Human Trafficking: Children

(asked on 21st January 2021) - View Source

Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many children have been referred to the Independent Child Trafficking Guardianship service broken since October 2018; and what information her Department holds on the (a) looked after children status, (b) age, (c) gender and (d) nationality of those children.


Answered by
Victoria Atkins Portrait
Victoria Atkins
Secretary of State for Health and Social Care
This question was answered on 26th January 2021

The Home Office has rolled out Independent Child Trafficking Guardians (ICTGs), an independent source of advice for trafficked children, in one third of local authorities across England and Wales. ICTGs provide one-to-one support for children who have no one with parental responsibility for them in the UK via an ICTG Direct Worker (DW). They also provide an expert ICTG Regional Practice Co-ordinator (RPC), first introduced in October 2018, for children where there is someone with parental responsibility for them in the UK.

Data tables published in October 2020 as part of the Assessment of Independent Child Trafficking Guardians – Regional Practice Co-ordinators: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/an-analysis-of-independent-child-trafficking-guardians show ICTG referral data between October 2018 and December 2019:

(a) The Home Office does hold data about the LAC status of children within the ICTG service. However, this data is not currently published and so, on this basis, we cannot provide any details on how many children receiving ICTG support are LAC.

(b) The split of gender in this timeframe is 378 males (243 DW and 135 RPC) and 134 females (77 DW and 57 RPC), these do not include some values that have been suppressed in order to protect the confidentiality of children in the ICTG service.

(c) The split by age group in this timeframe is:

  • 49 aged 0-13 (37 DW and 12 RPC);
  • 44 age 14 (28 DW and 16 RPC);
  • 90 age 15 (57 DW and 33 RPC);
  • 155 age 16 (107 DW and 48 RPC);
  • 148 age 17 (83 DW and 65 RPC); and
  • 18 age 18 (18 RPC).

These also do not include values that have been supressed in order to protect the confidentiality of children in the ICTG service.

(d) The total RPC caseload in this timeframe was 193 children. Out of this, 174 children were UK nationals. Due to the small numbers involved, data on other nationalities within the RPC caseload has not been provided in order to protect confidentiality.

For the DW role the following data is recorded for the timeframe: 320 children in total on the DW caseload. 56 Vietnamese nationals, 40 Sudanese nationals, 38 UK nationals, 30 Albanian nationals, 23 Gambian nationals, 22 Afghan nationals, 19 Romanian nationals, 17 Ghanaian nationals, 13 Eritrean nationals, 10 Iraqi nationals and 6 Iranian nationals. As with the RPC role, other nationalities cannot be included due to small numbers and the confidentiality required.

The Home Office publishes statistics on NRM referrals on a quarterly basis, reports from Q2 2019 – Q3 2020 can be found here: https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/national-referral-mechanism-statistics.

Reports from 2018 and 2017 can be found here respectively:

https://nationalcrimeagency.gov.uk/who-we-are/publications/282-national-referral-mechanism-statistics-end-of-year-summary-2018/file and; https://nationalcrimeagency.gov.uk/who-we-are/publications/159-modern-slavery-and-human-trafficking-national-referral-mechanism-statistics-annual-report-2017/file.

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