Royston Smith – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Home Office

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Royston Smith on 2016-06-06.

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what the Government’s policy is on the use of child advocates to support social workers working with unaccompanied migrant children.

Karen Bradley

Unaccompanied migrant children are looked after by local authorities, which provide social work support and access to legal representation. Such children are also referred to the Refugee Council’s Children’s Panel for specialist support.

In addition, the Government ran a trial of independent child trafficking advocates from 8 September 2014 for a period of 12 months across 23 local authorities in England. The trial provided a valuable contribution to our understanding of this area of work and we are currently working with a broad range of interested parties as well as Parliamentarians to further develop our thinking so that we ensure we support trafficked children appropriately. We will update Parliament in due course.