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Looked-after Children

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. I know that, when she was a distinguished Foreign Office Minister with responsibility for consular services, that was part of her portfolio. She gave evidence to the Home Affairs Committee on those matters. The concern is that there is not sufficient training to deal with these issues. We need to ensure that that happens. In a sense it is not just the responsibility of one Department, although the Government could spare only one Minister for the debate. It is a question of various Departments acting together. It would be helpful—I make this offer to my hon. Friend the Member for Huddersfield—in the spirit of joined-up Parliament if members of the Home Affairs Committee met members of the Children, Schools and Families Committee and other Committees with an interest in order to report about these matters where they cross boundaries. Between April and December 2008 a total of 957 suspected victims of child trafficking were picked up by local authorities. Of that number, more than 400 came from Afghanistan and 200 from Africa. Kent county council revealed that out of a total of 474 children taken into care in the eight months to the end of 2008, 86 went missing. The largest proportion of trafficked children in fact arrives in Kent. In Hillingdon, which handles children trafficked through Heathrow airport, 27 of 285 children have been reported missing. At least 77 Chinese children have gone missing after being taken into the care of the local authority at Heathrow. In 2008, the Serious Organised Crime Agency disrupted a suspected child trafficking ring operating through Manchester airport in which Chinese children were routed through Italy and ended up in the UK. That was the conclusion of the Home Affairs Committee report into human trafficking. We did not go into great detail about child trafficking because we were dealing by and large with adult trafficking, but we estimated that 330 child victims will be trafficked into the UK each year. About 60 per cent of suspected child victims in local authority care go missing and are not subsequently found. Our worry, for the very reasons that my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Heeley (Meg Munn) has mentioned, was that the local authorities were concentrating on the "home market"—children from the UK—and were not paying sufficient attention to those who arrived here and, within hours, went missing from their home. The information put into the public domain by The Guardian suggested that those Chinese children, having arrived here, were given mobile phones, were able to ring the adults who brought them into the country, walked out quite openly from the home and then disappeared into some part of the UK never to be found again. Unless a very important relationship is developed between the local authority and those who deal with children at our ports of entry including Heathrow—the responsibility of the UK Border Agency—and that is monitored so that we know who is in and who is out of a local authority home, that seems to be the fate of children who are human trafficked into this country. That is why the Home Affairs Committee will be looking at the subject again next Tuesday, to assess the Government's response to our report, which we published earlier this year. We asked the Government specifically to take appropriate steps in order to protect children who had come from abroad, who have the added problem of not being able to speak English. There may be the greatest training in the world for social workers dealing with these issues, but if such children cannot access translation services they will not be able to explain why they came to the country. There is also the situation of children who come from elsewhere in the EU, and we know of the important work being done by the Metropolitan police human trafficking unit through Europol. In particular, there is an initiative for the Romanian children, who are largely from the Roma community in that country, who were trafficked into this country and then disappeared from care. They ended up on Oxford street and began to get involved in begging operations. I am very sorry that the hon. Member for Totnes (Mr. Steen) is not present, because if there is an expert on human, and especially child, trafficking in this House, it is almost certainly him. He has told the House of his activities when he has been to Oxford street with the Metropolitan police. He saw children being apprehended, and there was nothing that the police could do other than put them into care. They then went missing from care again, and ended up back on the streets. Clearly, these issues go beyond the narrow remit of the Select Committee report and the estimate motion before the House, but they are within the remit of the Government as a whole, and I know that the Minister will want to bring them to the attention of her colleagues in other Departments, because we cannot deal with them merely on a departmental basis. My final point is on the human trafficking unit that is operated so effectively by the Metropolitan police. As we concluded our inquiry into human trafficking, we took evidence from that unit, and it informed us that its funding was to be cut. It said that the funding had been reduced over a number of years and that it would end up with no funding from the Government. During Prime Minister's Question Time a few weeks ago, I raised that with the Prime Minister, and he stood at the Dispatch Box and said that the money is not being cut but being increased because of the important work done by the Government on human trafficking. I was delighted by that statement. I asked the Prime Minister about the issue again when he came back from the European Council meeting in Brussels, because, as the Minister will know, the Swedish presidency—like the Czech presidency—has decided to make human trafficking a key priority. The Prime Minister said that the issue had been discussed at Brussels. I asked him again whether the money for the human trafficking unit had been increased, and he said yes. Before the Minister comes to reply, I hope there will be sufficient time for her to get a message to the Home Office to find out whether that is, in fact, correct, because the replies I have received to the letters I have sent suggest that nobody has received this money which the Prime Minister thinks has been increased. I am sure that if the Prime Minister announces it at the Dispatch Box, it will happen, but even if the money has not yet been received by the organisation it would be nice to know that it is on its way—in the post or about to be transferred—because it is crucial in our fight against human trafficking in this country.