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Borders, Citizenship and Immigration Bill [HL]

I would be sorry if this amendment were not moved, because it is extremely serious. It applies to the application of the Children Act 2004, particularly two aspects of it: first, the arrangements to safeguard and promote the welfare of children and, secondly, to take into account any guidance that has been issued for the safeguarding of children. Various groups of children concern me under the category of immigration. First, there are the immigration detainees who are held in detention centres, many of whom are held for far too long. There is a further amendment discussing the question of detention, so I shall not detain the Committee at this stage on that issue. Secondly, a very large number of people—certainly hundreds and said to be thousands—have come into this country as children, underage, and have disappeared. No one knows where they are. This is a matter that I have raised before in the context of the Health and Social Care Act. Who is looking for them? Who is trying to find them? I welcome the fact that the Government have recognised the need for the Children Act to apply to this group of children. I am enormously grateful for the briefing that I and other Members received from the Refugee Children’s Consortium, the Immigration Law Practitioners’ Association and the Refugee Legal Centre, which mentioned the problems of dealing with the children whom we know about—but who is looking for the children whom we do not know about? There are in existence local safeguarding children boards, which have been set up by statute. The Minister has already mentioned the fact that those boards have core membership that includes local authorities, health bodies, the police and others. I have called before for a census to be done by these local safeguarding bodies to discover how many of these children are in their areas of responsibility, where they are and what is happening to them. No one else is capable of doing so. If the UKBA now has an obligation under the Children Act, what is the relationship between the UKBA and the local safeguarding children boards regarding the children who appear, if we are not careful, to be falling between the cracks of the two? I shall go on to ask further questions of the Minister, because it seems to me that there is a great danger in allowing just the mention of looking after children under the responsibility of the UKBA to go without looking at all the other implications of this. Who is actually responsible for inspecting the conditions in which immigrant detainee and asylum-seeking children are held by social services all around the country? To ease the burden on the social services that are adjacent to the airports or ports of entry, children have been distributed all around the country to individual social services to be looked after. Their conditions are very different. Some are in bed and breakfast accommodation. Some are given education, others are not. Who is responsible for looking after this issue? The Council for Social Care Inspection was abolished recently and replaced by Ofsted. Is the UKBA talking to Ofsted about the inspection of the facilities in which these asylum-seeking and immigrant children are being looked after? We were going to just let the amendment go by default, but it seems to me to be a "tip of the iceberg" amendment. I really would like confirmation from the Minister that all these other implications of the looking-after of children under the terms and conditions of Section 11 of the Children Act 2004 really have been looked into and that all the other agencies with statutory responsibilities for helping and, particularly, for looking after these people who nobody knows anything about are being investigated.