26 1GM Thursday December 3 2020 | the times
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parents’, the agencies of the state are
collectively responsible for... these
children. Yet as these children are
moved into accommodation often at a
great distance from their home area,
sometimes in unregulated settings,Let it snow Marianna Tsembenhoi of the Royal Ballet dances in Covent Garden,
London, which will have a daily dusting of snow from noon to 6pm until January
Police and local authorities routinely
fail to track down missing children
involved in “county line” drug dealing,
according to a report.
The “broken” social care system has
led to vulnerable children going missing
and becoming disproportionately in-
volved in county lines, in which urban
gangs take over provincial drug markets.
The report by Crest Advisory, a
police and criminal justice consultancy,
says that local authorities avoided
responsibility for safeguarding exploit-
ed children, who can wait 18 months for
help despite known involvement in
drug running.
Councils and police fail to share
“critically important information about
vulnerable children in a timely manner
across borders”, the report says, mean-
ing that children are at risk of staying
missing. Children in local authority
care are disproportionately represent-
ed in county lines networks but are not
systematically identified, it adds. Police
do not properly use exploitation and
county lines flags when they record
data on missing children, creating a
“huge barrier” to managing their risk.
The report, released today, says:
“Children who have been taken into
local authority care... are widely recog-
nised as being at disproportionate risk
of being groomed and exploited in
county lines. As their ‘corporateChildren missing from care
‘abandoned’ to drug gangs
their vulnerability to criminal exploita-
tion increases.”
County lines gangs used to recruit
couriers in cities to run drugs and cash
to rural areas. However, they have re-
sponded quickly to police crackdowns
and children are increasingly recruited
locally, often from care homes, to avoid
scrutiny by the authorities.
Anne Longfield, the children’s
commissioner for England, writes in a
foreword to the Crest report that a
growing number of children in the care
system are “ripe for the picking by the
criminals who want to exploit them”.
The report concludes that too many
children are placed in care settings that
do not protect them from criminal ex-
ploitation. It makes recommendations
including ending the use of unregulat-
ed care homes, fixing the broken care
market and a new national strategy to
tackle criminal exploitation.
Kevin Hyland, the independent anti-
slavery commissioner, said that even
when children were identified as being
at risk, nothing was put in place to pro-
tect them or disable their exploiters and
they were “lost within the cracks of all
the different bits of the system”.
“Children are bouncing around from
care home to care home, police are
continuously having to look for
children, perpetrators are using kids for
criminal abuse,” he said. “Ultimately
you have a lot of young people growing
up in a life of crime.”Fiona Hamilton Crime Editor Case study
M
erseyside is one of the top
three exporting areas for
county lines, alongside
London and the West Midlands
(Fiona Hamilton writes). It has
less than a sixth of London’s
population but half the capital’s
number of drug dealing lines.
Of the 44 children in
Merseyside with a police county
lines flag who had been reported
missing in the past two years, 22
went missing from a care setting
at least once. Eight of the ten
who went missing most often
were in care. Of the 100 reported
missing most often, only 15 did
not go missing at all from a care
placement.
Crest also examined north
Wales, where many Merseyside
county lines export, and found
that 70 per cent of subjects with
county lines exploitation flags
had a history of missing episodes,
and 30 per cent had been in care.PAUL GROVER