Giving evidence to a parliamentary cross-party joint committee on human rights session held on 23 November, Laura Durán, head of policy, advocacy and research at Every Child Protected Against Trafficking (ECPAT), said that hotels used to house unaccompanied children are “effectively operating as unregulated children’s homes”.
Durán added: “The way these hotels have been operated is that there is no receiving local authority that has corporate parenting duties over the children while they’re in these hotels.”
She explained that current figures indicate at least 222 children have gone missing from these hotels while under the care of the Home Office since October last year, adding it is likely that many of the missing children are victims of human trafficking.
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