Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what assessment he has made of the implications for his policies of the recommendations made by Missing Families in its report entitled All of us were broken, published 29 July 2019; and what steps he is taking to improve protections and support for children at risk of exploitation and their families.

The department welcomes Missing People’s work on this matter and, together with the Home Office, will give due consideration to the report’s recommendations.

To improve protections and support for children at risk of exploitation and their families, we have strengthened local safeguarding arrangements through the Children and Social Work Act (2017). We have placed a duty on safeguarding partners – the police, health and the local authority – to work together to make plans to keep children safe and be accountable for how well agencies work together to protect children from abuse and neglect in their local area.

These new arrangements to safeguard and promote the welfare of all children must be implemented by safeguarding partners by the end of September 2019. It will be for local determination regarding what the arrangements cover, but they must set out how all children, including those at risk of child criminal exploitation, will be kept safe. In order to ensure transparency regarding the activities undertaken, the safeguarding partners must publish a report, at least once in every 12-month period, setting out what they have done as a result of the arrangements and how effective these arrangements have been in practice.

In 2018 we revised the ‘Working Together to Safeguard Children’ and ‘Keeping Children Safe in Education’ statutory safeguarding guidance documents to reflect new and emerging risks of harm to children including county lines, criminal exploitation and other harms from outside the home.

The department is also funding a £2 million Tackling Child Exploitation support programme to provide evidence-based expertise, advice and practical support to safeguarding partners in local areas to develop an effective multi-agency response to extra-familial harms such as child sexual exploitation, child criminal exploitation and gang and drug involvement that exploit vulnerable children.