Crime and Courts Bill [HL]

Baroness Butler-Sloss Excerpts

Monday 18th June 2012 Lords Chamber

How the new National Crime Agency is formed and functions will impact the prevention and policing of human trafficking offences and the protection of victims. I fully appreciate that the Government intend for the NCA to have responsibility in the area of trafficking. Mindful of this, they should have no difficulty in setting out this commitment in statute, as does my amendment. Such a commitment would also have the benefit of providing security in the event that a future Minister may not see the current implicit statutory responsibility of the NCA or the UKHTC quite as clearly as the Minister does today. I beg to move.

[Baroness Butler-Sloss]

My Lords, I strongly support these amendments and Amendment 22, to which I assume the noble Baroness, Lady Doocey, will speak in a moment. Two All-Party Groups have today published their Report from the Joint Inquiry into Children who go Missing from Care—I am relieved that it came out today so that I can refer to it. In doing so, I need to declare an interest. At least I hope that it is an interest, because I should at this moment be at the annual general meeting of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Human Trafficking, where I hope the group will decide to retain me as co-chair. However, I thought that it was more important that I should be present here to speak to the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord McColl.

The report from the joint inquiry makes some extremely important and worrying comments and recommendations in relation to trafficked children, many of whom are foreign children trafficked into this country. It has found from having heard a lot of evidence that it is estimated from,

“the patchy and incomplete data that is available on trafficked children”—

which is one of the most worrying aspects of this report—

“that 60% of suspected child victims of trafficking in local authority care go missing”.

The noble Lord, Lord McColl, referred particularly to sexual exploitation, but the finding of the parliamentary groups is that:

“Being exploited for labour is the most common form of exploitation for trafficked children, followed by sexual exploitation, cannabis cultivation, domestic servitude, benefit fraud, street crime and forced marriage. Many of the victims are subject to multiple forms of exploitation”.

Among their key recommendations is:

“A completely new system of reporting incidents of children going missing from care, which combines data from both the police and local authorities”.

Although the Minister might be wondering why on earth I am talking about what he might think is a matter for the Department for Education, this issue affects the NCA just as much it affects local authorities through the Department for Education. One of the major problems is that the police are not given information about children going missing from care homes where they have been placed, either because the local authority does not have that information or because the children are in another local authority which is not the local authority concerned with the children. It is a crying scandal that nobody knows anything about large numbers of missing children in this country except the place from where they went. Those data are not passed to the police. The police must be proactive in finding out what is happening to children.

The figures that local authorities give are peanuts compared with the figures that the police give. Local authorities say that it is about 900; the police think that it is probably about 10,000. Some of those children are trafficked children. I am very concerned that the United Kingdom HTC at Birmingham, which is doing sterling work, does not receive all the relevant data. One of the great problems here is the lack of a national rapporteur, or an equivalent mechanism under Article 19 of the directive. No organisation, even the UKHTC, seems to be given all the relevant information about children and adults who are the victims of trafficking. Data are crucial. The Dutch rapporteur has come to this country from time to time explaining how, in Holland, she is responsible for all the data, which she can give to the relevant police authorities. That is an extremely important aspect.

Amendments 3A and 3B—and, indeed, Amendment 22—would remind the NCA of an overriding obligation to deal with one of the most important and worrying crimes in this country, which is the receipt of foreign people who are trafficked and the internal trafficking of our own children. The police need to be proactive. The NCA needs to make sure that police, right down the scale, are aware, so that if they see a child in an odd situation, they should find out whether that child is missing from a care home or foster home or, perhaps more importantly, wonder whether the child is a trafficked child.

The point made by the parliamentary group is that most child victims go missing within one week of being in care, often before being registered; and almost two-thirds of trafficked children are never found. One reason that the non-British trafficked children go missing from care is that they have been groomed by their traffickers not to let anybody in this country know about it, either because they are frightened of the police or, much more likely, because they have been threatened with what may happen to their families. They are not immediately obvious, but that does not mean that we do not have, and that the NCA should not have, an absolute obligation to seek out those children and adults who are in a similar position—in particular, if I may come back to it, to deal with the inadequate and patchy data. That is something that the NCA should have responsibility for in passing all the information it has to the UKHTC in Birmingham, if that is the best place.

I wonder whether the Government should rethink where national data should be placed to ensure that they are all produced—what CEOP, the NRM and everyone else, in particular local authorities which may end up with information about the children they take, have. The Department for Education should be working much more closely with the Ministry of Justice, police and local authorities. I believe that the only way in which it will work more closely is if it is stated in primary legislation what should be done.

[Baroness Doocey]

My Lords, regarding Amendment 22, I am concerned at the failure of the Bill to deal adequately with the problems of child trafficking. I was also concerned at Second Reading that the Minister’s only reference to child-related crime was a mention of the exploitation of children for sexual purposes. This is not the same as child trafficking; the two are separate issues and dealing with one does not necessarily deal with the other.

Because the Bill is silent on child trafficking, it is unclear where responsibility is going to lie. Will it be with CEOP or the new operational command for border policing and immigration crime, or will it be divided between the two? I very much agree with the comments made by the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, that the difficulty is we really need something that deals exclusively with children. The ideal solution would be the establishment of a child-focused operational command within the NCA that could deal with all problems pertaining to child-related crime, including all forms of child trafficking and child exploitation.

Amendment 22 would not force the NCA to establish such an operational command since that is clearly a policy decision. However putting the words “child trafficking” on the face of the Bill would make it abundantly clear that this was a prime duty that the NCA had to address.

From the official statistics, which are woefully inadequate, we know for certain that in the past two years more than 600 children were trafficked into the UK. However, this is likely to be the tip of the iceberg because it is almost impossible to get the real figures. One reason for this is because trafficking legislation requires evidence sometimes called double intent, which means that it is necessary to prove both an intent to transport and an intent to exploit. Often, evidence exists of one or the other, but seldom both. For example, trafficking legislation cannot be used if a child arrives in UK with an adult but there is no evidence to prove that the same adult will exploit the child during its time in the UK. Such cases are usually prosecuted under immigration legislation. They are then not recorded as child trafficking, they do not go into the official statistics, and the official figures therefore hugely underestimate the problem.

The types of child exploitation are varied. Domestic servitude is a major issue and always has been, but looking after cannabis plants—I think it is called “cultivation”—is a major issue for children, particularly those brought in from Vietnam. Vietnam has consistently ranked in the top two countries for child referrals since 2009 when the national referral mechanism began. Despite this, there has not been a single prosecution under UK law for the trafficking of children for forced labour in cultivating cannabis, although Vietnamese children are regularly arrested and prosecuted in the UK for drug-related offences.

I urge the Committee to support this amendment. If we can get the words “child trafficking” on the face of the Bill, it will elevate the problem to a major responsibility of the NCA and something that has to be taken very seriously, that cannot be split between different operational commands and cannot just be pushed to one side. This is a very serious problem and it needs to be seriously addressed.

--- Later in debate ---

Within the NCA, CEOP will have full access to the entire range of operational tools that will be at the agency’s disposal to prevent harm to children in the UK and abroad, and to disrupt the activities of those who wish to abuse or exploit them. CEOP will also benefit from the relationships that will be developed with partners from the police service and the wider law enforcement community through tasking, co-ordination and mutual assistance. Indeed, we believe that the need to protect children from exploitation, trafficking and abuse will drive many aspects of the NCA’s work, and the whole agency will therefore be brought under the new statutory duty.

[Baroness Butler-Sloss]

I am extremely grateful to the Minister for giving way. Will there be any reference, in any documentation such as the framework or anything else of significance for the NCA, to human trafficking?

[Lord Henley]

I refer the noble and learned Baroness, as I did at the beginning, to Clause 8 and its reference to the Children Act, which does not refer to trafficking but makes quite clear that the interests of children should be taken very seriously. That said, I do not believe that it is necessary—this is what I have been trying to explain to the noble and learned Baroness and to the rest of the House—to refer to it specifically in the Bill in the manner she suggests. Further, I take her back to the references that have been made to the EU directive. We believe that we will be compliant with that and it is very important that that is also there.

I see that I must give way again to the noble and learned Baroness.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Butler-Sloss]

I apologise to the Minister, but it is just possible that he misunderstood me. I was asking whether, if these amendments were not accepted, there would be anything—not in primary or indeed in secondary legislation but at least in either the framework or other instructions to the NCA—to make very clear the importance of dealing with the trafficking of children and adults and the other points that we have made so that it was known in writing rather than being a general admonition.

[Lord Henley]

I take the noble and learned Baroness’s point and I will certainly consider a specific reference when it comes to the framework documents. I was dealing with what was in the Bill, which I think is very important due to the reason that I set out—the changing nature of crime. For example, 10 or 15 years ago we had never heard of cybercrime. Now we have. Things change and move on and the danger of listing things in primary legislation in the manner that she suggests is that it may confine us unnecessarily and is not the best way of dealing with these matters.

I hope that those assurances are sufficient for my noble friend to feel able to withdraw his amendment. We might want to have further words and noble Lords and noble Baronesses might want to see more in due course, but for the moment I hope that he is satisfied. I await what he has to say with interest.