Immigration Bill

Lord Dubs Excerpts

Monday 7th April 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Northbourne (CB)]

My Lords, I am not an expert in this field but I have encountered this situation in the context of the enormous number of unaccompanied children who arrive at the port of Dover. As a citizen of Dover and Kent, I declare an interest as a taxpayer there.

The noble Baroness, Lady Howarth, raised the very important issue of the enormous overload of work and pressures under which social workers operate in most, if not all, areas. I want to ask a question of someone, although I do not know whether it should be the Government. Who is going to pay for all this? My question is not so much, “Who is going to pay the guardians?”, because they might do it as volunteers, but if a child is moved from one local authority to another, the cost of caring for that child will move from one local authority to another, and, not unnaturally, local authorities whose services are already under huge pressure are not going to encourage that. How is it all going to work?

[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.