Illegal Migration Bill

Baroness Kennedy of Shaws Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 12th June 2023 Lords Chamber

I support the amendments in this group and look forward to the response of the Minister.

[Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws (Lab)]

My Lords, I am a member of the Joint Committee on Human Rights. The report, as others have mentioned, came out early today, and many noble Lords will not yet have had the opportunity to read it. Evidence was taken from many people who had in-depth experience and who were experts in these different fields.

On modern-day slavery, we heard from the former anti-slavery commissioner, Professor Dame Sara Thornton, who, as noble Lords know, had been a very senior police officer and the lead police officer in the area of Oxfordshire. She made it very clear that she was horrified at the implications of the Bill, saying:

“It basically denies those who are trafficked to this country and arrive irregularly any modern slavery protections … It will be the victims who are punished, not those who are trafficking them”.


She says that as someone with huge experience. While we do not have a modern-day slavery commissioner at the moment, she is our last one, so her voice of experience should be heard and appreciated by this House.

We also heard from the Salvation Army, which the Committee will know is, again, the lead organisation dealing with modern-day slavery. Similarly, in its testimony to us, it said that

“removing people … will deliver vulnerable people back into the hands of the criminal gangs who have exploited them. This does nothing to break the cycle of exploitation”.

We really have to listen to that. I know that there are people who do not believe in expertise, but we have to listen to those with real expertise. I agree that this whole set of recommendations in the Bill is unacceptable, inhumane and unworkable.

The noble Lord, Lord Weir, suggested that we are being cynical if we think that this is performance politics. I am afraid that that is the view held by noble Lords all around this Committee, not just on the Opposition Benches. There are many Members on the Conservative Benches who know that the Bill is really the last shout of a failing Government. One said to me that it was the last card in the pack. Just think about what that means: that, when you are foundering, you turn to immigration and make a dog-whistle piece of legislation in the ugliest of ways.

[Baroness Helic (Con)]

My Lords, I will speak in support of Amendment 86 in particular, but I fully endorse other efforts to preserve protections for victims of modern slavery.

As I said at Second Reading, and as many noble Lords have warned, the provision in the Bill to remove modern slavery protections from migrants targets the very people most at risk of being trafficked. It would reduce the number of people coming forward with evidence and make prosecutions harder. My noble friend the Minister reaffirmed then the Government’s commitment to tackling the horrendous crime of modem slavery and to supporting victims, but I am afraid that the Bill still falls short.

There are strong similarities to cases of sexual and gender-based violence. We know that survivors’ testimony is crucial for accountability, but, without proper support and good systems in place, survivors are not, and do not feel, able to give evidence. The Government say that, where absolutely necessary and where they are co-operating with the police, victims will be able to stay in the United Kingdom while their case proceeds, but I fear that this sets the bar way too high. By the time it becomes apparent that a survivor’s evidence is necessary, it will often be too late. Survivors need the time and space to process what they have been through and to prepare themselves for coming forward with evidence, speaking about what they have experienced and going through the justice system. It can be an intense and daunting process which requires determination from the survivor and engagement and support from prosecutors. That is much harder to deliver remotely and why a recovery period is so crucial. It allows the time to reflect, to receive support and to rebuild trust, which may have been shattered by the experience of being trafficked, but without which they cannot work with the police or prosecutors.

There are parallels with the situation of migrant victims of domestic abuse. We have ample evidence that the fear or threat of deportation is used by abusers to control their victims and that it prevents victims from seeking help or escaping an abusive situation. Similarly, if survivors of modern slavery and human trafficking believe that reporting the crime that they have experienced will mean immediate deportation, trafficked persons are far less likely to come forward in the first place. The net result of that might end up being more people suffering and less control over migration.

The support that survivors of trafficking are able to receive during a recovery period can also reduce their risk of being trafficked in future. Trafficked persons are often highly vulnerable. Returning them to their home country without support may not solve the problem and risks putting them back into the cycle and seeing them trafficked again. A recovery period can be crucial to ending dependency, allowing survivors to rebuild their lives—that, in itself, is a blow to the human traffickers’ model.

I really hope that my noble friends in government will feel able to look again at this. I do not think that removing the protection against modern slavery will have the impact for which they hope; I fear that it will make the situation worse rather than better. If we want to prevent dangerous illegal migration, we need to tackle the traffickers who facilitate it. Targeting their victims will only make that harder. By ensuring the recovery period, Amendment 86 would allow survivors the space and cover to receive the support they need and, in doing so, would make successful prosecutions more likely and escape from modern slavery easier. I hope my noble friend the Minister will be able to support it.

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[Baroness Hamwee (LD)]

My Lords, I am not going to repeat the points that I made on the first group because they apply in a very similar way to the amendments in this group, which in our case amounts to opposition to the clauses standing part of the Bill.

In the first group, I strayed into Clauses 25 and 26, which should really be here—the revolving door of a revolving sunset. A point I did not make was how much scope the Secretary of State has to keep on altering the direction of how things go with minimum scrutiny because, to me, scrutiny should include an opportunity to make changes. So much is dealt with by regulations. All the clauses on modern slavery are part of a whole, which, as a whole, we oppose. The Bill does nothing to tackle modern slavery and trafficking, does away with support for many victims and damages the UK’s reputation. Like the noble Lord, Lord Randall, who spoke earlier, I do not much like the term “world leading”, but that was what people were saying of us not so very long ago.

[Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws (Lab)]

My Lords, a number of years ago, I chaired an inquiry in Scotland for the Equality and Human Rights Commission of the United Kingdom to look into the position of trafficking in Scotland because it was a surprise that at that time there had not been any prosecutions. Was this because there was no problem in Scotland, or was something happening with regards to investigations?

I want the Committee to know that after many years of practice at the Bar, doing some of the most shocking and desperate cases, the experience of chairing that inquiry into modern slavery was revelatory to me in hearing evidence—particularly, of course, from women who had been sexually used, and used in the most horrifying ways, where their whole days were spent servicing men. Afterwards, they needed to be looked after, cared for and encouraged to believe that their families back in the countries from which they had come would not be punished if they were to testify in a court of law. The threats that they had experienced were of such a kind that they lived in terror of those who had victimised and trafficked them.

I really do feel—I heard earlier one of the Conservative Back-Benchers asking the Minister whether he had ever met anyone who had been trafficked—that meeting those who have been trafficked is a shocking business. It also goes on to those who, for example, are subjected to slavery within the domestic environment, who are worked almost to death. They are brought over from other countries, live in households in which they are expected to get up at the crack of dawn and work through until the wee small hours of the following day, and are not rewarded—their wages are supposed to go to their family back somewhere else. The accounts that one hears are just shocking.

The fear that people have, which has to be catered for in having them give testimony in a court of law against those who have been their traffickers, is such that to be removing all of that is just shocking. It is unbelievable to people in other parts of the world. My work has now changed; it is now in international law, and everywhere I go people are shocked by Britain, which led the way on this and was so inventive in creating this legislation. Other countries are now saying “What is Britain thinking about?”, and we are really uncertain as to what the Government are thinking about.

[Lord Morrow (DUP)]

My Lords, I will speak very briefly as a co-signatory to Amendment 96, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Weir. I suspect it will not surprise anyone in your Lordships’ Committee that I have a real passion about modern slavery. I had the experience on one occasion of meeting a victim, and I listened to a story that I was never prepared for.

What that victim told me about how she was treated was quite horrendous. She was treated as a commodity, with no respect; indeed, she did not even get food, never mind anything else. I have seen some difficult cases in all my years in politics because I have been in it nearly as old as I am; it seems that way. But the day that lady came to Stormont, met me and told me her horrendous story, I said that as long as I live, I will always make an effort to do something, moderately little as it may be, to fight this awful cancer of human trafficking. So it is extremely disturbing, as I said at Second Reading, that the plans of the devolved Administrations and their modern slavery strategies are now undermined by the Bill.

When I first consulted on my Private Member’s Bill in the Northern Ireland Assembly in 2012—it became the trafficking Act in January 2015—it was shortly after the UK had signed the EU trafficking directive, and a significant part of my Bill was to ensure that the rights within the directive could be enacted in Northern Ireland. At Second Reading of my Bill, nearly 10 years ago now, I said that the directive

“makes a number of effective proposals, which, if we choose to put them into law, would have a positive effect for vulnerable victims. Many of the proposals in the Bill directly seek to implement the directive into our law.”


I went on to say that the Assembly

“should seek fulsome implementation of the directive and, indeed, the Council of Europe Convention on Action against Trafficking in Human Beings”.

I believe that the Assembly met that objective when the Act was passed in January 2015. It is therefore with deep regret that, 10 years on from my Second Reading speech, I am seeing that good work being undone, justified by a tenuous interpretation of the European trafficking convention, which the noble Baroness, Lady Ritchie, made reference to earlier—a view which was described as “untenable” by the Joint Committee on Human Rights in its report published at the weekend.

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[Lord Coaker (Lab)]

That would be helpful, looking at the incredulity on the faces of the noble Lords, Lord Morrow and Lord Weir.

[Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws (Lab)]

A year ago, I conducted an inquiry into a horrifying set of events that took place in Glasgow during Covid, involving refugees and asylum seekers. Support was given then by the local authority to the asylum seekers in Glasgow. In addition, there was a migrant helpline, which was pretty hopeless, emanating from the Home Office—it was outsourced—but most of the social work on the ground was done by the local authority.

[Lord Coaker (Lab)]

I thank my noble friend Lady Kennedy for that. Asking the Minister to check this is helpful. It will no doubt be in his notes that it is the case, but, given the experience of devolved matters of noble Lords, it would be helpful for the Committee if that were checked and confirmed one way or the other.