Your Safeguarding Responsibilities
We all have a responsibility to one another to prevent ourselves and one another from harm. Your local authority will have a safeguarding board and when you meet, you should make sure that you ask about how you can report a safeguarding concern relating to the person you are sponsoring should it is needed. Your role is not to take on the place of statutory services, but we all have a role to report whether there are concerns about the welfare of children or vulnerable adults and take action to address them where appropriate. This may involve reporting concerns to the relevant statutory services (ideally with the consent of the people concerned, where possible) and working with them to address the concern.
How to make sure you adopt safeguarding with your guest
Don’t shy away from talking about safeguarding responsibilities with your guest. It’s important for them to understand what is expected in the UK. For example, sharing that it’s illegal to smack a child in Scotland and Wales and how the use of positive parenting is expected throughout the UK is extremely useful information.
If you have a safeguarding concern regarding your guest, or you are concerned about their behaviour, you should contact your local authority immediately. If it is an emergency, contact 999.
Emergencies
Ensure that when they arrive, you speak to your guest about how to contact emergency services. In Ukraine, they have different numbers for the different services, whereas in the UK we have 999 for emergencies and 101 for non-emergency police contact, and 111 for non-emergency healthcare. Make sure you explain that if someone does not speak English, they can say the name of the language they do speak (in English) for the call handler to source an interpreter.
