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Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham) (Con): I am listening intently to the hon. Lady. Is it not sensible that, when a child arrives in the country with an adult, there should be some way of ascertaining that the adult has parental responsibility, either as a parent or a relative in place of parents, and that if that is not the case, there should, as in the ordinary way, be an involvement by social services or the authorities at the airport before the child is free to enter the country? Moreover, should not there be much greater involvement with international social services that deal particularly with those countries in west Africa from which most of these trafficked children still come? That still has not happened, even in the light of the Victoria Climbié case.

Ms Keeble: Yes, I agree. Some thought must be given to how one identifies the children who are covered by the documentation that is provided. The children should be with parents or adults who have an established relationship with them, and the nature of the relationship should be absolutely clear. I would not expect genuine parents to be too worried about handing over their children's passports for safe keeping for the duration of the flight. However, the points that the hon. Gentleman made are critical because the impersonation of a relationship rather than the forged documents is the real problem, as, for example, in the case of Victoria Climbié. It is probably the bigger problem in all the cases with which I have dealt. I therefore agree with the hon. Gentleman, who had one of the homes in his constituency.

Fifthly, I ask that children who are found to have no residential status be regarded as being at risk. They should be on the at-risk register and social services should treat them as being at risk until it is proven otherwise. One of the current problems is that, when children turn up without status or papers and efforts are made to get them on to somebody's asylum application or to get their residential status linked with an adult with whom there is no proven link, one has to prove to the local authorities that they are at risk. One has to try to get intervention on that basis. I believe that the boot should be on the other foot and that the children should be protected until it is clearly established that they are with people with whom they have a relationship and that they will be safe.

My hon. Friend the Minister for Citizenship and Immigration has on file many of the details of the individual cases that I have encountered over the years. I hope that he has considered carefully the lessons to be learned from them. I have not gone into them in detail tonight because they refer to individual children. However, I hope that my hon. Friend considers them carefully and puts in hand some of the steps, perhaps with colleagues in other Departments, that will bring those children out of the twilight world in which they live and give them the status and protection that they need. I seriously hope that he will examine that as a matter of urgency because repeated cases come through
 
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my advice surgeries. All the national agencies are clear that the problem is substantial. We must protect those children and ensure that we have no more disasters.

9.47 pm

Mr. Hilton Dawson (Lancaster and Wyre) (Lab): I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Northampton, North (Ms Keeble) on her tremendous work on such a serious issue and on her good fortune in securing the debate, especially when we have a little more opportunity than normal to discuss the matter. I also congratulate her on everything that she said, with which I heartily concur.

I have nothing like my hon. Friend's direct experience of children who have been trafficked and the situations in which they appear in this country. However, I have spoken to several people and organisations that are involved in the issue and I am extremely concerned about what I have heard of the circumstances that they have come across.

I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Minister for Citizenship and Immigration, who will reply to the debate. I am not sure of the collective noun for social workers—I am sure that it is not pejorative—but I took a gaggle of them to see him late last week with a proposal for a pioneering international approach to the subject and other associated problems. I was pleased with his positive response and interest.

I have heard that trafficking in children affects children in a wide variety of situations, including those who have been trafficked for the purposes of sexual exploitation, domestic servitude and benefit fraud. Some of the examples that I have heard of children being trafficked for sexual exploitation sound like the very worst forms of child abuse and exploitation that there could possibly be. Reference has already been made to the work that has been done in the safe house in West Sussex to deal with children who came to this country not only frightened out of their wits by the real threats made to them and to their families back in the countries from which they came, but scared by tales of witch doctors, voodoo, juju and black magic that have been perpetrated on them. There is evidence of children being trafficked into this country for sexual exploitation, and being trafficked beyond this country to Italy, to work there as prostitutes to pay back the traffickers many times over the money that they expended on bringing the children here.

There are many organisations working in this field. As well as the ones that my hon. Friend the Member for Northampton, North mentioned, there is ECPAT, which stands for End Child Prostitution And Trafficking, and AFRUCA—Africans United against Child Abuse—an organisation rooted in the African community in this country that is doing sterling work and has access to information of profound importance. That organisation knows of children in domestic servitude and of children coming into this country to be brought into private fostering and involved in benefit fraud; we need to tap into that.

This problem requires a multi-agency response. I believe that the Home Office is doing an excellent job in this regard, with legislation already being put in place to deal with the criminals who profit from this appalling trade. However, we also need very good relationships
 
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between the immigration and nationality directorate, the police, and social services, all of whom must work coherently together. Operation Paladin has been a step in the right direction, but we do not know the extent of the problem. We suspect that it is a large one, involving appalling exploitation, but we do not know, and we do not have effective models or effective ways of working with children who have been trafficked. We need the organisations to work together and we need a range of resources to deal with those children. We also need to learn the most effective ways of dealing with them and we need international work to link with agencies back in the countries whence they came. We need a child-centred, international social work approach to this serious problem, and I hope that this debate will help us to move forward on a variety of fronts.

9.53 pm

The Minister for Citizenship and Immigration (Mr. Desmond Browne): I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Northampton, North (Ms Keeble) on securing this debate. I know that she has come across cases of trafficked children, or of children who are suspected of having been trafficked, in her constituency, and I commend her for the assiduous way in which she has brought the concerns of her constituents to the House. I hope that I shall be able to reassure her, in my response to this short debate, that the Government are taking the issue of child trafficking seriously.

All too often, many important issues are discussed in front of a comparatively sparsely populated House of Commons because they are raised in the context of an Adjournment debate. What this short debate has lost in quantity, however, it has made up for in quality. I am pleased that my hon. Friend the Member for Lancaster and Wyre (Mr. Dawson), whose reputation in relation to such issues, particularly child protection issues, stands the test against any other Member—and furth of this House—has been able to make a contribution. I shall come shortly to the meeting that we had last week, and what further contribution the delegation that he brought to see me can make with the Government in advancing public policy on this issue.

I also want to mention the hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton). Although his contribution was only through an intervention, clearly, he has a degree of knowledge on this issue, which is based, I understand, on some constituency experience. Even in that short intervention, he brought additional information to the debate, attention to which should serve us well in the future.

Child trafficking is a pernicious crime. It violates basic human rights, and treats its victims as a commodity to be bought or sold, or to be bought, sold and abused in some circumstances. In a globalised society, it is also a crime that transcends national borders, and in some circumstances, organisational boundaries. The Government need to work together across agencies, and across Governments, if we are to tackle it effectively. I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Northampton, North for her opening remarks acknowledging the work done in this area of public policy by the Government, but I accept her advocacy of the fact that there is more to do.

My hon. Friend referred to suspected cases involving trafficked children in her constituency, and I know that she had concerns that certain cases had not been
 
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responded to either appropriately or speedily enough. I know that because in the comparatively short time that I have been the Minister with this responsibility, we have discussed those issues on a number of occasions. Indeed, we made arrangements to have a meeting later this week—I do not know whether this debate will serve to satisfy her request for a meeting, or whether the meeting should still go ahead. If she wishes it still to go ahead, I will be happy to meet her.

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