My Lords, clearly things have moved on a little since we debated the Immigration Bill on 7 April. Nevertheless, there is clearly a long way to go. I am particularly grateful to the noble Lord, Lord McColl, who I thought made a brilliant speech, and to the other noble Lords who signed this amendment and again brought this issue before your Lordships’ House with Amendment 86H. I am pleased to support them.
While I welcome the action of the Government in trialling the delivery of a child trafficking advocate system, I am disappointed that they are not being bolder in their statement of the principles that would underpin the role of the advocates. I agree with the Joint Committee on the draft Bill, which said that pilots are not,
“a substitute for a statutory advocacy scheme”.
Since that report, the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child has recommended that the UK prioritises,
“the appointment of a competent and statutory guardian as expeditiously as possible to safeguard the best interests of the child during the criminal justice process and ensure that a child victim is referred to asylum-seeking or other procedures only after the appointment of a guardian”.
There are many pages of recommendations from well established and respected international organisations on how a guardian advocate system should function, which would allow us to set out a framework that could be adopted by the Bill.
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In this context, while the trials are going to be useful in helping us to find out how best to address some of the practical implementation questions, I do not believe that we should wait for the outcome of the trials to address the basic definition of what a child trafficking advocate is. The problem, and the role that it is designed to address, can and should be defined now in this legislation. That of course is what the Northern Ireland Assembly has done, as the noble Lord, Lord McColl, told us in his speech.
I hope that noble Lords will agree that this House needs to make a significant impact on the definitions in Clause 47. The recent report from the Joint Committee on Human Rights said about the passage of the Modern Slavery Bill in the Commons that,
“we would have welcomed an opportunity during the passage of the Bill to scrutinise in more detail the proposed system for child trafficking advocates, particularly in relation to their powers and functions”.
The truth is that the provision of the name of a role in statute without a definition is exceptionally high risk, as we have all come to see in relation to the national rapporteur role in the EU anti-trafficking directive. One might have assumed that the definition attributed to the role by the British Government would be the one defined by international best practice, but it plainly is not, and that has been possible only because the directive assumes rather than provides a definition of a national rapporteur. We must not make that mistake with this legislation.
Amendment 86H gives us the crucial opportunity to define the powers and functions that a child advocate should have. I, too, commend it to the House for its strengthening of the independent nature of the advocate and for setting out clearly the functions that are expected of an advocate, based on international guidelines.