Modern Slavery Bill

Debate between Baroness Butler-Sloss and Lord Warner

Monday 23rd February 2015 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Butler-Sloss (CB)]

In the letter from Kevin Hyland, on page 4 on international collaboration, it is clear that the commissioner designate sees it as an essential part of his role to bring together the necessary partners, nationally and internationally. He talks about working with British embassies and high commissions and wanting a significant increase in bilateral, multilateral and joint investigations, some of them supported by EU funding. In the past there have been some excellent bilateral arrangements, particularly one with Romania called Operation Golf, and there were other very good arrangements that worked with Europol and so on. Do the Government think that the current powers of the commissioner are sufficient for him to carry out all the duties that he talks about on page 4—and, if so, is it necessary to have it in primary legislation?

[Lord Warner (Lab)]

My Lords, in speaking in support of the amendment I want to ask the Minister a question. We had a discussion earlier today about the Secretary of State fixing the budget for the commissioner and we had a debate about public bodies being required to co-operate with the commissioner. Is it the Minister’s understanding that the amendment on setting the budget for the commissioner embraces the whole area of overseas travel and maintaining those international relations? Why are embassies not included in the public bodies that are expected to co-operate with the commissioner? It would be helpful to have some clarification on those two issues.

Modern Slavery Bill

Debate between Baroness Butler-Sloss and Lord Warner

Wednesday 10th December 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Warner (Lab)]

My Lords, I shall speak to Amendment 93, in my name, which adopts an approach similar to that of my noble friend’s Amendment 86P. I agree with what he said. We both agree that we should put the national referral mechanism on a statutory basis, as the Joint Committee recommended. I need to go over some of the same ground as he did, but there are also some other issues that I want to put into play in trying to convince the Government that a statutory basis is the right basis for the NRM.

Before I make my case, I should briefly explain why I am taking an approach different from that of the noble Lord, Lord McColl, in his Amendment 86M, which we discussed on Monday. I agree with him that Clause 48 is totally unsatisfactory, but I am not sure that it is right to put on the face of the Bill as much detail as there was in his amendment. That is why, in my amendment, I have gone for a set of regulation-making powers on given subjects.

My amendment is intended to give effect to the recommendation in the report by the Joint Committee on the draft Bill that the Bill should be amended,

“to give statutory authority for the NRM to ensure greater consistency in its operation, decision-making and provision of victim support services”.

Those are the critical reasons why this mechanism should be not an internal administrative system but one that has clearly been endorsed by Parliament. Our recommendation is clearly stated and set out in paragraph 82 of the Joint Committee’s report. My amendment would not hamstring the Home Office too much—I shall come back to that later.

Instead of laying out a lot of detail in the Bill, my amendment would enable the Home Secretary to make regulations in six key areas, and includes a provision for the inclusion of,

“such other matters as the Secretary of State considers appropriate to the new body”.

This approach to regulation-making gives the Home Office plenty of discretion for adapting the scheme as circumstances require. It does not fix for all time the role or the precise remit of the NRM. If we put a clause of this nature into the Bill, there will be plenty of flexibility in the regulation-making approach,

The six key areas in my amendment are the very ones identified by the Home Secretary as the subject of the Review of the National Referral Mechanism for Victims of Human Trafficking, as summarised in paragraph 2.1.3 of the report. I have not gone for widening the NRM’s role in any way; my amendment covers the topics that the Home Secretary said the review of the NRM had to cover. When Ministers set up that review, they knew that the Joint Committee would be recommending an NRM with a statutory basis. We came to that conclusion before we drafted the report and we informed the Home Office, so it did know that that was the road that we would traverse. There was plenty of opportunity for the Home Secretary to consider that issue in the context of the review. It is striking that, if we read the review fully, we find that it very much makes the case for putting the NRM on a statutory basis.

One point that I would draw attention to is in subsection (3) of my amendment, which gives effect to another Joint Committee recommendation, in paragraph 91 of its report, that,

“competent authority status be removed from UK Visas and Immigration”.

We saw a conflict of interest between determining immigration and asylum status and determining whether someone was a victim of trafficking. I will not detain the House with the evidence for that recommendation, but it is set out very clearly in paragraphs 84 to 90 of the Joint Committee report. The evidence and this amendment are absolutely consistent with the recommendations of the NRM review report at paragraphs 7.4.1 and 7.4.5. The amendment is drafted to be consistent with the findings of that review.

The Joint Committee heard a huge variety of evidence and arguments in favour of making the NRM a statutory-based mechanism, which were very much the same sets of arguments and evidence that was put before the review. We were told by Anti-Slavery International that the current arrangements,

“led to arbitrariness of application and access for victims”.

Others said that giving victims statutory rights would make claiming and enforcing those rights more straightforward and transparent. We were told that a statutory NRM was necessary for the UK to fulfil its international obligations as well as securing the most effective victim identification process.

Let me briefly illustrate the many concerns about a non-statutory NRM with the case of Ms O, who was a victim of trafficking, covered and cited in detail on page 61 of the Joint Committee report. Ms O was effectively kept in custody for nearly a year, despite the fact that people knew that she was a victim of trafficking. That is an appalling outcome for a person who was identified as a victim of trafficking, and that is what took place under a non-statutory-based NRM. All those issues are very clearly set out in the NRM review, which effectively makes the case, as I said earlier, for a statutory-based NRM.

I have spent much of the time in this Committee arguing for the Home Office Ministers and officials to get off the back of the anti-slavery commissioner and widen his remit. The NRM is a subject where the Home Secretary and her officials need to get more involved and design a statutory-based system that provides much more consistency and better identification and support for victims, has more credibility and speed of independent decision-making and is more fit to work alongside an Independent Anti-slavery Commissioner. I want the Home Office to get more involved, and I hope that in responding to the NRM review it will have a change of heart and commit to putting the NRM on a statutory basis.

I do not expect every “i” to be dotted and “t” to be crossed on this new system before Royal Assent but, before the Bill leaves this House, I hope that we can agree with the Minister the terms of a new clause that gives the Home Secretary regulation-making powers subject to the affirmative resolution procedure.

Finally, I have deliberately described in my new clause a “National Referral Mechanism replacement”. I do not regard the name, “national referral mechanism”, as particularly clear or helpful, and I would hope that we could find a better title, embracing words such as “slavery”, “victims” and “safeguarding”. How about the “Slavery Victims Safeguarding Authority”? Something along those lines would give a true indication of what this mechanism is actually all about. I support the amendment.

[Baroness Butler-Sloss (CB)]

My Lords, my Amendment 96 is in this group. I start by saying that I entirely support the idea of the previous speakers that we should have a statutory national referral mechanism, although perhaps with more felicitous wording, as the noble Lord, Lord Warner, has just suggested.

My proposal is much more modest. The reason for it is this. At the moment we have a very poor double system. There is the UKHTC in Birmingham, which provides, as we have heard, an 80% yes rate to victims, as opposed to the UKVI, which says that only 20% get through. Clearly, that is unacceptable. We also have two reviews from Jeremy Oppenheim which, in my view, are absolutely excellent. As I understand it, the Government have agreed in principle to the fundamental and radical changes that the second, final review has asked for. However, it seems to me that there needs to be some time for consultation, for arranging to get these panels around the country and for arranging how, in fact, a new, better described NRM should work.

My proposal is that the Secretary of State should have the power to make regulations to establish this statutory committee, leaving it to the Home Office to work it out. However, in order to keep them up to the mark, the Secretary of State must report to Parliament within 12 months of the Bill becoming law, in order to say that they will actually do it. At the end of the day, we undoubtedly need a statutory system. But I believe that we need some leeway to work out how it should be. That is why my amendments, in my view, are very modest.

If I may respectfully say so, it would be very unwise of the Government not to listen to this. We have the two reviews of the NRM and we have what the Joint Committee has said, which has been set out so well by the noble Lord, Lord Warner—of course, I was a member of the committee. I totally support the proposals of our Select Committee and of the two reviews. All I am saying is that the Government should have a bit of time to think it over, but not so much time that the matter goes into what is sometimes called the long grass, because this really has to come. The current situation cannot go on for much longer because it is so patently wrong. That has been set out very clearly in the two reviews of the national referral mechanism.

I hope that, at the least, the Government will accept my amendment. I would have no objection to the Government accepting either of the other amendments that have come forward. However, I have no doubt that, one way or another, within the next 12 to 18 months, we will need to have a statutory mechanism for dealing with victim identification and support.

Modern Slavery Bill

Debate between Baroness Butler-Sloss and Lord Warner

Monday 1st December 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Warner (Lab)]

My Lords, if I may, for the convenience of the Committee, I will group my Amendment 33 with Amendment 32 as my amendment is meant to help fill the pot that the noble Lord, Lord Alton, wants to distribute. I am sorry that I did not group it at an earlier stage.

My amendment is much less ambitious than the noble Lord’s amendment. It follows on from an amendment that my noble friend Lady Smith moved to the Serious Crime Bill. I was a member of the Joint Committee on the draft Modern Slavery Bill. We were concerned to maximise the confiscation of resources from perpetrators of slavery that could go to help victims much more than had happened in the past. Indeed, the confiscation of criminal assets under SOCA had not been one of the most glorious bits of public administration in this country, as I think was recognised by the Government following a PAC report. Therefore, we need to strengthen this.

I am the first to recognise that the Government went some way towards meeting the recommendations from the Joint Committee in this area and I am very grateful to the Government for moving some way. For example, I am glad that the Government have reduced the legislative requirement for a restraint order from reasonable cause to believe to reasonable suspicion. However, I remain concerned that they have not gone further and accepted the committee’s recommendation to remove the test that there must be a risk of dissipation of assets before action is taken by the prosecutor. Frankly, the advice that the Home Secretary seems to have been getting on this issue is a bit fanciful. The characters we are talking about in this area have a track record of dissipating assets. They move very quickly when it is known that they are going to be charged and prosecuted. I think that hanging on to the idea that they need to be protected from gung-ho prosecutors by actually keeping the intention that they have to show that they will dissipate their assets is rather fanciful. The Government need to look again at that area.

I will not spend very long at this late hour talking about the areas where the Government said they were going to look further at two or three of the other recommendations in paragraph 210 on page 97 of the Joint Committee’s report. Rather than detain the House now, perhaps the Minister could write to us about how things have progressed in those areas that the Government were reviewing further.

What I want to do on this amendment is to persuade the Government that it would be useful to have a consultation to look further at strengthening the arrangements around this very technical area. I understand the difficulties of actually finding technical solutions and I am not someone who is going to try to move complicated technical amendments to the Bill at this late stage in its passage. However, I think the Government need to have another look at this so we can maximise the confiscation of assets to produce the kind of fund that the noble Lord, Lord Alton, is talking about. It is no good having a grand scheme for distribution if there is nothing in the pot to distribute. We have to work a lot harder. The kind of consultation that we are proposing in this amendment is meant to be helpful to the Government so that we can move on and strengthen this area of confiscation to the maximum advantage of victims.

[Baroness Butler-Sloss]

My Lords, I should like to make a short point on these amendments. I consider the proposals put forward by the noble Lord, Lord Alton of Liverpool, to be extremely interesting. The idea that the proceeds, if there are any, should go not only to victims but to other organisations is one which, as the noble Lord, Lord Alton, has said, attracted the Home Secretary. I would particularly like to refer to the idea that 25% of proceeds should be distributed to organisations whose purpose is to prevent slavery. One example is that of the Bedfordshire police who spent an enormous amount of time and effort, and a great deal of the police budget, in managing to bring the Connors family to justice. They were the Gypsies who had a large number of men living in appalling accommodation. They had recruited them from homeless units or soup kitchens by offering them money but then treated them in the most appalling way. They eventually took a great many of them to Sweden, trafficking them from the UK to Sweden, where they were living in caravans again and working 18 hours a day on construction sites without receiving a single penny. They in fact came back to England but I am not sure we looked after them very well when they came back. The Bedfordshire police did an extremely good job and it cost them a great portion of their budget. Andrew Selous MP has raised this issue on various occasions and I am happy to raise it again in this House. That is the sort of organisation which ought to be compensated to some extent for the use of its budget—way beyond what is normal—to get a prosecution of a large group of very successful and very wicked traffickers.

Of course, as the noble Lord, Lord Warner, has said, unless you have the money you cannot give it out to anybody else. The Government are to be congratulated on adding criminal lifestyle offences to Clause 7, taking the provisions from the Proceeds of Crime Act. I suggest to the Government that they really ought to look at civil proceedings before the arrest has been made. If the intention is to make an arrest, knowing that the lifestyle of a particular person makes them likely to be a trafficker and therefore likely to be prosecuted, you want to catch the money before he is arrested because otherwise the minute he is arrested he will get it out of the country. Anyone can get money out of the country extremely fast. Therefore, there should be some provision in the civil courts—by which I mean the High Court in particular—that where there is sufficient evidence to be able to make an arrest there should be not a confiscation but a freezing order. Freezing orders are perfectly well known right through the civil courts. If you can get a freezing order a few days or weeks before the actual arrest is made, you may take the trafficker unawares. That is where you get the money to get the pot of the noble Lord, Lord Alton, sufficiently filled. There is no question that this is either the second or third most profitable criminal enterprise in the world. It is worth something in excess of $30 billion, quite a lot of which comes through this country. It does not stay long enough, but if we can get it in the civil courts, it can fill the pot that the noble Lord, Lord Alton, wants.