It is vital for police forces and agencies to work well together, so Greater Manchester police is working closely with forces that have an expanse of rural areas such as Cumbria, Cheshire, North Wales and Lancashire.

The excellent Greater Manchester police YouTube video, made for the “Trapped” campaign, illustrates vividly how a child drawn by the offer of cash becomes more and more embedded in the gang. What at first seems like easy money becomes a miserable existence of escalating violence and threats to life. We know that certain factors make children more vulnerable to exploitation, but all young people can be vulnerable at the time of transition from primary to secondary school. That is why it is important that sex and relationships education in schools involves raising awareness of criminal exploitation and county lines.

[Joan Ryan]

I completely agree about the transition period being a risk. Does my hon. Friend agree that the pupil referral unit, where we have seen gang members hanging around to recruit youngsters who often are vulnerable, is also a risk?

[Ann Coffey]

My right hon. Friend is absolutely right. Young people in PRUs are specifically targeted by organised crime because of their vulnerabilities. Vulnerable young people often feel there is nothing else for them on the horizon except what the drug dealer might offer. Poverty, poor housing, unemployment and living in a high crime neighbourhood creates the conditions for county lines to flourish.

County lines is also a public health issue. We cannot ignore the demand for drugs and the impact on individuals, families and children’s health. Health needs to be part of the safeguarding response to county lines at a national and local level. I thank the Minister for meeting me recently to discuss many of the issues.

Recent media coverage has meant an increase in the awareness of the extent of exploitation of children by organised crime, reaching beyond high-crime areas to communities that have never experienced the brutality and violence that comes with county lines. It is progress that there is increasing awareness and that the National Crime Agency is taking a national co-ordinating role. There has to be an effective response by the police leading to successful prosecutions so that county lines are disrupted. Alongside that there needs to be better identification of children at risk by agencies working together at a local and national level. There need to be better interventions earlier in children’s lives, and more resources.

Modern Slavery Act 2015

Ann Coffey Excerpts

Thursday 26th October 2017 Commons Chamber

[Ann Coffey (Stockport) (Lab)]

Kevin Hyland, the Independent Anti-Slavery Commissioner, stressed this week that using children to transport and sell class A drugs in county lines operations is a form of modern-day slavery. He said that the police and other agencies were not seeing it for what it is: the use of children and young people as commodities by criminal gangs. He said that more and more county lines were being discovered each day but there was often a lack of sympathy for the victims. He was responding to the HMIC report, “Stolen freedom: the policing response to modern slavery and human trafficking”.

The criminal exploitation of children to sell drugs in county lines operations is the next big grooming scandal. It has many similarities to grooming in the early child sexual exploitation cases in places such as Rotherham and Rochdale. The National Crime Agency says that 83% of police forces have reported activity in their areas, and I have been told by a well-informed police source that there could be up to 1,000 county lines operating from major cities throughout the country that have well-established criminal gangs, including London, Liverpool and Manchester.

Although the exploitation of children by organised crime to carry and sell drugs is not new, there is a huge and growing problem of children being groomed to supply class A drugs—crack cocaine and heroin—around the country. That usually involves a gang from an urban area expanding their operations by crossing one police force boundary, or more, over to more rural areas, setting up a secure base and using runners to conduct day-to-day dealing.

A county lines enterprise almost always involves the exploitation of vulnerable children and adults. As more and more county lines are set up, more and more children are being targeted and groomed to carry and supply drugs. For the criminal gangs, it is a very successful business: new markets bring more income, and using children and young people reduces the gang’s risk of detection. For the children and young people, it often ends in drug and alcohol addiction, violence and sexual and other exploitation. The children become criminals and the groomers and exploiters of other children. The extent of county lines is very difficult to map, as data are collected by various agencies and there is very little sharing of those data.

This week, I was invited by Greater Manchester police to help launch an excellent new campaign called Trapped, to raise awareness of how children and young people can get drawn into county lines. Children as young as 11 have been ferried from inner-city parts of Manchester to Blackpool and Barrow to sell drugs. Only this week, the police found a young boy in Blackpool who they said was relieved to be locked up and whose face was green, as he had been so badly beaten.

The Trapped campaign aims to raise awareness of all forms of criminal exploitation by gangs of young people and vulnerable adults. Key to its approach is working with schools, youth centres and housing and drugs services to prevent young people from getting embedded, or further embedded, in criminal gangs and to provide them with safe people to talk to.

Some children are vulnerable to being targeted because of chaotic family relationships; others because they are looked-after children. Some may be younger children whose older siblings have got caught up in drugs, while others may have parents who have become complicit in the use of their children by gangs, to help feed their own drug habit. Methods of recruiting children include offers of cash and goods, coercion with threats of kidnap and young people having to work to pay back a drug debt owed to a gang member.

I chair the all-party parliamentary group on runaway and missing children and adults, which is supported by the Children’s Society and Missing People. In March, we held a roundtable on county lines, taking evidence from victim’s parents, experts and agencies. May I thank the Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, the hon. Member for Truro and Falmouth (Sarah Newton) for attending that roundtable? The report we produced made clear that children from all backgrounds are at risk of being drawn into county lines. Indeed, the parents who gave evidence did not meet the profile of a chaotic family. Their sons had become involved through friendships with other young people who had associations with gangs.

Pressure on young people is huge, and at the time of transition from childhood to adolescence, they are particularly vulnerable to pressure from peers. Young people can get drawn into what initially looks like a good offer, in terms of cash and lifestyle, but end up being trapped and coerced by some terrifying people.

Looked-after children in particular are targets for grooming by criminal gangs. Those placed miles away from their home areas can be especially vulnerable. There are additional difficulties involved in keeping children safe when they are placed far away. It is hard for social workers to give support from hundreds of miles away. It is concerning that since March 2012 there has been a 78% increase nationally in the number of children being placed in children’s homes outside their borough.

Parents whose children have been exploited expressed to our roundtable their despair at the response the system often gave to their pleas for help. I am concerned that the response of the safeguarding system is increasing the vulnerability of young people. The parent who is not supported will leave the child more vulnerable. Placing a child or young person in a children’s home that is being targeted by criminal gangs increases their vulnerability. Failing to assess risk in missing episodes appropriately will increase vulnerability.

There needs to be a more joined-up response from the National Crime Agency and at a regional and local police level. Criminal gangs are making millions from the exploitation and degradation of children, and they are responsible for countless beatings, stabbings and murder. We need to disrupt the grooming of vulnerable children at a very early stage, while as prosecuting senior gang members. Preventing children from getting into gangs in turn prevents many more victims. We need to consider the better use of child abduction warning notices, and the national referring mechanism needs to be better understood, as it can be used to identify children as victims of exploitation, which in turn makes it easier to prosecute exploiters—who are hiding behind the children—under trafficking laws. That will also prevent prosecution of the child.

The exploitation of children by criminal gangs is increasing, and it is shocking that the message that organised crime is getting is that, provided that they use children and young people, we are powerless to do anything about it. We need to find better ways to work together and use available resources, and a better safeguarding response for children. Children should be our priority—

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)]

Order.

Independent Advocates for Trafficked Children

Ann Coffey Excerpts

Tuesday 28th June 2016 Westminster Hall

[Fiona Mactaggart]

Thank you very much, Mr Streeter. The hon. Member for Maidstone and The Weald talked about the complex factors that lead to children going missing. As Professor Ravi Kohli, who led the evaluation team, told a joint meeting of the all-party groups on human trafficking and modern slavery and on runaway and missing children and adults, the circumstances in which a trafficked child goes missing from care are complex. Many factors may be involved and may need to be addressed to provide a solution. An advocate can help to mitigate those factors by raising awareness of the risks among other professionals, pressing for the provision of safer accommodation and building strong relationships with the child, but other action is also needed. As the evaluation report said, the circumstances in which children go missing require further investigation to ensure that we put in place the most appropriate measures to prevent that from happening.

[Ann Coffey (Stockport) (Lab)]

I congratulate my right hon. Friend on securing this important debate. On that issue, the all-party group on runaway and missing children and adults has done work on children who go missing from care and is concerned that a proper risk assessment should be made of what happens to such children and the risks that they may be opened to when they go missing. That relies on the child disclosing what has happened to them. Children will not disclose information unless they trust the person they are giving that information to. The trusted person is key. Does she think that one way forward on this issue might be to look at how we can get more trusted people for children who go missing—they go missing for all sorts of reasons—and possibly developing some kind of voluntary scheme?

[Fiona Mactaggart]

My hon. Friend, who chairs the all-party group on runaway and missing children and adults, really understands this issue. I believe that children who have lost contact with families can benefit from such an advocacy scheme too. In a way, the Home Office has been more determined to provide support for isolated children than has the Department for Education, which should play a leading role in this area. Local authorities face diminishing resources and increased demand, and cannot adequately support British children who go missing or the unaccompanied Syrian refugee children who will come here. We know from international and indeed Scottish evidence that such children benefit from independent guardianship and that they are at risk of exploitation and trafficking.

My hon. Friend’s proposal that we find ways of giving all children a special person may help to make more children resilient to the risks that they face of going missing, being exploited and so on. Although it is beyond the scope of the debate, I hope that in the future we could extend an independent child advocate scheme beyond trafficked children to lone migrant children and children who have gone missing from their families and so on, because every child needs their person who will help to make them safer. There is no magic bullet, but having a person can make a lot of difference.

On my hon. Friend’s question about risk assessment, we know that the risk of going missing is much higher among some groups of trafficked children than others. For example, Vietnamese children trafficked to this country to work as gardeners in cannabis farms are at an almost automatic risk of disappearing. So a robust risk assessment is needed as soon as a child is identified as a victim of trafficking and we need an accelerated programme to connect high risk children to an advocate.

The evaluation illustrates cases where advocates were the only people who enabled a child who had gone missing to be brought back into contact with the authorities responsible for them. There were significant delays in children being referred to the advocacy service by local authorities—a delay of three days or longer in almost 70% of cases. In comparison, once the advocacy service received the referral, 84% of children had an advocate within one day and all within two days. This finding raises important questions about the referral process and—this is key—the level of commitment from local authority staff members to the advocacy provision. That is one of the reasons why I think the Minister must implement section 48 of the Act now so that local authorities have legal duties in relation to advocates.

The evaluation tells us:

“There were many difficulties associated with advocacy work where speaking up for a child required nimble and diplomatic manoeuvring, rather than being able to draw on a legal authority to contribute”

to meetings about the child’s case.

The evaluation identified challenges faced by advocates, and I am glad the Minister intends to look at those and seek to address them in future incarnations of the scheme. However, I do not believe it is necessary to conduct further trials to do so. The Government originally promised to implement the scheme after the trial. The Minister knows that inadequate co-operation from some public authorities, exacerbated by a lack of legal authority, can be resolved only by commencing section 48 of the Modern Slavery Act 2015, which specifically requires public authorities to recognise and pay due regard to the advocates’ functions and provide them with access to the necessary information about a child’s case. Without bringing section 48 into force, the degree to which public bodies will pay attention to advocates will remain variable, and we will never be able to measure the full potential benefit of the scheme because this depends on statutory recognition, which trials can never give.

In their response to the evaluation report, the Government stated that they would bring proposals about the way forward to Parliament in March. Three months later, the proposals are unpublished, yet since the trials ended nine months ago, vulnerable trafficked children across the country have been left without vital support. Barnardo’s, which delivered the trial advocacy scheme for the Home Office, has continued to provide support to children who entered the trial because it is convinced of its value, but this is to rely on charities once again to step in and cover what should be a statutory responsibility. It is now of the utmost urgency that plans are put in place to make this support available on a wide basis.

Earlier this month, various charities wrote to The Guardian newspaper calling on the Government to act urgently to make independent advocates available to all trafficked children. The charities know, from their work with children, that the delay means many vulnerable children will lack vital support and will be at risk of cruel exploitation. I trust that the Minister will today set out in full the Government’s intentions. I urge her not to proceed with further unnecessary trials, but instead to commence section 48, which provides the best opportunity for acting on the recommendations of the evaluation report and for addressing the challenges it identified, not least that of a lack of legal authority that led to poor collaboration by some local authorities. We must act with urgency to make this provision available and I urge the Minister not to sacrifice the good for the sake of the best, which is what her present course of action risks.

Statutory services can be evaluated and improved when in operation; they often are. As understanding grows about trafficking and the nature of the challenges and risks that children face, there will inevitably be aspects of the advocacy scheme that will need to develop in response. However, the trials have provided sufficient information for the establishment of a permanent country-wide scheme and I hope, although I do not expect, the Minister will put one in place as soon as possible. If she prefers to press ahead with further trials before enacting section 48, I would ask her to heed the advice of the Independent Anti-slavery Commissioner to make every effort to avoid unnecessary delays that would result in beginning again from scratch.

If further trials are to be entered into, they must add to the information and knowledge gained from the first stage of the trials and not be an entirely separate process.

I hope that at a minimum the Minister will confirm today that any new trials and evaluation process will include continued monitoring of the situation and outcomes for the children who participated in the first phase. This will mean we can comprehensively assess the impact of the advocacy provision, particularly in the areas of operation where processes can be lengthy, such as the legal cases that did not reach a conclusion during the first trial period.

I also ask the Minister to build into any future trials the possibility for section 48 to be commenced before the end if interim reports are positive. Doing so would enable very needy children around the country to benefit from this important assistance as soon as possible. I know that the Minister is determined to eliminate trafficking and to protect and support its victims, but the delays that we are experiencing are leaving vulnerable children at sea in a bewildering ocean of statutory agencies, coping with a foreign language and unfamiliar processes, as well as in many cases recovering from trauma and exploitation without the support that Parliament, the European Union and the United Nations have all decided they need. Trafficked and separated asylum-seeking children in Scotland have benefited from similar services for several years and will soon do so on a statutory basis. Northern Ireland is also moving forward on this. However, here in England and Wales, where we have responsibility for the majority of trafficked children, we are lagging behind.

I hope to hear today when the Minister plans to commence section 48 of the Modern Slavery Act to make independent child trafficking advocates available for every trafficked child in England and Wales, because vulnerable trafficked children across the country—more than 1,000 kids—have been left without this support. We urgently need to make such support available on a wider basis.

Oral Answers to Questions

Ann Coffey Excerpts

Monday 11th April 2016 Commons Chamber

[Karen Bradley]

I thank my hon. Friend for his support for the response unit, which will deliver significant benefits by assisting local areas experiencing particular issues and/or high volumes of child sexual exploitation cases, by offering a range of support, including advice from expert practitioners who have first-hand experience of tackling child sexual exploitation.

[Ann Coffey (Stockport) (Lab)]

Going missing can be an indicator that a child or young person is being exploited by organised gangs to traffic drugs across county lines. What more can be done to ensure that police forces work together and share information on missing children in order to combat the criminal exploitation of young people?

[Karen Bradley]

The hon. Lady, who has incredible expertise in this area, is absolutely right; we need police forces to take this seriously and recognise that a missing child is a child who is being exploited while they are missing. There is therefore a fantastic opportunity for intelligence gathering and safeguarding those children to stop them going missing in future.

Policing and Crime Bill

Ann Coffey Excerpts

Monday 7th March 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mrs May]

If I may, I will make a little more progress on this issue. In two instances—pre-charge bail and detention under the Mental Health Act 1983—we need to take action to ensure we get the balance right. Part 4 therefore contains a number of important reforms to police powers. In the case of pre-charge bail, it is apparent that a significant number of individuals have spent an inordinate amount of time on bail only to end up not being charged or, if charged, found not guilty. Of course, the police and prosecution need time to assemble and test the evidence, particularly in complex cases, before coming to a charging decision, but we need to recognise the stress caused when people are under investigation for prolonged periods, and the disruption to their lives where they are subject to onerous bail conditions.

[Ann Coffey (Stockport) (Lab)]

I welcome the provision in clause 53 to increase safeguards for 17-year-olds, in recognition of the fact that they need to be treated as children when in police detention. However, there is also a strong argument for heavier sentences for adults who have been convicted of sexual assaults against 16 and 17-year-olds who, although over the age of consent, are still children in law. Will the Home Secretary consider that proposal?

[Mrs May]

The hon. Lady raises an interesting point. However, it is possible that the age of the individual can be used as an aggravating factor in relation to dealing with the offence, so it can be taken into account in the case of somebody who is 16 or 17.

Before coming specifically to the issue of mental health, I will deal with the bail proposals. To address the legitimate concerns that have been raised about the current arrangements, the Bill introduces a number of safeguards. First, it creates a presumption that a suspect will be released without bail conditions attached. Secondly, where it is necessary and proportionate to release on bail, this would normally last no longer than 28 days. Thirdly, if this initial period needs to be extended, it can be extended only up to three months on the authority of a superintendent, and any subsequent extension, for a maximum of three months at a time, must be authorised by a magistrates court. The Bill provides for a special procedure in complex cases, such as those investigated by the Serious Fraud Office, but the requirement that prolonged periods of pre-charge bail, and any conditions attached to that bail, are subject to judicial approval is clearly established in primary legislation.

The Government are committed to ensuring better outcomes for people with mental health problems. Those experiencing a mental health crisis and who present a danger to themselves or to others need rapid support and care from mental health professionals. They do not need locking up in a police cell for up to 72 hours.

Over the past couple of years, significant strides have been made in reducing the instances where police cells are used as places of safety, but we must do more. The amendments to the Mental Health Act 1983 will ensure that police cells can never be used as a place of safety for children and young people under 18, and that they are used only in genuinely exceptional circumstances in the case of adults.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mrs May]

Despite what I said earlier, I apologise to my hon. Friend, but I need to make some progress. [Interruption.] The fickleness of woman!

Let me turn to the question of firearms. This coming Sunday will mark 20 years since the appalling murder of 16 children and a teacher at Dunblane Primary School. I am sure the whole House will want to join me in sending our deepest sympathies to those who lost loved ones and to the survivors of that terrible day. We are also reminded of the importance of firearms legislation in helping to prevent such events from happening again.

In this country, we have some of the toughest firearms controls in the world. It is no coincidence that the number of homicides and other crimes involving firearms is relatively low, but we must remain vigilant. Where there is clear evidence of loopholes in the law that can be exploited by terrorists and criminals, we must act to plug the gaps. The provisions in part 6 are directed towards that end.

After extensive consultation, the Law Commission has made a number of carefully considered recommendations for tightening up the firearms Acts. It is simply no longer sustainable, for example, to have uncertainty around what constitutes an antique firearm. The Bill therefore defines that and other terms so that it is clear when firearms, and their component parts, are subject to the controls under the firearms Acts. We are also introducing statutory guidance for police forces on the exercise of their licensing functions under the firearms Acts. That will ensure that the law is consistently applied and all appropriate checks are undertaken when considering someone’s suitability to hold a firearm or shotgun certificate.

Finally, part 8 strengthens the enforcement of financial sanctions, which are important foreign policy and national security tools. The effective implementation and enforcement of financial sanctions are vital to their success. To this end, the Bill increases from two to seven years’ imprisonment the maximum sentence that can be imposed following a criminal conviction for a breach offence, introduces new civil monetary penalties and extends the availability of deferred prosecution agreements and serious crime prevention orders.

[Ann Coffey]

Will the Secretary of State give way?

[Mrs May]

If the hon. Lady will excuse me, I am virtually at the end of my speech, and I wish to finish.

Part 8 also introduces a mechanism to ensure that UN-mandated sanctions can be implemented without delay to minimise the opportunities for the dissipation of assets before new sanctions regimes come into force, and to help the UK comply with its international obligations.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mrs May]

The statement that I made about crime falling is based on the independent crime survey of England and Wales. That shows clearly that crime has fallen since 2010 by more than a quarter. What we are now doing is recognising that certain types of crime have not been fully recorded in the past. Cybercrime did not suddenly start in May 2015. Cybercrime and fraud took place under the last Labour Government as well as under subsequent Governments. We are now recording those figures and ensuring that they are available to the public. I welcome the fact that we are being open with people about different sorts of crimes that have been committed in the past but were hidden under the last Labour Government.

[Ann Coffey]

Will the Secretary of State give way?

[Mrs May]

I am virtually on my last sentence. The Bill will continue the Government’s commitment to reform public services, not for the sake of it but to deliver more responsive, accountable police forces that continue to cut crime and keep our communities safe. I commend the Bill to the House.

Gangs and Serious Youth Violence

Ann Coffey Excerpts

Thursday 3rd March 2016 Commons Chamber

[Ann Coffey (Stockport) (Lab)]

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Streatham (Mr Umunna) for securing this important debate and for his excellent speech, which outlined the complexities and difficulties of the subject. It is a privilege to follow the powerful contribution of my hon. Friend the Member for Westminster North (Ms Buck).

I want to focus on the phenomenon of “county lines”, whereby urban, criminal gangs groom and coerce children and young people into selling class A drugs, particularly heroin and crack cocaine. Young people travel many miles from their home, often to quiet market and seaside towns where they are set up to deal drugs, sometimes from the home of a vulnerable person.

Last July, I attended the launch of the first major report on county lines, entitled “Running the risks: the links between gang involvement and young people going missing”, which was published jointly by Catch22 and Missing People. A month later, the National Crime Agency produced an intelligence assessment that said that county lines affect “most forces”, and almost always involve the exploitation of vulnerable people. It said that children are used

“as they are inexpensive, easily controlled and less likely to be detected by police”.

In January, the Home Office published a report entitled “Ending gang violence and exploitation”, which highlighted the fact that gangs have wised up to police tactics and are operating more covertly, making it harder for the police to disrupt activity and safeguard vulnerable people. The reports also state that young girls are groomed for involvement in criminal behaviour and harmful sexual behaviour as part of the gang culture. Indeed, the recent Rotherham trial showed the connection between organised crime and drugs, and child sexual exploitation.

We do not yet know the scale of the county lines problem, and where it is discovered, agencies are not clear how to deal with it. I have been told about children from Greater Manchester who have been found selling drugs in flats in seaside and other provincial towns, including some as far away as Devon. Children are used to reduce the risk to older gang members, and they may go unnoticed by local police, particularly if they have no record of offending. The gang leaders are rather like modern-day Fagins or Bill Sikes—hard men who groom youngsters and then use them to do their dirty work. There is serious under-recognition of the county lines phenomenon, which I believe is the next big grooming scandal.

Just as with children groomed for child sexual exploitation, we must recognise that young people drawn into criminality and drug dealing have, in the first instance, been groomed and manipulated. Those young people end up being charged with criminal offences, which gives them the same relationship with the law as the adults who groomed them. That leaves them vulnerable to further exploitation, and they continue to be victims at the same time as offending. That must be seen in the context of organised crime and the systematic grooming of young people. Often, those at the centre are long-term hardened criminals.

The Catch22 report stressed the link between gang involvement and young people going missing, and said that too often the young people are criminalised rather than safeguarded. It said that, although missing incidents for children and young people are generally under-reported, that is particularly acute for those involved in gangs. It presented evidence of gang-involved children and young people being placed into care miles away from their home town, with little care planning or support, leaving them vulnerable to getting drawn back into gangs. An additional issue with county lines is that the young people involved may often be aged between 16 and 18. According to the Children’s Society, there is evidence of massive under-reporting of young people who go missing in that age group.

Understanding of county lines is developing at a national level, and the use of young vulnerable people to traffic drugs across county lines is flagged up as a major issue by practitioners. Organisations that work to turn young people away from gang crime—most notably the St Giles Trust, a charity in London that works with young people to break the cycle of offending—have been dealing with the issue for some time and have harrowing stories to share. I was told by the St Giles Trust that young people are using the plastic container from Kinder Egg toys to transport drugs inside their own bodies—a serious risk to their health. It is hard to imagine a more graphic metaphor for the perversion of childhood. The trust also told me about young girls dressed in school uniform who are being used to mule drugs because they are unlikely to be stopped and searched. The age at which young people get involved with gangs is concerning. There have been reports of cases in London involving children as young as nine, and the trust gave at least one example of a child aged 12 being involved in county lines.

Increasingly, there are stories about gangs setting up their own young members to be robbed en route. They are then told that they must work off the debt by trafficking and selling drugs for free, or by engaging in sex. That is nothing less than slavery. The threat of child sexual exploitation for girls involved in gangs is known, but the added factor of being trafficked to remote locations compounds their vulnerability. Those young people are at risk of physical violence, sexual exploitation, and emotional and physical abuse. That model of grooming arguably involves both trafficking and modern slavery.

These children are seen as “bad kids” who have chosen a criminal lifestyle. For example, a national newspaper recently reported a court case involving a 13-year-old Manchester boy who was sent to Barrow in Cumbria by a criminal gang and set up as a heroin and crack cocaine dealer. There was a quote saying that police said the boy “revelled” in his role as a “little gangster”. He was a child.

The recent Home Office report indicates that we still have some way to go in tackling county lines. Action is needed at national level to set out clearly where responsibility lies within law enforcement for detecting and disrupting county lines, and how information should be shared with local authorities and safeguarding boards so that when young people are found they are supported in an appropriate manner.

We need to know the scale of involvement of vulnerable young people in county lines. I asked a number of parliamentary questions to try to establish numbers. The Home Office Minister responded that, because the National Crime Agency does not conduct county lines operations, it does not hold that information. We also need to know how much use is being made of anti-trafficking legislation and modern slavery laws to charge older gang members with grooming younger members. Finally, we need to know how best to support those young people once they have been found.

The police should be using data on missing episodes, and cross-referencing that with information about possible gang involvement, not only to understand trends, but to take an early intervention approach, and to try to disrupt involvement early after missing incidents. I offer the Minister a practical suggestion that would help to disrupt the grooming of children and young people to sell drugs at that early stage. Currently, numerous civil orders are available to the police to combat grooming for child sexual exploitation, including sexual risk orders, sexual harm prevention orders, and child abduction warning notices. I would like similar orders to be created, to be used where children are being groomed by organised criminals and gangs to act as drug runners. Perhaps they could be called “Fagin orders”.

Many children who are initially groomed into criminal activity are often then groomed for sexual exploitation; alternatively, they are initially groomed for child sexual exploitation, and then for criminal purposes. The two forms of exploitation are often inextricably linked, and young people are reluctant and frightened to disclose either. Return interviews with children who have gone missing are an important source of establishing the risk to the young person, and of gathering information about their associates and intelligence about county lines. It is important that that information is used for safeguarding by police and children’s services.

When young people are found and arrested after involvement in county lines, the approach from agencies should be holistic. The St Giles Trust has suggested a pilot in which their caseworkers—who are ex-offenders—accompany police on targeted raids and immediately offer support to the young people, who are more likely to listen to those who have been in the same situation.

To conclude I will return to the point I made at the beginning of my remarks: we must learn from the child sexual exploitation scandals that have ruined so many lives, and we cannot afford to make the same mistakes again, blaming young people, saying that they have made their own bed, failing to ask the right questions, and failing to respond even when we know what is going on. Missing People has been working with a mother whose son started going missing aged 12 and was being groomed by a gang to sell drugs away from home in a county lines operation. The mother was desperate not to lose her son to that, and always reported it every time he went missing. It took her six months to receive any support from services. How can that be right? The boy repeatedly went missing for periods ranging from overnight to up to three months. He ended up being taken into care and had numerous distance placements.

We need a response to county lines that ensures that children are found, safeguarded and supported out of gangs, and that the adults who groom and manipulate them are punished to the full extent of the law. Until then, it will continue to be the young victims who are blamed and punished, as their abusers and puppet masters continue with a trade that nets them thousands of pounds a day.

Sexual Exploitation: Protection of 16 and 17-year-olds

Ann Coffey Excerpts

Thursday 17th December 2015 Commons Chamber

[Ann Coffey (Stockport) (Lab)]

It is a great pleasure to follow the hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton), who did so much excellent work as children’s Minister to tackle child sexual exploitation.

“Old enough to know better?” is, indeed, a thought-provoking report by the Children’s Society, which has long been concerned about the vulnerability of this age group. It should be congratulated on its campaigning work in this area.

The last Parliament saw high-profile child sexual exploitation cases in Rochdale, Rotherham, Oxford and Telford, among other places. The public were shocked as the graphic details of the offences were reported, with children and young people being passed around for sex by groups of men, their plight made worse by the attitude of those working in the agencies charged with protecting them, who regarded them as making a lifestyle choice to exchange sex for gifts.

Those cases led to an increasing awareness of grooming and what constitutes consent, and an examination of the wider issues around child sexual exploitation and vulnerability. They also led to a better understanding of online grooming, sexting, peer-on-peer exploitation, the impact of the digital age on how young people communicate and the pressures that that can place upon them.

The last Government introduced a number of measures, such as the new offence of sexual communication with a child and the reduction in the number of occasions on which the defendant must initially meet or communicate with the child before a prosecution may be brought to only one.

Because of the high-profile cases, child sexual exploitation has been identified predominantly with the exploitation by Asian men of white girls, so some of the more common kinds of sexual exploitation are not well understood, particularly how vulnerable young people can be groomed one-on-one by much older adults, either online or in person, or both, into performing sexual acts in which they feel complicit. Neither is the extent of peer-on-peer sexual exploitation fully appreciated. It is the ruthless exploitation of vulnerability—arising from a craving for love or acceptance, a dependence on drugs or alcohol, a disability or the inexperience and immaturity of childhood—for sex that needs wider understanding if we are really to protect children and young people by holding their exploiters to account.

That brings me to 16 and 17-year-olds. Sixteen is the age of consent to sex in law. A 16-year-old can marry with permission and at 17 a young person can drive. Although children can leave school at 16, they cannot work full time unless they are in part-time education or training. We recently debated in the Houses of Parliament whether 16-year-olds should be able to vote in the European referendum. Those differences reflect our ambivalence in respect of that age group. It is an age at which young people want the right to be respected for the decisions they make on their pathway to independence, but at which they still need protections. That is reflected in the different levels of protection that are offered by the law, which recognises that they are still immature in terms of life experience.

That vulnerability in respect of immaturity and age was recognised in the passing of the amendments by the last Government that consigned the term “child prostitute”, referring to those under 18, to the history books. Those amendments came into force on 3 May 2015. One important implication of those measures is that a child of 16 or 17 can no longer be seen as contracting to sell sexual services. Section 47 of the Sexual Offences Act 2003 clearly recognises in law the vulnerability of this group as a result of their age and makes it clear that alleged consent to specific acts will not be a defence when an offender sexually exploits a child of this age group.

That recognition of the vulnerability of this age group needs to be extended and made explicit elsewhere in the law to make it clear that when a sexual offence of any kind is committed against a 16 or 17-year-old, it will always carry a harsher sentence than if the victim had been an adult. The sentencing guidelines for rape, for instance, list a number of factors that determine the category of the offence for sentencing purposes, one of which is that the

“victim is particularly vulnerable due to personal circumstances”.

Along with mental health issues and disabilities, that has been interpreted to include age, but we need to make its inclusion explicit and unambiguous.

No scope should be left for a 16-year-old to be considered not vulnerable, despite their being a child, when we know that there have been significant problems with professionals and the justice system treating people in this age group as adults or as “resilient” or “asking for it”, particularly when the victim is involved or is seen to be involved in criminal activity. The message should go out to perpetrators loud and clear that if they sexually exploit, abuse or rape a 16 or 17-year-old, they will automatically receive a harsher sentence.

Altering the sentencing guidelines in the way I have outlined and in the ways proposed by the report of the Children’s Society, so as to make the vulnerability of this age group clear and consistent across all sexual offences, is an important first step in strengthening their protection in law. I would hope that something could then be done to decrease the disparity in the starting point for sentencing in cases of rape. If the victim is 15, the sentencing range is eight to 13 years, whereas for a child of 16, the range drops to only six to 11 years. There is no reason to make that distinction for offences such as rape, where the age of consent is clearly not relevant, given that rape cannot be consented to. There is every reason to afford 16 and 17-year-olds the same protection we give to children of a slightly younger age.

Last year, I was asked by Tony Lloyd, the Greater Manchester police and crime commissioner, to undertake an independent inquiry into the work that has been done to tackle CSE in Greater Manchester since the shocking Rochdale case. As I said in the report, which was published last October, we cannot prosecute our way out of the problem of CSE. The report highlighted figures for the previous six years in Greater Manchester, which revealed that there were only about 1,000 convictions out of 13,000 reported cases of nine major sexual offences against under-16s.

We know that there is under-reporting of sex crimes against 16 and 17-year-olds because victims are frightened that they will not be believed or because they feel complicit or ashamed. As the “Old enough to know better?” report shows, the police received 4,900 reports of sexual offences against this age group last year, but the crime survey for England and Wales shows that an estimated 50,000 girls alone said that they had been victims. In the last year, Greater Manchester police recorded 311 sexual offence cases against 16 and 17-year-olds, but I believe that there is a much higher level of offending.

Children who are sexually exploited can suffer lifelong harm and everybody agrees that prevention has to be the goal. By the time of prosecution, it is already too late for that particular child, and yet they have to face delays in cases coming to court and challenging and sometimes bullying cross examination, which can add further to their trauma.

Therefore, an important part of the strategy of tackling CSE must be better prevention. To ensure that that happens, we need to listen to children and young people about their experience of the world and support them to inform other young people. We need to build on a new approach to preventing CSE that is spearheaded by young people themselves. One of the things that young people told me again and again was how they valued talking to their peers, because they felt that their peers understood the pressures they faced.

My central proposal was for a multimedia digital network led by young people to spearhead the fightback against CSE, including a high-profile weekly radio show on CSE-related issues produced and hosted by young people. It is a peer mentoring session, writ large. We now have a very successful weekly radio show on CSE on Unity Radio. For two hours on a Thursday evening, this dance and urban music radio station is taken over by 11 to 16-year-olds for the “Next Gen Youths” show, which has serious but accessible discussions on child sexual exploitation, led by young people. The strapline of the NGY show is

“helping young people lead safer and happier lives”.

Its aim is to spread awareness of CSE so that young listeners are better able to understand what a healthy relationship is. The shows have included discussions on what grooming is, how fashion is part of CSE and how pop stars influence the way in which young people dress. Greater Manchester is also developing an app, funded by a Home Office grant, called CTZN, which is a mobile-based digital platform created by and for young people.

Educating young people and effecting a sea change in culture is the only way forward. I believe that all those initiatives show that Greater Manchester is one of the leaders in the fightback against CSE. Public attitudes are fundamental to the protection of children and young people, but the criminal justice system is key in reflecting our attitudes to children and young people. We know that 16 and 17-year-olds are a difficult and challenging age group, but we must understand that during those two years, they often inhabit a dangerous twilight world between childhood and adulthood. Their vulnerability needs to be recognised and the clear message needs to go out to sexual predators that if they commit sexual crimes against people of this age group, they will receive a tougher sentence. That is not the solution, but it is an essential part of a wider strategy to tackle the child sexual exploitation of 16 and 17-year-olds.

Child Abuse Inquiry

Ann Coffey Excerpts

Thursday 22nd January 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mrs May]

I think that the hon. Lady has slightly misunderstood my comments on due diligence. Due diligence has already been done, and further due diligence work is being done, so we will not be starting ab initio from the nomination of an individual. Obviously, in getting to the shortlist, a lot of work has been done in terms of the suitability of individuals to undertake this role. So a lot of the work has already been done.

[Ann Coffey (Stockport) (Lab)]

As the Home Secretary will understand, one of the problems identified in past reviews of child abuse cases is that children’s services and police did not always recognise that the children were being sexually exploited. They were often referred to as making lifestyle choices or as child prostitutes. Does she agree that if a lesson is to be learned it is that language is important, and that this place should take the lead in stripping “child prostitution” from all the existing legislation and substituting “child sexual exploitation”, which is what it is?

[Mrs May]

I fully understand the point that the hon. Lady makes. The language of “child prostitution” has come up elsewhere, particularly in the Modern Slavery Bill that is going through the House. She is right: language does matter. But what also matters is the attitude that leads to that language. Using the correct term of “child sexual exploitation” is important. The sort of attitudes that were set out so graphically in Professor Alexis Jay’s report, whereby police and others appeared to take the view that this was the sort of thing that would happen to girls like that, is utterly appalling—a point I have made to the House previously. We cannot allow that attitude to continue, and we must ensure that we take every measure to ensure that those attitudes change.

Serious Crime Bill [Lords]

Ann Coffey Excerpts

Monday 5th January 2015 Commons Chamber

[Ann Coffey (Stockport) (Lab)]

The Serious Crime Bill is an opportunity for Parliament to remove all references to child prostitution from legislation. Britain should lead the world in outlawing the term. That would send out a powerful and unequivocal message, in the wake of the shocking sexual exploitation of children in Derby, Rotherham, Rochdale, Telford, Oxford and Stockport, that there is no such thing as a child prostitute, only a sexually abused or exploited child.

The term “child prostitute” is inappropriate and is an insult to innocent victims who have been robbed of their childhood and then stigmatised and blamed. Sixteen pieces of legislation use the term “child prostitute”, which implies an element of complicity and gives the idea of a consensual contract of a child offering sex in return for gifts or money. It is shameful that the offence of loitering or soliciting for prostitution, contrary to section 1 of the Street Offences Act 1959, as amended by section 16 of the Policing and Crime Act 2009, can still be committed by a child aged 10 or over. There is also an offence of controlling a child prostitute or child involved in pornography. As recently as June 2014, a Bolton man was charged by Greater Manchester police and found guilty of controlling a child prostitute for financial gain.

There can be no doubt that much has been done in recent years to take the word “prostitute” in relation to children out of Government guidance. This is important because language shapes attitudes. However, it is incongruous and wrong that it still remains in statute. I hope that there will be support across the House for the amendments I plan to table to the Bill, which will consign the term “child prostitution” to the history books, together with amendments that will make it much harder for defendants to argue consent in cases of child sexual exploitation. There has been a significant cultural shift away from talking about child prostitution to talking about child exploitation. Underlying that change is the acknowledgment that a child cannot consent to exchanging sex for financial gain. Removing references to child prostitution in legislation is the final piece of the jigsaw.

It seems surprising now that up until only six years ago the sexual exploitation of children was still being referred to as child prostitution in statutory guidance. Fresh guidance in 2009 was entitled “Safeguarding Children and Young People from Sexual Exploitation”, whereas previous guidance in 2000 had been entitled “Safeguarding Children Involved in Prostitution”. The 2009 guidance stated:

“Sexually exploited children should not be regarded as criminals and the primary law enforcement response must be directed at perpetrators who groom children for sexual exploitation.”

However, the offences referring to child prostitution still remained on the statute book and that affects attitudes. Describing a young person as a child prostitute means they are not seen as victims and their sexual abuse is seen as self-inflicted. Those attitudes were identified in the Rochdale overview report in December 2013. Social workers talked about the victims making “lifestyle choices”. One Rochdale father described being told by social workers that his daughter was a “child prostitute”.

Figures provided by the House of Commons Library for my recent report, “Real Voices: child sexual exploitation in Greater Manchester”, which was commissioned by Tony Lloyd, the police and crime commissioner for Greater Manchester, show that between 1992 and 1996 there were 1,449 cautions—about 300 a year—for prostitution by under-18-year-olds, and 976 court proceedings for loitering or soliciting for the purposes of prostitution under the Street Offences Act 1959. In the four years between 2010 and 2013, 15 cautions were issued to juveniles under the age of 18 and seven defendants under the age of 18 were proceeded against. Of those seven defendants, three were found guilty but none was imprisoned. Last year, there were five cautions for prostitution-related offences for those aged 15 to 17. Two were proceeded against and found guilty.

The figures show that attitudes are changing, but it is wrong that we still have legislation referring to child prostitution on the statute books because of the message it sends out. Referring to a young person as a child prostitute fuels old-fashioned attitudes that have done so much harm to children over the years, because it feeds the idea that the child is in some way to blame for their own abuse. Even now, Crown Prosecution Service guidelines state that children should generally be treated as victims of sexual abuse, but still add that

“only where there is a persistent and voluntary return to prostitution and where there is a genuine choice should a prosecution be considered.”

It is vital that wider cultural attitudes be tackled and changed if we are to protect children and young people from sexual exploitation. We have seen how the culture at the time protected well-known, high-profile people, including celebrities such as Jimmy Savile. Young people are still too often blamed for being a victim of crime. Police, social workers and prosecutors and juries made up of ordinary people all carry attitudes around with them, and language used in legislation heavily influences those attitudes. The more people I spoke to during my inquiry into child sexual exploitation in Greater Manchester, the more I realised that although we can come up with more effective ways of working for agencies, the most important thing we can do to protect children is to tackle the cultural attitudes that cocoon sex exploiters and enable them to get away with what they are doing under our noses. There has been a sea change in the public’s attitude towards same-sex relationships, the decriminalisation of which was an important step in effecting changes in attitudes. We must effect the same change in attitudes to the sexual exploitation of children.

In 2012, the Office of the Children’s Commissioner interim report on sexual exploitation in gangs and groups, “I thought I was the only one. The only one in the world”, called for a Government review of all legislation and guidance that made reference to children as prostitutes or as involved in prostitution. In June 2013, the Home Affairs Committee, chaired by my right hon. Friend the Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz), produced a report entitled, “Child sexual exploitation and the response to localised grooming”, which supported all of the OCC recommendations. In 2012, I chaired a joint all-party group report on children missing from care that called for changes to schedule 5 to the Children’s Homes Regulations 2001. We recommend that the obligation on homes to notify agencies of

“Involvement or suspected involvement of a child accommodated at the home in prostitution”

be changed to

“suspicion that a child accommodated in a home is at risk of abuse or child sexual exploitation”.

I am pleased that that has now been done.

In 2012, in “Out of place: The policing and criminalisation of sexually exploited girls and young women”, the Howard League for Penal Reform highlighted the importance of language:

“To speak of girls and young women’s involvement in prostitution without also stating that they are emotionally, physically or economically coerced is now the same as saying ‘girls and young women’s involvement in their own abuse’. To state that they are involved in prostitution is regarded as denial that they are being abused.”

In April 2013, the Barnardo’s report, “Report of the Parliamentary inquiry into the effectiveness of legislation for tackling child sexual exploitation and trafficking within the UK”, chaired by my hon. Friend the Member for Rotherham (Sarah Champion), also recommended the removal of all references to child prostitution in legislation, as did the report I produced last October.

The Government support the principle that the phrase “child prostitute” should not be used, and Sara Thornton, the chief constable of Thames Valley police, said:

“We try not to use the term child prostitute and our absolute aim is that we don’t use it. I think that if Parliament were to set the standard and say we’re thinking of new legislation and we don’t have the term child prostitute in the legislation, I think that would be a good step.”

The office of Simon Bailey, the chief constable of Norfolk constabulary, who is the national lead for child protection and abuse investigation, said:

“It is our opinion that the term Child Prostitution is no longer appropriate and does not truly reflect acts which should always be considered as Child Abuse. Child Prostitution implies complicity by the child when they should only be considered as a victim.”

I agree. The continued use of the term by the criminal justice system gives out the wrong messages to those who are being abused, the adults who abuse them and the general public. It could be argued that those offences involving child prostitution are so little used that it is immaterial that they remain offences. However, I would argue that as long as they remain on the statute book, they influence attitudes to consent, which defence lawyers exploit, and are a barrier to a better understanding and awareness of the nature of sexual exploitation of children. It is shameful to us all that the term “child prostitute” remains in law. It is an outdated insult to victims, many of whose lives have been ruined. It is inappropriate. No one believes it any longer. It is plain wrong and it should go.