Human Trafficking

Lord Avebury Excerpts

Thursday 14th October 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Avebury]

My Lords, I, too, welcome the opportunity that the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, has afforded us of considering what has been done already to deal with the horrible crime of human trafficking and what still needs to be done. She made useful suggestions on that, and I agree with her wholeheartedly that it is wrong in principle to prosecute child victims of trafficking for minor offences such as having the wrong documents. I certainly hope that the noble Lord will give a favourable answer to the suggestion made by the noble Baroness that this offence be struck out, because it seems to me outrageous that children are spending time in custody when they had no other means of getting into the United Kingdom than the use of false documents, as many asylum seekers do.

I also welcome what the noble Baroness said about the European directive. I agree that it would be useful to have a meeting with the Minister to discuss the arguments that have been rehearsed in both Sub-Committee E and Sub-Committee F on what we should be doing about this directive. If it is possible for the noble Lord to say that he would agree to that meeting, I would be very grateful.

We have come a little way since the chairman of the Home Affairs Select Committee in another place remarked, on producing his report of May 2008:

“we have no good information on the scale of the problem, enforcement is patchy, prosecution rates are low and there is little protection for victims”.

There has been a bit of an improvement since then, although we are still looking at the tip of the iceberg. The Select Committee said that on a conservative estimate, as has been mentioned, there were 5,000 victims of trafficking—of whom only a fraction have been identified—while the number of arrests as a result of the work of the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre in 2009-10 reached a respectable total of 417. Yet there were only 73 convictions of traffickers in the latest three-year period for which figures are available.

One reason it has been so difficult to get convictions is that the prosecution has to prove double intent: first, that the offender was moving the victim across a national border and, secondly, doing so to exploit that person here in the United Kingdom. Because of this difficulty, the CPS often charges the trafficker with a lesser offence such as living off immoral earnings, which is easier to prove, but that sentence may be so short that the offender is out before the victim’s immigration status has been determined. Does the Minister think it would be possible to expand the definition of the trafficking offence so that it was only necessary to prove that the victim was not lawfully in the UK, not that the accused had been concerned in unlawfully bringing the victim here?

The noble Lord, Lord Luke, mentioned Barnardo’s, and I, too, pay tribute to its work. It published the very useful report, Whose child now?, on what is known about the practice of moving a child around the UK or from town to town for the purposes of sexual exploitation, a crime punishable by up to 14 years’ imprisonment under Section 58 of the Sexual Offences Act 2003. This crime is recognised as trafficking in the UK action plan and covered in the remit of the HTC. Since that penalty is the same for a child trafficked from another country, it gives the prosecution an alternative charge where it is easier to prove that the trafficker was responsible for the move within the UK, rather than for the original trafficking from overseas. Is the HTC building up a database of cases that can be referred to by the police and the CPS to help them decide what is the most appropriate charge?

In the Government’s response to the sixth report of the Home Affairs Select Committee last August, they said that the HTC would continue to improve its role as a central point for the collection and analysis of data through its responsibility as the national referral mechanism. This process requires that a suspected victim of trafficking is referred to a competent authority for a decision on whether he has been correctly assessed, and the HTC not only provides the central co-ordination and expertise to combat trafficking but is also one of the two main agencies acting as a competent authority. It is dealing with a steadily increasing number of cases expeditiously and, of the 543 decisions in the year to 30 March 2010, two-thirds were accepted.

There does not appear to be an appeal procedure against a decision not to accept an individual as trafficked; the Minister will correct me if I am wrong, but presumably that question will be dealt with in the course of an appeal against refusal of leave to remain. Alternatively, the refused victim may wish to return to his or her country of origin, and I would be grateful if the Minister would confirm that if the victim was under 18, he would get financial assistance from the IOM under their AVRFC scheme. Also, why should adult victims of trafficking not be eligible for the same benefits? Will the Minister give us any information about the fate of the 192 who were not accepted in the year to 31 March?