(a)

in 2016, a full scrutiny review was conducted into child exploitation in Plymouth; this review came up with a range of recommendations all of which had been completed;

(b)

it was highlighted that young people could be exploited in a number of ways, including County Lines (drug running), sexual exploitation, human trafficking and criminal exploitation;

(c)

the oversight for the work surrounding child exploitation in Plymouth was with the Local Safeguarding Board (PSCB) however this was to transfer to Local Safeguarding Arrangements soon; Safer Plymouth also had an oversight of a number of strands of the work, particularly regarding their role to address cyber-crime and fraud. In Plymouth, child exploitation work was overseen by the strategic Missing and  Child Exploitation (MACE) subgroup of the PSCB and was chaired by the NSPCC;

(d)

examples of work linked to child exploitation in Plymouth included: Operation Greywild (which targeted and disrupted large groups of young people who were becoming involved in criminal activity or ASB); Operation Dalitron (focused upon engaging fairground owners and operatives to prevent child exploitation); Barnardos have delivered ‘in plain site’ (targeting awareness raising in the night time economy);

(e)

MACE had developed a new screening tool for all professionals concerned about potential child exploitation; this would support better intelligence gathering about prevalence and types of child exploitation in Plymouth.

(f)

officers had been working with young people to discuss what cyber bullying and peer to peer bullying looked like to them; it was now for messages/ a campaign to be developed with young people to clearly explain what cyber bullying consisted of in order to encourage others to recognise the signs and receive help and support if required;

(g)

as part of the child exploitation scrutiny review in 2016 there was a call for evidence sent out to a variety of partners and organisations requesting for more information on this subject; the call for evidence had a poor response rate and members of the review were concerned what that implied to the importance of child exploitation at the time.  Since 2016, the local authority, partners and other organisations had worked well together on safeguarding courses, annual conferences, seminars and training sessions;

(h)

one of the focuses of the Together for Childhood project was to develop key messages and training, in conjunction with Barnardos, for Early Years Practitioners; work was also ongoing as to how this could link in with the early years curriculum. It was also highlighted that the council’s early years team had an action plan consisting of safeguarding, training programmes and audits for childminders/ nurserys etc;

(i)

the Safeguarding Board was the lead for child exploitation in the city; whilst there was a lot of information on their website regarding this subject, it was acknowledged that the Council needed to have a clear link on their website which would direct them to this information.