Human Trafficking (Further Provisions and Support for Victims) Bill [HL]

Baroness Butler-Sloss Excerpts

Friday 25th November 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Butler-Sloss]

My Lords, I declare an interest as the co-chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Human Trafficking. I support the Bill and I make no apology for also talking about Clause 9, which relates to the legal advocate.

This Bill is necessary, despite the good intentions of government. I congratulate the Government on signing the European Convention and the European Union directive and, even more, on their policy, including the important support of the Prime Minister.

Much of what is required in the directive is in our legislation and, in theory at least, in our practice, but there remains much more to be done. There are real issues over implementation of policy, and the Government may be oversanguine in their belief that they have done enough. I would suggest that the devil is in the detail.

There are 2.4 million people who are trafficked around the world. Human trafficking is the second most valuable illegal trade in the world and is worth billions of pounds. My greatest concern, from my own background, is in trafficked children. The noble Lord, Lord McColl, gave some details, but I shall add a few more.

From January to September of this year, 202 children were identified as trafficked: 67 from all parts of Africa; 50 from eastern Europe, mainly Romania, Slovakia and Bulgaria; 22 from other regions; and 63 from Asia, mainly from Vietnam. Your Lordships have already heard about Vietnamese children coming to this country. Why do they come? They are mainly boys who go into rented accommodation where the house has been stripped and turned into a cannabis factory. There are over 3,000 cannabis factories in London and something like 7,000 factories identified across the United Kingdom, most of them staffed by Vietnamese boys. It is a real problem because those boys in the factories are taken out by the police and Romanian Roma children are thieving on the streets. I do not know whether noble Lords have heard of “mobile surfers”. The police told me when I went along the Edgware Road with them some time ago that a boy of 12 or so we could see on the street was a mobile surfer. The child would run into a café where young people leave their mobiles on the table, pick one up, run out and go into the next café. They, along with Bulgarian children who steal on London Transport, are the victims rather than the criminals because their traffickers take the money from them. It is very important that we do not see these children as criminals when what in fact they are doing is providing money for their traffickers.

The system of adult victims in this country, although not perfect, is undoubtedly better than that for children. If a child is recognised as a victim, he or she is placed under social services’ care. There is a great danger, as the noble Lord, Lord McColl, pointed out, of a child being retrafficked, and he gave some worrying figures for missing children. The problem is that the social services who take these children in do not necessarily identify them as having been trafficked. My co-chairman of the group, Peter Bone MP, inquired of local authorities how many of them knew that their missing children had been trafficked. I think that only 11 authorities out of those which replied across the whole country knew that the children had actually been trafficked. That is of great concern.

Clause 9 would offer help that is not being provided by social workers. The proposed legal advocate would be able to support and advise children at each stage up to the age of 18. An extremely powerful letter from the ECPAT UK, signed by 25 different organisations including the children’s commissioners, the NSPCC and Barnardo’s, was sent to Tim Loughton, the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Children at the Department for Education, on 14 October this year. It stated that the Government are failing to meet international obligations and that the general child protection services for these children are not sufficient. Child victims of trafficking require independent and dedicated guardians with parental responsibility to look after their educational, medical, practical and legal requirements. Who speaks for these children at the moment? There is a real problem here in that social workers cannot be expected to speak for them across the multiplicity of procedures that they have to go through. What the legal advocate would do is befriend the child, become a person the child could trust, and on the end of a telephone could advise and guide them through all these procedures. As I have said, local authorities mostly do not even know that the children who are missing are trafficked children.

Some of the NGOs, particularly Barnardo’s, offer legal advocates, but the major problem for an NGO in doing so is that the agencies do not recognise that they have any serious influence and do not take any notice of them. What is therefore required in the Bill is a legal advocate either with parental responsibility or with some other authority of which the various agencies would have to take account. Has the Minister looked at the interesting pilot scheme in Scotland where, I think, eight guardians are working in the Glasgow area with what has been so far a real degree of success? Will the Minister look not only at that scheme, but also at those NGOs which are offering advocate services to see whether, as long as they are given sufficient authority that the agencies must listen to them, that could be built on? If the Government do not do this, these children will continue to fall through the system and continue to be denied their absolute basic requirements. Let us face it: these children are victims and they are not receiving the help in this country that they should.