Immigration Bill

Baroness Neville-Rolfe Excerpts

Monday 7th April 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Dubs (Lab)]

My Lords, I support the amendment with great enthusiasm and want to comment briefly on an interesting point made by the noble Lord, Lord McColl, and possibly by others as well. I serve on a committee of the British-Irish Parliamentary Assembly and towards the end of last autumn we produced a report on people trafficking. We covered all the jurisdictions—that is, England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland, and indeed the Republic of Ireland—and one thing that came through very clearly was that children who are taken into care because they appear to have been trafficked too often disappear from their local authority care home. Nothing seems to be done about that. It may be that the numbers are small, and I very much hope that they are, but surely it is extremely serious if a child in such a vulnerable position is taken into what seems to be a safe environment and then disappears, presumably—we can only suspect this—because the traffickers have discovered where the child is and have persuaded, induced or compelled him or her to abscond. There appears to be no system—I may be wrong but my committee could not discover one—whereby local authorities are diligent enough to try to find out what is happening to these children. They may have done so from time to time but there seems to be a gap in what is going on. Therefore I look to the amendment in the realistic hope that a child trafficking guardian would use influence to lessen the likelihood of children disappearing from local authority care homes.

On the noble Lord’s point about the cost implication if a child is moved from one local authority to another, I do not understand why a child in the care of a local authority, with no obvious parents to care for him or her, would be moved from one local authority care home to another, although it might happen. Nor can I see a good reason why a child should leave the country, as has also been suggested. If a child is vulnerable and in care, surely everything must be done to ensure that the child’s well-being is looked after totally and that the child would be enabled to leave the country only if there were a proper basis for him or her to be looked after elsewhere; otherwise we are simply saying, “We are washing our hands of this child and never mind what happens to it”. Surely we would never dream of doing that.

I look at the amendment to see to what extent it will meet the need that I have just described. I think that, by and large, it would. It does not quite spell it out as clearly as I would like, but if we had a child trafficking guardian and the child was in a local authority care home, the guardian would know that the child was there and keep an eye on him. If the child were to disappear, the guardian would surely be among the first to ask, “What has happened? All steps must be taken to find the child”. Above all, it would help the local authority care home and the social workers to develop a better system so that children could not easily be induced or compelled away, or whatever happens to them. Even if the numbers are small, we are dealing with a serious problem. We always thought that once a child was in a care home the child was safe. I hope that this amendment, if passed, will make such children a little safer.

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

I had not intended to speak but I was concerned to hear about some of the disturbing individual cases of bad practice described by noble Lords.

Surely the prime public policy need is better enforcement by the police, supported by social services, of anti-child-trafficking laws and penalties to prevent these awful things happening. Does an adequate framework for such enforcement exist? This issue is highly relevant to Amendment 55A.

The issues would be better discussed and tackled separately in legislation that can look at both issues—perhaps in the draft modern slavery Bill. We should also take time to properly review the proposed provisions. I noted the well informed comments of the noble Baroness, Lady Howarth, about the role of volunteers and the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, about costs. For these reasons we should not burden the Immigration Bill with this complex new issue but seek to find a way forward to consider it.

[Lord Cormack (Con)]

My Lords, we have clearly got to find a way forward. As my noble friend Lady Neville-Rolfe has just briefly and succinctly said, the question is whether it fits better into this Bill or into the anti-slavery Bill.

There is no more despicable thing than to exploit a child. One’s mind goes back to when I had the great good fortune in 1982 to be commissioned to write a short life of William Wilberforce to commemorate the 150th anniversary of his death and the 150th anniversary of the abolition of slavery throughout the British dominions in 1983. In researching that book I became totally convinced that William Wilberforce was indeed the greatest Back-Bencher in our history. He was a man who never held office of any sort and yet campaigned brilliantly and persistently over decades, first, to achieve the abolition of the slave trade in 1807 and then, over a quarter of a century later, the abolition of slavery itself. He heard the news of the passing of that Bill as he lay dying in his home.

That of course did not end the sort of social evils against which he had campaigned, and we all remember Fagin, the fictional character of Dickens, and how Mr Brownlow came to the rescue of Oliver Twist. We also remember the writings of Henry Mayhew in the articles under the heading, “London Labour and the London Poor”. I often think that we could do with a Mayhew and a Dickens today to point the moral and adorn the tale, as it were, by graphically describing the sort of evils to which my noble friend Lord McColl, the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, and the noble Baroness, Lady Royall of Blaisdon, have referred during the debate.