Looked after children exploited by County Lines drug dealers

Work with Offenders profiles a new report by Crest Advisory

A new report published today (3 December 2020) by Crest Advisory concludes that looked are children are being exploited by County Lines drug dealers because of our broken care system. The report which is based on interviews and focus groups with police officers, child protection experts and charities, and analysis of data from police in Merseyside and North Wales, identifies systemic failures to safeguard vulnerable adolescents.

Since the National Crime Agency (NCA) published their first intelligence assessment in 2015, county lines have gone from being a little known phenomenon discussed by a small community of professionals to front page news in national newspapers. However, due to the lack of published data on the nature and scale of county lines exploitation, Crest Advisory describes it as “an issue that generates heat but very little light”.

Lack of a systematic response

Local authorities and police forces, with a few notable exceptions, do not publish data on children exploited in county lines, neither is this data routinely collected by central government departments. It is often unsafe for children and young people who have been involved in county lines to tell their stories, even anonymously, so first person accounts are relatively rare. The lack of published evidence has inhibited the ability of professionals to understand and respond to the evolving county lines threat.

Looked after children (LAC), who have been taken into local authority care as a statutory intervention to improve their welfare, are widely recognised as being at disproportionate risk of being groomed and exploited in county lines. As their ‘corporate parents’, the agencies of the state are collectively responsible for the welfare of these children. Yet as these children are moved into accommodation often at a great distance from their home area, sometimes in unregulated settings, their vulnerability to criminal exploitation increases.

Maps plotting known county lines show a multiplicity of lines extending from urban bases to coastal towns and market towns all over the county. These maps echo the distribution of looked after children from urban local authorities, sent to children’s homes and unregulated accommodation often hundreds of miles from home. The relationship between the movement of vulnerable adolescents around the country in care placements and the spread of county lines is therefore a matter of significant interest.

We have long known that drug markets of all types are constantly evolving in order to evade enforcement efforts. The ‘traditional’ model of county lines involved gangs grooming and exploiting looked after children from care settings in urban areas to go missing and transport and sell class A drugs in county bases. In many areas, this is gradually being replaced (driven in part by the impact of the pandemic and consequent lockdowns) by a new ‘local franchise’ model of county lines, putting the growing numbers of looked after children who are placed at distance from their home area or in unregistered, unregulated settings, at greater risk.

Key findings

The report highlights what can happen when the children’s social care system fails to act as the parent it has a statutory duty to be when a child goes into care and presents four headline findings:

1. Looked after children are disproportionately represented in county lines networks — but they are not being systematically identified by police or local authorities. Children reported missing data shows that children placed in residential care homes and unregulated settings are at a higher risk of going missing. However, the police are not consistently using county lines and Child Criminal Exploitation (CCE) flags to identify heightened risk leading to a gap between data and operational understanding.
2. A growing number of looked after children are placed in care settings which do not protect them from criminal exploitation. The ‘market’ for children’s social care placements is broken. There is a shortage of suitable placements close to home for vulnerable adolescents, meaning they are often placed in settings perhaps hundreds of miles from home, and in extremis in unregistered, unregulated settings.
3. Inadequate information sharing between agencies leads to a poor safeguarding response for exploited children. Local authorities and police forces lack a common set of vulnerability assessment tools and CCE flags. With no centrally directed approach there is currently an inconsistent patchwork of local responses. This means that agencies are not able to share critically important information about vulnerable children in a timely manner across borders.
4. The county lines operating model has proven to be highly adaptable to police tactics. Grooming and exploitation is increasingly taking place in the ‘county bases’ — the point of sale for county lines, rather than in the ‘home bases’, the urban hinterlands of these gangs and OCGs. Adaptations piloted by gangs during the first Covid-19 lockdown suggest that the most successful operators of county lines are moving towards new models of exploitation which will pose huge challenges to police forces in county dealing bases.

Principles for reform

The Crest report identifies three broad principles which it recommends should guide the Government’s to tackling county lines:

• Define the problem. There is currently no legal definition of child criminal exploitation (CCE) or county lines. A new legal framework is required to form the basis for the tools agencies use as part of a new national strategy.
• A national strategic response. In order to safeguard looked after children from exploitation in county lines networks, an interdepartmental national strategy is required which manages vulnerabilities between local authorities and the police and across borders.
• A joined up focus on prevention across government. The national leadership in tackling county lines remains with the Home Office. As a result, the emphasis is heavily on enforcement, as the levers necessary to develop a preventative safeguarding response sit within other government departments, particularly the Department for Education. A multi-agency response is needed to protect vulnerable children, particularly those in care.