4. 4. Statement by the Chair of the Equality, Local Government and Communities Committee on the Committee's Forward Work Programme including Refugees, Asylum Seekers and Unaccompanied Children

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 3:22 pm on 19 October 2016.

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Photo of Joyce Watson Joyce Watson Labour 3:22, 19 October 2016

Thank you, Deputy Presiding Officer. Thank you, Chair, for your statement. Not to lengthen the debate too much, I want to focus in particular on the report that we will eventually come up with about asylum seekers, refugees and specifically unaccompanied children. I would ask that, within our stages of going through the report, we look at the children we’ve seen from the care report by ECPAT, which particularly focuses on asylum-seeking children being taking into care, because they’re unaccompanied minors, and then going missing from that care provision simply because they haven’t been looked after in maybe quite the way that they should have, and some of the practices that go alongside unaccompanied minors hadn’t been thought about.

I’m going to be quite specific when I say that it is very often the case—and I hope it will never be the case in Wales—that unaccompanied minors do end up being trafficked. They end up being trafficked because people haven’t quite grasped the fact that they are under extreme pressure and that many of them, in the very first place, have arrived where they are due to being trafficked in the very first place. So, we do really need to be very, very aware of that.

Moving on with the same theme, it is the case, and it would be worth us examining this, that we have the new anti-slavery Bill that is coming through from the UK. There are trial projects in Wales that we could certainly look at when we look at the role of child trafficking guardians, and anything that we can learn from that, that might be useful to work along those lines in this instance.

I do have to say—and I don’t expect a comment, but I have to say it—that waking up this morning and listening to David Davies, the MP for Monmouth, suggesting what he did suggest this morning about checking individuals in a very personal, intrusive manner really did appal me, and I just wanted to put that on the record.