Met chief to attend Nichols’ conference on trafficking

The Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe, will attend next month’s Vatican conference on human trafficking to be chaired by Cardinal Vincent Nichols.

The cardinal told BBC News on Monday that Sir Bernard would be one of at least 20 senior police officers from around the world to attend the event in Rome on 9-10 April.

The conference is the second on trafficking to be hosted by the Vatican and will focus on building links between police and the Church.?He said: “What we bring particularly is the role of Religious women, who belong to congregations that are worldwide. Often [female] victims of trafficking trust other women, and these international networks of Religious women help to get people back home, and in that way build up a network to counter the criminal network of human trafficking.”
During the interview, Cardinal Nichols reflected on the consistory at which he was made a cardinal. “I have moved into another sphere of life of the Church, one that I never dreamed of being involved in,” he said, adding that while the Archbishop of Westminster is traditionally made a cardinal: “With this Pope, it wasn’t at all sure.”

He also renewed his recent criticism of welfare reform, saying that many found it “impossible to cope with the complexities of the welfare support system”.

In a reflection posted on the Westminster Diocese website, Cardinal Nichols said that his remarks to The Daily Telegraph last month on welfare reforms, in which he described levels of destitution as “a disgrace”, had been “politicised”. “What happened I think after [the interview] was something of a politicisation of my remarks, and newspapers take them in a different way depending on their political point of view,” he said.

The cardinal added that he was opposed to welfare dependency and did not believe the Government was deliberately pursuing policies leading to destitution.