Council and partners “much better” at identifying when Bedford children are at risk of exploitation

Bedford Borough Council and its safeguarding partners are “much better” at identifying when a child is at risk of being exploited, a senior council officer has said.

Martin Purbrick, director of children’s services, presented the Bedford Borough Local Safeguarding Children’s Board Annual Report to the Children’s Services Overview and Scrutiny Committee on Monday (January 9).

He told the committee that the report was a “really comprehensive” look at the work undertaken by the council and its safeguarding partners through 2021/22.

Committee chair, councillor Hilde Hendrickx (LibDems, Newnham) said the report talked about safeguarding in the community and child exploitation.

“Can you give us an idea for the scale of the problem in Bedford borough,” she asked.

“I don’t think I can give you an exact number of children that are at risk of exploitation,” Mr Purbrick replied.

“We’ve developed a much more sophisticated partnership around exploitation awareness not only in Bedford borough, all the exploitation work is done on a pan-Bedfordshire basis.

“There are multiple meetings involving officers at all levels of the local authority, the police, and health colleagues where we share information about strategic approaches to tackling exploitation, right down to the case level data.

“We don’t know what we don’t know, but there has been a lot of work about ensuring that schools, police, and health settings share information with each other around exploitation.

“So whilst I probably couldn’t give you a percentage or a number of young people [being exploited] I feel really confident that where someone is identified as not only being exploited or experiencing a risk of it, or maybe they are an acquaintance of someone that is being exploited, we share that information so there’s a really robust response,” he said.

“Has that risk been increasing over the years?” councillor Hendrickx asked.

Mr Purbrick replied: “I think the biggest change has been the shift in focus to incorporate the different types of exploitation.

“When local authorities first started talking about exploitation it was all about child sexual exploitation and the focus was heavily on that – it wasn’t about criminal exploitation.

“Whereas now sexual exploitation, criminal exploration, and missing episodes are all seen together under one holistic overview.

“They are all seen under one lens now which means that probably the number of children that we are working with (who you would describe as being exploited or at risk of exploitation) has grown,” he said.

“But that’s because we are much better at identifying and understanding who is being exploited and what exploitation means.

“Where authorities are not talking to each other and not sharing information is where there’s a real risk of children slipping into serious harm.

“I can’t say that isn’t going to happen, what I can say is that [our] partnership is very strong, and our information sharing protocols are working and are in place, and everyone is signed up to them.

“Where we do have concerns about a child we share it with each other,” he said.