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Motion made, and Question put forthwith, pursuant to Standing Order No. 118(6)(Standing Committees on Delegated Legislation),
That the draft Age-Related Payments (Northern Ireland) Order 2004, which was laid before this House on 24th June, be approved.
That the draft Vehicle Testing (Temporary Exemptions) (Northern Ireland) Order 2004, which was laid before this House on 29th June, be approved.—[Mr. Jim Murphy.]
Question agreed to.
WELSH GRAND COMMITTEE
Motion made, and Question put forthwith, pursuant to Standing Order No. 108(1) (Welsh Grand Committee (sittings)),
That the Order of the House of 22nd June relating to sittings of the Welsh Grand Committee on Tuesday 20th July be amended, in paragraph (2), by leaving out 'Two o'clock and half-past Four o'clock' and inserting 'Three o'clock and half-past Five o'clock'.—[Mr. Jim Murphy.]
Question agreed to.
ENVIRONMENTAL AUDIT
Ordered,
That Mr. Jon Owen Jones be discharged from the Environmental Audit Committee and Mr. John McWilliam be added.—[Mr. Bob Ainsworth, on behalf of the Committee of Selection.]
9.27 pm
Mr. Paul Tyler (North Cornwall) (LD): On a point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. The motion on sittings of the House was not moved. Are we to be given any explanation by the Leader of the House or the Deputy Leader of the House of the arrangements for Thursday? Has the Chair been given any indication yet—
Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. As the motion was not moved, we will not have any debate about it at all.
Peter Bottomley (Worthing, West) (Con): On a point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. If the motion comes back tomorrow, is it possible that the Chair might say to the Government, "We would like to know on which Bills messages might be presented to the House", or is that to be a secret? Is the reason for not moving the motion to try to keep that information from the public and Parliament?
Mr. Deputy Speaker: The hon. Gentleman's point of order is hypothetical and not one that the Chair can deal with at this time.
Mr. Eric Forth (Bromley and Chislehurst) (Con): Further to that point of order—
Mr. Deputy Speaker: No, I have dealt with that matter.
PETITION
Gidea Park Post Office
9.28 pm
Mr. Andrew Rosindell (Romford) (Con): I present a petition on behalf of no less than 1,071 of my constituents in the Gidea Park area of Romford. The people of Gidea Park are outraged at the strong possibility that the local Gidea Park post office will be closed. They have asked me to present the petition to the House on their behalf this evening.
The Gidea Park community contains large numbers of elderly people who depend heavily on their local community shops, of which the post office is a focal point. The loss of the Gidea Park post office would not only be a great inconvenience to all local people in that area of Romford, but would have a damaging effect on other local community shops.
I wish to present the petition on behalf of all residents of Gidea Park and the surrounding communities of Heath Park, Marshall's Park and central Romford, all of which are very close to Gidea Park. The petition has been given strong support by members of the congregation of St. Michael's church, Gidea Park, parents from the Gidea Park primary school and the Gidea Park college, and particularly the shopkeepers in Main road, Gidea Park, and Balgores lane. It also has the full support of the local councillors for the Squirrels Heath ward, Councillors Eric Munday, Michael White and Eddie Cahill, and for the Romford Town ward, Councillors Wendy Brice-Thompson, Frederic Thompson and Andrew Curtin.
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The petition reads as follows:
To the House of Commons,
The Petition of the People of the Gidea Park area of Romford
Declares that the Gidea Park Post Office is threatened with Closure. The petitioners therefore request that the House of Commons do all in its power to keep the Gidea Park Post Office open.
And the petitioners remain, etc.
To lie upon the Table.
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Child Trafficking
Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.—[Mr. Jim Murphy.]
9.30 pm
Ms Sally Keeble (Northampton, North): I am very grateful for the opportunity to have this debate on child trafficking, an issue that has been of great concern to me for a considerable number of years. It has also been highlighted by a large number of organisations, in particular UNICEF, World Vision and Save the Children, which have all campaigned strongly over the appalling exploitation of children and young people through trafficking. My local women's institutes have also been very concerned about the issue and have lobbied me on it. My hon. Friend the Member for Lancaster and Wyre (Mr. Dawson) is also going to make some points, as he, too, has been active on this matter for a long time.
I recognise that the present Government have taken substantial steps to deal with child trafficking, including measures in the Sexual Offences Act 2003 and the Asylum and Immigration (Treatment of Claimants, etc.) Bill, and the funding of the Eves project, as well as the Paladin Child project. I congratulate the Home Office and Metropolitan police staff who are working in Heathrow on that project and who do amazing work checking on the status and care arrangements for children coming into the UK. I was able to spend time with them and also with the immigration and nationality directorate staff at Croydon. I was impressed with the expertise, thought and care that they put into their very difficult work. I was very moved by some of the children whom I encountered and heard interviewed.
The reason why I asked for this debate was that, despite the legislation and the very good work that has taken place at Heathrow, the reality appears to be that children and young people are still being trafficked into the country. When they emerge in the system, in schools, health services or in my advice surgeries in particular, there are real difficulties in getting their position resolved. Although I have a big interest in this matter as a policy issue, my main reason for raising it this evening is that it is a pressing constituency concern as well.
I believe that there is a strong need to ensure that there is some real connection between the national and strategic work and the local work dealing with the individual child. We often get transfixed by some of the criminal issues that surround child trafficking, particularly with regard to sexual exploitation, whereas an awful lot of it is not so spectacular and is much more humdrum, relating to benefit fraud, private fostering arrangements and other such issues.
I am concerned mainly with child protection rather than criminal issues. I have repeatedly dealt with cases in which children have been trafficked into the UK, but in which it has been exceptionally difficult or, as in most cases, completely impossible, to sort out their immigration status and get them essential support. There is a lot behind the children whom I have encountered that is not clear. In most cases, I do not know why they leave their country of origin, although I would assume that their parents want to get them out of countries that are being destroyed by conflict and poverty.
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It is sometimes unclear how such children are being exploited. On one occasion, the exploitation involved domestic servitude, in some cases the sexual exploitation of older girls and women was involved and other cases included benefit claims and private fostering. Exploitation might even begin with the best of intentions and occur because of changed circumstances.
It is clear that people are paid to bring children, who often change hands more than once before they get to Northampton, into the country. The relationship between such children and their carers is not always clear, and they are often moved about. I am not prepared to see those children continue to be moved about and treated in that way without the implementation of more robust arrangements to protect them.
I first came across child trafficking back in the early 1990s, when I was a councillor in south London. I had to deal with a young Somali girl who had been brought into the country to marry a much older man and run a home for a series of children smuggled in on false papers. Her story was similar to those that I have heard repeatedly in recent years. Agents bring in children whom they usually pass off as relatives. The children are given papers, which are then taken back by the agent or destroyed—normally, the agent takes the papers back—and are sometimes taken to a community centre or similar in London before being moved on. It is hard to get more precise information and doubts always exist about the extent to which children are coached and the possibility that some of the children might be UK children who are being circulated around the system.
I have met a reasonable number of such children and have got to know some of them well over the years. They have clearly been smuggled through immigration by being passed off as agents' children, and they end up in Northampton with no papers and no status. Trying to get their status sorted out is extremely difficult, especially for younger children, who are the most vulnerable and who often do not know where they have been and where they have come from.
I shall give some examples. A young woman who was brought into the UK to start a better life ended up in domestic servitude—a church community helped her to leave her home. Two little boys, who are still waiting for DNA tests to establish their relationship with their father so that their status here can be resolved, were apparently brought in by an agent in November 2000, and they are still in a bureaucratic limbo—they are at school, but they cannot register with doctors because they do not have birth certificates. I have been in contact with the Home Office about them since early last year.
Agents brought two young girls into the UK via Heathrow on 15 May 2002 and 7 September 2001, and the girls' status has not been resolved—a dispute seems to be occurring between two women over which of them is the girls' mother. A number of teenage girls who were brought in and moved around repeatedly are still without papers. Other cases have occurred, some of which were referred to people involved in the care of children in Northampton.
Those children are not unaccompanied minors who claim asylum on arrival. Some 2,800 unaccompanied minors arrived last year and they are relatively well off compared with the children I am talking about. I am
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discussing children who appear in the system without proof of identity, residential status and clear safeguards or protections. They are children such as Victoria Climbié, who was brought into the UK by being passed off as her aunt's daughter. I always have a great sense of unease when I deal with such cases and talk to the children.
Those children need more protection, and I ask my hon. Friend the Minister for five things. First, I know that the Home Office is already training more staff to do the work undertaken by the team at Heathrow that stops and checks children being brought into the country when it has doubts about the arrangements. I hope that the training will progress quickly and that such teams will be installed at ports across the country. The work is remarkable and involves simple things such as discovering whether the relationship between the two people is what it is claimed to be by picking up the body language between an adult and a child and determining proper arrangements for the care of the child. When I was at Heathrow, the team picked up a mother and son, who were not in fact mother and son—the so-called son had a load of drugs in his little rucksack.
Secondly, I ask that applications for asylum or immigration status from children are fast-tracked. Taking three years to process a claim for asylum or indefinite leave may not be a disaster for an adult, but it is an eternity for a boy of five or six. If a parent or adult with care agreed to a DNA test in 2003, it should not take 18 months to get it done in order that the relationship between the adult and the child can be established and the immigration claim properly assessed—it should happen much more quickly than that. In the meantime, the child cannot gain access to a range of services, including health services.
Thirdly, some good joint working between national and local authorities and between the different local authorities is required to ensure that problems such as data sharing are properly resolved. If there have to be delays in inquiries into the exact status of a child, some thought must be given to liaising with the local social services and housing authorities to prevent repeated moves and to ensure that the child's school is properly involved and that other safeguards are in place.
Fourthly, the Home Office needs to give some thought, in conjunction with the airlines, to how children's identity documents should be handled. That critical matter has been discussed at official level, in the industry and among concerned groups. Perhaps the documentation for certain children who travel on airlines should be kept by stewards or similar people on the plane, then handed over to the immigration staff when the children disembark.
It is hard to describe how horrible it is having to ask a child about their identity when they do not know. I once talked to a child who, as was clear from having tracked back through the record of what had happened to her, must have originally left her home in Somalia when she was about four years old. When I asked her where she had come from and what it was like there, she did not know, not because she was trying to deceive me, but because she could not remember as she was too little. Once children forget, there is nothing on earth that one can do about it. As for the children themselves, they lose
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their sense of themselves, who they are and where they have come from. I very much feel for the children who become lost in bureaucratic red tape.
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