Children in Care

Fiona Mactaggart Excerpts

Thursday 7th January 2016 Commons Chamber

[Fiona Mactaggart (Slough) (Lab)]

I agree with the focus of this debate. Sadly, our care system in Slough has not protected children effectively, and I am particularly sad that the Children’s Services Trust, which the Government set up to improve services, has apparently not done so very effectively. The Minister will be aware of a case involving a two-year-old, about which I have written to the Secretary of State. I would like to see better monitoring of Children’s Services Trusts from the centre.

I wish to shoehorn into this debate the issue of children who are not in the care system but who are not able to remain safely at home with their family or extended family. If we do not include those children, we will fail to address some of the urgent issues in this regard. Specifically, I want to raise the matter of trafficked children, particularly children who are trafficked across borders, as, according to a recent Home Office commissioned report, they are more isolated from protective networks than their internally trafficked counterparts.

The Government published that report as a result of the pilot they introduced on child trafficking advocates. It was only after intense pressure from Members that they agreed to introduce any system of protection for trafficked children. These are not guardians with legal powers, and the Government only had a pilot of the advocacy system. Unfortunately, despite the fact that a report by the University of Bedfordshire made it quite clear that the pilot had been successful, Barnardo’s has not been commissioned to extend its service, nor has any subsequent service been provided.

I urge the Minister to speak directly to his colleagues in the Home Office to ensure that there is a continuing advocacy or better guardianship provision for these children. I gather that the excuse for not carrying on providing any protection mechanism for them that is worth the name is that children within the advocacy service still disappeared. It is clear from the university report that half the children who disappeared—overwhelmingly, they were Vietnamese children who were trafficked into cannabis farming—disappeared before they had been referred to the advocacy service.

There are clear examples in the report of how advocates worked very hard to protect children who were at risk of disappearing. The fact is that those advocates did not have legal powers and could be ignored by local authorities. In one case, they were unable to persuade the local authority to put a trafficked child in safe accommodation, and the child then disappeared into the hands of a trafficker. In another case, they were unable to persuade a local authority that a child was a child, and it was only because of the determination of the advocacy service that when that child re-entered the healthcare system they were discovered again and re-referred to the Home Office protection system.

I am very concerned indeed that this group of children is falling through the gap, and that the problem is being regarded as an immigration issue rather than a child protection issue. I urge the Minister, in responding to this debate, to say that he is not prepared to tolerate the one bit of the Bedfordshire report that suggested there was no enthusiasm for this process—certain social workers felt that they should have the money rather than child protection advocates. Will he also ensure that, within the month, he will speak to the Home Office about continuing to fund proper child advocacy services, preferably child guardians with legal powers to stop local authorities ignoring those children’s need for protection, so that they, like all other children in Britain, can be properly kept safe?