Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many and what proportion of children referred into the national referral mechanism have not received an independent child trafficking guardian direct worker or regional practice coordinator in all quarters for the period of Quarter 1 2017 to Quarter 3 2020 by local authority area.

The Home Office has rolled out Independent Child Trafficking Guardians (ICTGs), an independent source of advice for trafficked children, in one-third of local authorities across England and Wales. ICTGs provide one-to-one support for children who have no one with parental responsibility for them in the UK via an ICTG Direct Worker. They also provide an expert ICTG Regional Practice Co-ordinator (RPC), first introduced in October 2018, for children where there is someone with parental responsibility for them in the UK.

A staggered approach has been adopted in the delivery of ICTGs, together with built-in evaluations to ensure the delivery of the correct ICTG model. Data tables published in October 2020 as part of the Assessment of Independent Child Trafficking Guardians – Regional Practice Co-ordinators: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/an-analysis-of-independent-child-trafficking-guardians show how ICTG referrals have increased since 2017, split by local authority area. This data covers the period from Q1 2017 – Q4 2019. The Home Office does not hold data on children not referred to the ICTG service by local authority area.

The Home Office publishes statistics on NRM referrals on a quarterly basis, reports from Q2 2019 – Q3 2020 can be found here: https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/national-referral-mechanism-statistics.

Reports from 2018 and 2017 can be found here respectively:

https://nationalcrimeagency.gov.uk/who-we-are/publications/282-national-referral-mechanism-statistics-end-of-year-summary-2018/file and; https://nationalcrimeagency.gov.uk/who-we-are/publications/159-modern-slavery-and-human-trafficking-national-referral-mechanism-statistics-annual-report-2017/file.

The NRM and ICTG data is held separately; it is not one linked dataset.

The Home Office does not hold data on Looked After Children that do not receive support from the ICTG service. On this basis, we cannot provide any details on how many and what proportion of Looked After Children have been not been allocated an Independent Child Trafficking Guardian Direct Worker.