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Mr. Clappison: I am following carefully what the Under-Secretary has said. Can he give us some examples of the people he envisages will be employed by PCTs to discharge the duties on their behalf?
Dr. Ladyman: Certainly. PCTs might use nurse practitioners, rather than general practitioners, for some functions, which would be a legitimate choice for them. They might even choose to commission services from private providers under the terms of agreements that the health service is pursuing to increase the range of capacity and improve services in local areas. If they are contracting with anybody, they are ultimately brought within the ambit of the Bill, because the duty is on the PCTs, the commissioners of services, to discharge the duties that the Bill gives them.
Mr. Clappison: When a PCT is dealing with the parties that the Under-Secretary described, will it be responsible for informing them that they are discharging their duties under the Children Bill?
Dr. Ladyman: Absolutely. It is the responsibility of anyone who commissions services to ensure that the people from whom they commission them understand all their duties, not just under this measure but under all legislation. In particular, so far as children and the national health service are concerned, it will be their duty to ensure that they understand best practice as set out in the national service framework, and that all those from whom they commission services work together to ensure that that framework is implemented in the local area.
Tim Loughton: I am still not clear where private practitioners come in, because a PCT is not, for example, commissioning the services of a private physiotherapist to whom a young person chooses to go. How does the Bill therefore cover that private physiotherapist?
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Dr. Ladyman: The hon. Gentleman makes the good point that the Bill refers only to those services that are commissioned by the partners mentioned in the Bill. If a child uses services through any other route, whether from a private practitioner or from McDonald's, their duties will be set out in the wide range of children's welfare legislation. I undertake to reflect on the paragraph and consider whether it is necessary to include a duty on those people who are not commissioned by any of the partners to fulfil a function that is not already covered by legislation. My understanding is that their duties to safeguard the well-being of children will be protected elsewhere, but I shall have another think to ensure that we are not missing anything.
Mr. Turner: In answering my hon. Friend, the Under-Secretary did not deal with a PCT securing the services of a national health service trust, which is understandable, because it is covered by subsection (1)(e). However, I wonder whether subsection (1)(d) would cover an NHS trust in Wales, the services of which had been secured for a child resident in England. Is there a lacuna in the Under-Secretary's thinking in that respect?
Dr. Ladyman: No, I do not believe there is a lacuna, because the services commissioned by the PCT are covered in the Bill; it does not matter from where those services are commissioned. Whether they are commissioned from a trust in Wales or a private practitioner, as has been suggested, it is the duty of the primary care trust to ensure that the people providing the services understand their duties under both the Bill and the national service framework to ensure that children's well-being is protected. It might be worth our reflecting on the situation in which a child goes to a private practitioner completely outside the range of the services commissioned by the partners in the Bill, and I have undertaken to do that.
Amendment agreed to.
The Chairman: Before we proceed further on clause 8, there is a technical point that requires a meeting of the Programming Sub-Committee. There is no need for Members to leave the Room, but I will suspend the Committee for a few minutes.
10.25 am
Sitting suspended.
10.33 am
On resuming—
Ordered,
That the Order of the Committee of 12th October be amended, in paragraph 2, by leaving out the words ''clauses 2 to 14, schedule 2, clauses 15 to 34, schedule 3, clauses 35 to 41'' and inserting the words ''clauses 2 to 8, 10 to 14, schedule 2, clauses 15 to 34, schedule 3, clauses 35 and 36, 9 and 37 to 41''.—[Margaret Hodge.]
The Chairman: In effect, that means that we are putting clause 9 back so that it will be debated on Thursday after clause 36.
<<179>>Clause 8
Arrangements to safeguard and promote welfare
Margaret Hodge: I beg to move amendment No. 134, in
clause 8, page 6, line 40, at end insert—
'( ) the British Transport Police Authority, so far as exercising functions in relation to England;'.
The Chairman: With this it will be convenient to discuss Government amendment No. 149.
Margaret Hodge: The amendments reflect a promise that we made in the House of Lords. We had omitted to place the British Transport police on the list of organisations that will have a duty to make arrangements for ensuring that
''their functions are discharged having regard to the need to safeguard and promote the welfare of children''.
This is not a contentious issue. We have discussed it with the Department for Transport, and everybody has agreed that as the British Transport police have wide contact with the public, and with children in particular, it is appropriate to include them in the clause. I hope that the Committee will accept the amendment.
Mr. Roger Williams: I welcome the amendments. There is just one point that I want the Minister to respond to. All the bodies and authorities mentioned in clause 23 are either devolved or situated in Wales, but the British Transport police headquarters is in London, so how will they exercise their responsibility? The Welsh Affairs Committee is conducting an inquiry into policing in Wales and will examine the role of the British Transport police in Wales, but it may be more appropriate to specify in the Bill that the Welsh headquarters of the British Transport police be involved.
Margaret Hodge: I hope that we have covered the hon. Gentleman's concerns in the amendment to clause 23, in which we agreed that it would be helpful to have a mirror clause for Wales to ensure consistency. Unless I have missed something—if I have, perhaps he would like to reply—I thought that we had covered that point.
Mr. Williams: I think that we have covered the point, but my question is how the British Transport police will fulfil their responsibilities in practical terms. Will that be done be through a local arrangement, or will it be bureaucratic and done through its headquarters?
Margaret Hodge: I could write to the hon. Gentleman if that would be helpful, but the answer is that we cannot specify in the Bill exactly what parts of an organisation will have the duty imposed on them. We are attempting to specify that Welsh children will be protected. This is a technical point, so it may be helpful for me to write to the hon. Gentleman to give him the comfort that he seeks for Welsh children.
Amendment agreed to.
Tim Loughton: I beg to move amendment No. 30, in
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clause 8, page 6, line 44, at end insert—
'(ja) the chief immigration officer at ports of entry to England;'.
The Chairman: With this it will be convenient to discuss amendment No. 99, in
clause 8, page 6, line 46, at end insert—
'(l) a regional office of the National Asylum Support Service;
(m) the centre manager of an immigration removal centre;
(n) the Chief Immigration Officer at a port of entry.'.
Tim Loughton: Amendment No. 30 would add an extra person to the list of people involved in arrangements to safeguard and promote welfare. In another place there was a lot of talk about this issue, and a number of children's organisations have made representations to the effect that the whole of the asylum and immigration service should be included in the list of those having a duty to safeguard and promote the welfare of children. That is a contentious issue.
I have some sympathy with the argument that, if the Government had to pay undue regard to the welfare of children in the asylum system whose claims, with those of their parents, were being assessed, that could advance the claims of certain asylum seekers. The welfare of children could therefore be used to extend the stay in this country of people who are not entitled to stay, and that is fraught with problems. That is why we have not replicated such amendments in Committee.
Mr. Clappison: My hon. Friend makes an important point. If it could be established that the clause would have no effect on the operation of the immigration laws and the determination of asylum claims, would he be sympathetic to the idea of giving those children the same protection that is afforded to children elsewhere?
Tim Loughton: My hon. Friend makes an important point: children are children wherever they may be. We will not stand by and allow harm to come to children who happen to be in the asylum system in this country. We must ensure that the asylum and immigration service, under the Home Office, has measures in place to ensure that those children, as well as the rest of their families, are properly looked after. The risk is that having greater regard to the welfare of those children in the asylum system would in some way prejudice the assessment of their case by the immigration services, and that situation could be used by people who would bring children here to advance their own asylum cases. That argument was mentioned in another place, which is why I have not tried to replicate it. I have limited the additional consideration to the chief immigration officer at ports of entry.
That consideration is reflected in amendment No. 99, in the name of the hon. Member for Lancaster and Wyre. That would extend the measure to the National Asylum Support Service and immigration removal centres; he will no doubt argue as to why he thinks it should go that far. I have explained why we would not extend it that far.
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I believe that a particular role is played by chief immigration officers at ports of entry to this country, especially with regard to unaccompanied asylum-seeking children. Many of us have spoken on this subject before, and it featured in a private Member's Bill that I promoted last year, which also included the registration of private fostering considerations. Too many minors appear at ports of entry to this country and then get lost in the system for a host of reasons. In some cases, it is difficult to prove their age and, therefore, whether they are a minor.
A case in my county, of which the Minister is aware, involved a number of girls arriving from west Africa, particularly Nigeria and Sierra Leone, as unaccompanied asylum seekers. Many of them had been intimidated out of their countries by unscrupulous pimps—I use that word advisedly—with threats of voodoo curses befalling them if they did not comply. Those children arriving at Gatwick airport were, correctly, taken into the care of West Sussex social services and put into foster care—private foster care, in some cases—but then they mysteriously disappeared. At least 44 girls have disappeared over the past few years. Girls have been taken by those pimps, often in the middle of the night, and driven to the continent, via Belgium for some reason, where many of them have ended up in the sex industry in northern Italy, particularly Milan.
Fortunately, because the profile of that hideous practice has been raised here and in the media, and because of excellent work by West Sussex social services, Sussex police and the Home Office, the practice appears to have ended. I fear that it has not ended altogether and has just gone elsewhere, but at least we have stopped it being a problem at Gatwick airport. It is still a problem in other parts of the country, however.
We must do more. I know that the Minister has taken that fact on board and that there is now greater co-operation between social services departments and the Home Office in the form of the immigration service at ports of entry. That happens at Gatwick airport, at Dover in Kent and at other airports and ports. It means that social services are, in effect, part of the welcoming party, so that a child claiming to be 18 when he or she is not, and a child accompanied by someone who is not obviously a parent or does not obviously have parental authority, are not just nodded through. Unaccompanied minors should be passed on to the appropriate social services department.
We must place a duty of care on the immigration service at ports of entry to ensure that when such children arrive, their welfare is a consideration. People should be concerned not only with whether they have the right documentation but with what will happen to them when they go outside the confines of the port or airport and are in the big wide world of the United Kingdom.
This probing amendment is designed to see how we can include in the Bill the chief immigration officer at the port of entry without going into the argument
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about including the whole immigration and asylum service; I fully acknowledge that there would be problems with that. We need to have far greater regard to children arriving at ports of entry, and that is what the amendment would achieve.
10.45 am
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