Modern Slavery Act 2015 Committee Report

Baroness Barker Excerpts

Friday 28th March 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barker (LD)]

My Lords, I begin by declaring an interest: my family depends on care workers who come from a CQC-registered provider. Part of what I say today is based on reflections from sitting and listening to some of the conversations of those remarkable people who have come around the world to do jobs that are extraordinarily difficult and very necessary to us here.

Yesterday, I and the clerk to our committee had the great privilege of speaking to representatives of the Lao parliament about the process of post-legislative scrutiny. We talked about this Act and the work that we did, and we were asked, “What was the most important lesson that you learned?”. I said it is important to have a mix of people who know the subject inside out—I include in that our committee people, such as the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, the noble Lord, Lord Randall, and the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee—together with people who know very little and are capable of asking the obvious questions; that is me.

We will hear in great detail from various people from around the committee on the nature of this problem and what the Government have to do about it. But the key question that we are debating is: is it government policy that ending modern slavery is seen as an integral factor in the development of sustainable business, or is it a luxury that would be very nice to have but actually does not matter? It was quite clear to us that under the preceding Conservative Governments it had gone from being one to the other. My suggestion is that it is neither. I suggest that all the things that we are going to recommend today that the Government do as the result of our report add up to good and sustainable business practice.

The noble Baroness, Lady O’Grady, talked about the care sector, and obviously I want to focus on that. But during our deliberations, one particular case came up that shows the problems in stark contrast. There was a case of a trawler firm, TN Trawlers, based in Galloway in Scotland. For over a decade it had been bringing in people from all over the world to act as deck-hands, and they were kept in the most appalling and dangerous circumstances with absolutely no possibility of contacting anybody at all. That threw up three issues for me. First, this is not just a domestic issue for us but an offshore issue; that is something that we did not get a chance to focus on in our committee but is very important. Secondly, the Government have not yet tackled the role that the directors of the company and phoenix companies have in the perpetuation of bad practice. Thirdly, the loopholes and the lack of information between different agencies—the police, the gangmasters authority and others—are ongoing.

We now have a growing body of evidence. In the care sector, for example, we have seen the problems grow over the last few years. It is very strange to me that we cannot get to the bottom of the problem. Our care sector is very well studied. People such as private equity investors do not put their money into a sector in the scale that they have without knowing the detailed financials, yet we could not get anybody to tell us who was paying for the care, which companies were bringing in workers and which were treating their workers badly. It is extraordinary to me that, as the noble Lord, Lord Randall, said, we are going to repeat the errors by setting up an agency that does not have the power to demand data of other public authorities or the requisite number of inspectors with deep knowledge of each of the sectors in which these abuses are happening, in order not only to deal with the cases that turn up but to do labour market projections and prevent matters arising. I see the problems of visas being tied to particular employers very clearly, and I think the noble Baroness, Lady O’Grady, is right that we should look at the Australian system as a way of preventing further abuses.

I go back to my starting point. I think that the role of government is to continue to make the business case against modern slavery. To do that, we really have to up our research game. The noble Baroness, Lady O’Grady, like me, was very disappointed by the response of the Department for Business and Trade that we received when we took our evidence. I sincerely hope that by making the fair work agency the responsibility of that department and making explicit the continuing responsibility of other parts of government to feed into it, we will overcome that problem. If we do not, we are going to continue to trade on human misery, and that is not just immoral but financially unsustainable.