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Human Trafficking

I do not know whether to refer to my hon. Friend or the hon. Member. Perhaps I should refer to him as something in-between. I thank him for his intervention. The subject is complicated and the word ““missing”” in the phrase, ““children going missing from local authority care”” is slightly confusing. When children go missing, they are often in transit in local authority so-called care. Having been found as victims of trafficking, they are placed in a so-called place of care, but it is not secure, and there is a problem with how secure it should be. If it is too secure, the children are in a prison. Brothels are where many trafficked women are found. The problem, as I am sure the Minister will say, is to obtain sufficient evidence that the women are prepared to make available to enable the police to nail the traffickers. They are terrified of reprisals, they do not speak the language and many of them are in a strange country. There are great complications in nailing traffickers, who are much more nimble than we are. I am grateful for that intervention. The Western Mail reported 35 children missing without trace in major cities in Wales. The Government clearly have a problem with identifying victims of human trafficking. The Crown Prosecution Service should remember that they have a duty to explore all the facts when dealing with young people involved in, for example, cannabis cultivation and other organised crime before they seek a prison sentence. Let us remember what trafficking is. It is the exploitation of making someone do something that they would not want to do if they were fully aware, and of compromising them, duping them and coercing them. The problem is how to distinguish between genuine victims of trafficking and illegal migrants. That recognition is critical because it determines how the Government treat people. Illegal migrants are usually given short shrift and a one-way ticket back to where they came from. The Government have a poor track record on producing meaningful statistics. The problem is that they do not really have any statistics and those that they do have are totally misleading. We were told that the UK Human Trafficking Centre in Sheffield would change all that, so perhaps the Minister could tell us whether it has. Will the Minister tell us when we will have some reliable statistics that bring together the information from the various police and UK Border Agency operations? One can understand that victims of trafficking are a problem for the Government because there is always some doubt about whether people have been genuinely trafficked or whether they knew what they were getting into and are illegal migrants searching for a better way of life. Even with genuine victims, the Government are often reluctant to identify them early enough and decide what to do with them, where they should go, how to fund them and how to help them. Media coverage of Pentameter 2 suggested that an increasing number of British young women are trafficked from one part of the UK to another. Sadly, the sexual exploitation of British young people is nothing new. Operation Glover—a police operation—focused on the internal trafficking of British children, and that is what the media picked up on when reporting on Pentameter 2. Somehow the press completely missed the fact that 13 children from Romania, Nigeria, Brazil, China, Estonia, Afghanistan, Eritrea, Congo and Cameroon were found by Pentameter 2. Two of the children were returned without a welfare assessment and were virtually deported on the spot. In addition, two children went missing within hours of being placed in care. One child was issued with an asylum registration card that contained the details of a false passport given to her by a trafficker even though the police and the UK Human Trafficking Centre both knew that it was fraudulent. UK Border Agency staff who issued the card maintain that they were unable to do anything else even though they knew that the details had been provided to her by traffickers and were totally false. It is clear that the protection response to children cannot be hailed as successful—in that case it was deplorable. Out of the 167 victims discovered by Pentameter 2, how many were provided with legal representation consistent with the Government's obligation under article 12 of the Council of Europe convention on action against human trafficking? Out of the 13 children found, how many were provided with guardians consistent with the Government's obligation under article 10 of the convention? How many of the victims are now in a safe refuge to which traffickers do not have access and how many have agreed to give evidence against their traffickers? Pentameter 2 has achieved 528 arrests, which is a remarkable number, yet we lack specifics. Where did those arrested come from and how many were UK based? Will the Minister put on the official record from which countries they hailed? How many of those 528 have been charged with trafficking offences? It is interesting to note that the figure of 528 that was reported under Pentameter 2 was adjusted in the revised action plan that was announced on the same day, which states that the actual number of traffickers found was not 528 but only 99. Are those 528 individuals separate or have fewer people been charged with multiple crimes? Have there been any successful prosecutions under Pentameter 2, because on 3 July The Guardian reported that there had been 24 successful prosecutions as a result of the operation? In other words, is this massive police crackdown putting traffickers behind bars and if so, how many? Alternatively, are traffickers more nimble with their footwork than the heavy hand of the constabularies acting together with the bureaucracy of the Crown Prosecution Service and the unco-ordinated activities of the UK Border Agency?