Nationality and Borders Bill

Debate between Lord Alton of Liverpool and Baroness Garden of Frognal

Lords Hansard - Part 1 & Committee stage
Thursday 10th February 2022 Lords Chamber

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Baroness Garden of Frognal) (LD)]

My Lords, if Amendment 156 is agreed I cannot call Amendment 156A by reason of pre-emption.

[Lord Alton of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to address Amendments 156A and 156B in this group and to follow the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh of Pickering, and what she said about the Scottish Law Society. I very much associate myself with her remarks. I turn the attention of the Committee to these two amendments, the kernel of which is

“(1ZA) Guidance issued under subsection (1) must, in particular, provide that the determination mentioned in paragraph (c) is to be made on the standard of “suspect but cannot prove”.”


My explanatory statement says—I will not read it all—

“This amendment would ensure that amendments made to the Modern Slavery Act 2015 do not raise the threshold”—


the point the noble Baroness has just referred to—

“for a Reasonable Grounds decision when accessing the National Referral Mechanism in line with—”

the guidance.

One thing that came out of the last debate was that it was pretty clear that the whole Committee is agreed about one thing: that the national referral mechanism is vital to the recovery and safety of survivors of modern slavery. Since its introduction in what the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, was right to refer to as “landmark legislation” in 2015, a point echoed by the noble and learned Lord in replying to that debate, it has allowed us to identify survivors and ensure they receive the right support and are able to assist law enforcement in tackling this abhorrent trade in human beings and human suffering. I am very grateful to my noble friend Lady Prashar and to the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Albans for signing Amendment 156A.

Accessing the NRM is the crucial first step on a survivor’s journey to recovery, giving them access to vital legal and financial support, safe accommodation and an exit from the kind of exploitation that the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, referred to earlier. It enables them to start the process of rebuilding their lives, empowering themselves and even bravely supporting the prosecution of traffickers so that more potential victims are saved from exploitation. First established in 2009, and supported by successive Governments, the NRM was recently highlighted by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe as being a key element in the fight to end slavery. Since then, with the introduction of the Modern Slavery Act 2015, the UK has become a world leader in this fight and a beacon of hope for those who have been trafficked and enslaved.

However, as the noble Lord said earlier, and I agree with him in this sense, the national referral mechanism is not perfect. That is clear but the opportunity to do something about it is up the track. There is no need for Part 5 to be incorporated in the Bill, when it is inconsistent with much else in it anyway. The noble Lord told the House earlier that there is to be new legislation, so why on earth can we not wait for that? There is an old saying that when you legislate in haste, you repent at leisure; that is what we will do if we simply push this through in a pell-mell way. The mechanism may not be perfect, but it is better than anything else at the moment and we should be very careful about what we do to it.

There is a catalogue of confusion and delays, but I am sure the Government do not believe that the only solution is simply to reduce the number of poor people able to access support. However, that is exactly what Clause 59 will do. Effectively increasing the threshold that these traumatised individuals must meet, almost from the get-go, to receive support will not only leave many with the choice of slavery or destitution; it will fundamentally undo the years of hard work by government, police, NGOs, charities and Members of both Houses.

Even now, far too many survivors go unrecognised and are excluded from support. Despite our understanding of the nature of trauma and the horrors so many have gone through, many do not receive a “reasonable grounds” decision and are forced to reapply. In the previous debate, we were urged to get into the real world. The noble Lord, Lord Coaker, had a better definition of what the real world is than the one we heard from the Government Front Bench. I will do as the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, did earlier and share one example with the House, if I may.

It is the case of a poor woman who was the victim of trafficking and violent sexual exploitation. By the time she arrived in the UK, she already had severe PTSD. Her symptoms included involuntary numbing, avoidance, dissociation and shame. She failed to disclose her trafficking experience in her early interactions with the Home Office, due to the severe trauma she had experienced. These inconsistencies later contributed to her receiving a negative decision on her trafficking claim. However, they needed to be understood in the context, as I said earlier, of prolonged exposure to trauma at an early age and fear of reprisals from her abusers.

Clause 59 risks raising the threshold for a positive reasonable grounds decision at this vital first stage, meaning that survivors such as that woman will be forced to meet an even higher threshold of evidence almost immediately, before they have accessed safety and a lawyer, translator or advocate to help provide the evidence that is expected of them. The noble Lord who addressed the House earlier has promised to write to the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, me and others with more data. Here is a little data that I will share with the noble Lord, Lord Sharpe.

It is worth noting that 81% of all negative decisions at this first stage which where reconsidered were found to have been wrong, and the victim deserved a positive reasonable grounds decision. Currently, there are an estimated 136,000 victims of modern slavery in the UK, and a little over 10,000 were referred to the NRM in 2020. That means there is a vast number of individuals who have been trafficked and enslaved in our country and are already far from the safety offered by the national referral mechanism. Were we to raise the threshold to access safety and support, it would surely only play into the hands of the traffickers and slave masters by preventing survivors sharing their experience and supporting criminal investigations.

I note that the Government have denied that Clause 59 will increase the threshold, and that the intention behind it is to bring us in line with the European convention on action against trafficking—ECAT. However, many who are in the anti-slavery movement, to which we heard a lot of references earlier, and on the ground in the real world supporting vulnerable people every day believe that it is already harder today than it was, even a year ago, to get a positive decision. As such, if not remedied in the guidance, the change in language represented in this clause would effectively raise the NRM threshold.

Furthermore, the Government have rightly decided to include in the Bill that conclusive grounds decisions be made on the balance of probabilities. If the intention is not to raise the threshold, then I simply ask the Minister that they put in the Bill that reasonable grounds decisions be made on the tried and trusted standard of “suspect but cannot prove”, which is the essence of Amendments 156A and 156B. That would allow the Government to change the language of the Modern Slavery Act to be more in line with ECAT, in order to provide more consistency between conclusive grounds decisions and reasonable grounds decisions in the Bill. Vitally, it would not raise the threshold for survivors of trafficking to receive a positive decision, therefore ensuring that these poor people receive the support they so desperately need and the authorities have the evidence they need to end slavery.

Article 10(2) of ECAT says that

“if the competent authorities have reasonable grounds to believe that a person has been victim of trafficking in human beings, that person shall not be removed from its territory until the identification process as victim of an offence … has been completed”.

Both ECAT and the Modern Slavery Act envisage that support be given to victims through the NRM as the earliest stage possible, when someone is identified as a potential victim. Raising the threshold only to those who prove their status as a victim of trafficking would undermine the point of the three-stage referral system currently in place. That support is crucial to enable victims to make any discourses from a position of safety.

No doubt the Minister will say that the NRM may have been abused, but I ask him to provide the justification for that claim. As the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, and I said earlier, where is the data? I refer the Minister to the report by the Rights Lab at the University of Nottingham for evidence that the NRM is not being abused. Indeed, according to many reports, one of the biggest problems with our NRM is that it is underutilised; there are already a low number of referrals to the NRM. According to the Global Slavery Index, the estimated figure for the prevalence of modern slavery in the UK is 136,000, yet in 2020 only 10,613 potential victims were referred to the NRM. Raising the threshold would serve only to further restrict those who access the vital resources of the NRM.

I therefore felt it necessary to table these amendments. Those who are referred to the NRM are often among the most vulnerable, in the most traumatic moments of their lives. We should not be raising the threshold; we should be doing everything we can to facilitate their access to support. I beg to move.

Immigration and Social Security Co-ordination (EU Withdrawal) Bill

Debate between Lord Alton of Liverpool and Baroness Garden of Frognal

Consideration of Commons amendments
Monday 9th November 2020 Lords Chamber

[The Deputy Speaker (Baroness Garden of Frognal) (LD)]

Does any other noble Lord in the Chamber wish to speak? No. In which case, I shall call the speakers listed, the first of whom is the noble Lord, Lord Alton of Liverpool.

[Lord Alton of Liverpool (CB) [V]]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Southwark. When we travel on the London Tube, there is a warning to “mind the gap”. In their contributions, the right reverend Prelate and the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, have said that there is potentially a gap in provision between Dublin III and whatever is brought forward for January of next year. It is right that we should mind that gap.

On 21 March 2016, by a margin of 306 votes to 204, your Lordships carried an amendment on unaccompanied child refugees. Four years later, the noble lord, Lord Dubs, valiantly keeps us focused on the plight of refugee children. Four years ago, the noble Lord asked me to be a signatory to what in shorthand became known as the Dubs amendment. I readily agreed. I said at that time that the repeated use of the argument about the so-called pull factors—some of which were mentioned earlier by the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe—cannot, in the case of children, outweigh our duty to do all in our power to safeguard and save any child at risk. Not to do so would leave a lasting stain on our reputation.

In the four years since we first considered the Dubs amendment, we have seen shocking reports of children dying, abandoned, disappearing, trafficked or exploited during perilous journeys. The recent death of two little children in the English Channel, after their boat capsized, simply underlines yet again why it is crucial that we find these safe and legal routes, and long-term solutions that hit hard the criminal gangs that profiteer and exploit desperation, while tackling the root causes that create such phenomenal displacement.

In 2015, we were all deeply affected by the harrowing picture of a little Syrian toddler, washed up like so much flotsam and jetsam on a beach near Bodrum. The tragic deaths of a five year-old and an eight year-old in the English Channel starkly remind us that little has changed since then.

The Dubs amendment will not save the life of every child. Family reunions provided for in the Dublin III regulation are, at best, a safety net. But its absence after 31 December—the gap mentioned—could make a bad and tragic situation even worse.

Against this background, the House of Commons has once again returned this amendment to your Lordships House. I know that the Minister, the noble Baroness, Lady Williams of Trafford, believes that the plight of children should be a top-tier priority for the Government—in her remarks a few moments ago, she used the phrase “a fundamental tenet”. She is justifiably proud of the help we have given. Thanks to parliamentary pressure, the Government have been able to tell a better story today than might otherwise have been the case. Surely that shows the importance of parliamentary debates such as this. However, she must also accept that the talk and rhetoric from others of nets and water canon to disable or push back boats and of the use of oil rigs or remote islands to lock up migrants, and the absence of any international initiative—ideally led by the United Kingdom—to tackle the root causes, are deeply dispiriting.

According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, of the 79.5 million people around the world who have been forced to flee their homes, nearly 26 million are refugees. The UNHCR estimates that 40% are children and 68% come from just five countries. It cannot be beyond our wit—our collective genius—to drive this issue to the top of Governments’ agendas. Even if they do not accept that there are altruistic and humanitarian reasons to act, there are plenty of self-interested reasons why they should do so.

As the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, reminded us, today we commemorate the anniversary of Kristallnacht—the night of broken glass—which included the destruction of 267 synagogues. Eleanor Rathbone MP established the Parliamentary Committee on Refugees. Two years later, on 10 July 1940, in a six-hour debate, she intervened on no fewer than 20 occasions to insist that Britain had a duty of care to the refugees being hunted down by the Nazis. She said that a nation had an obligation to give succour to those fleeing persecution—in her words,

“not only in the interests of humanity and of the refugees, but in the interests of security itself”.—[Official Report, Commons, 10/7/1940; col. 1212.]

She said that discussions about asylum seekers and refugees

“always begin with an acknowledgement of the terrible nature of the problem and expressions of sympathy with the victims. Then comes a tribute to the work of the voluntary organisations. Then some account of the small leisurely steps taken by the Government. Next, a recital of the obstacles—fear of anti-semitism, or the jealousy of the unemployed, or of encouraging other nations to offload their Jews on to us”.

In 2020, nothing much has changed, and it is hard not to see the parallels.

The noble Lord, Lord Dubs, was one of the few rescued by Kindertransport, and his commendable determination for us to remain focused on the needs of refugee children was born in those shocking times.

The clock is ticking towards 31 December. The Government’s amendment legislates for a review on safe and legal routes in the new year, including specifically on family reunion. I welcome that, but, on 1 January, children will potentially have impaired access to family reunion, and many may be left stranded alone in Europe. The amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, adds a requirement that current family reunion laws are kept until the review and report are complete, so that no child loses out from accessing this vital safe and legal route.

Like the noble Lord, I am pleased by the spirt and tone of everything which the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, has said this afternoon. However, I would prefer to see this written in the Bill, and I will follow the noble Lord, Lord Dubs—metaphorically anyway—into the Lobby and vote to send this back to the Commons one final time if he does not believe that the Government’s assurances go far enough.