Immigration Bill (First sitting)

Lord Davies of Gower Excerpts

Tuesday 20th October 2015 Public Bill Committees

[Paul Blomfield]

Q 26 Briefly, is there any evidence from other countries that withdrawal of support along the lines proposed in the Bill assists compliance?

Mike Kaye: I cannot speak for other countries, but in the UK we can go right back to 1996 and look at how we have tried to use the removal of support either to reduce applications to the country or to encourage returns, and none of those attempts has worked.

[Byron Davies (Gower) (Con)]

Q 27 Good morning. I have heard what you have said in answer to the questions about what is proposed in the Bill. You have given your objections to what is in the Bill, so can I ask you what you think is the way forward to effect behavioural change? What is your answer to it?

Mike Kaye: My answer—I have referred to this before—is that you need to resource the system properly so that you get quick, accurate decisions and you enforce them. That is not about spending more money, because it is a spend-to-save policy. With each caseworker you employed, you would actually save money from resolving asylum cases earlier in the process. Once you reduce backlogs, you reduce incentives for people to make unmeritorious claims. You also ensure that you do not get, as John was saying, people who have been in the system for a long time whom you can no longer remove because they get other obligations to stay in this country. That reduces cost and makes the system work better, and it gives it credibility.

[Byron Davies]

Anyone else have a view on that?

Judith Dennis: It is important to understand that some cases are complex and some decisions will not be made right first time. You can do the majority right first time, but you need independent scrutiny and you need skilled caseworkers. There are some in the Home Office who are very good at picking up a case and seeing it through to its end, and that has not been incentivised in the past. Incentivising people to pick up a case and not to lose it until they have resolved it is needed. In addition, accept when somebody cannot be returned home, and give them leave.

[The Chair]

I cannot read the clock very well, so Gavin Newlands, very quickly.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sarah Champion]

Q 62 Mr Miley, as a licensing officer, does this give you enough to go on to stop illegal practice, or would you like to see more in there?

John Miley: I think it helps. I am quite keen to ensure that the licensing authorities are not given some sort of role in this in respect of being responsible. If we are making checks on certain documentation, I do not want us to be part of the problem. If something happens and we miss a check, we do not want to be responsible for it. It is important that owners and employers are responsible. It certainly gives the enforcement agencies the opportunity to take proper action against them.

[Byron Davies]

Q 63 Caroline, you mentioned the extent of harbouring. You talked about the Romanian case on Channel 4. What is the extent of this, and what is the evidence?

Caroline Robinson: Of people being harboured in situations of exploitation?

[Byron Davies]

Yes.

Caroline Robinson: The evidence from the National Crime Agency statistics shows the range and scale of the exploitation referred into the national referral mechanism. The scientific adviser’s report to the Home Office was published last year, and estimated that there are 13,000 victims of modern slavery in the UK. If we go by the NRM stats, one third of those would be victims of labour exploitation—about 4,300 victims of labour exploitation in the UK. Those are the statistics.

[Byron Davies]

Q 64 What would your definition of harbouring be, out of interest?

Caroline Robinson: Harbouring was placed on the UN human trafficking protocol by the Americans at the time of the travaux préparatoires to the protocol. It was based on the definition of harbouring in US domestic law, which is about retaining individuals in a situation—keeping people in a situation and harbouring in the same situation.

[Paul Blomfield]

Q 65 I am keen to ensure that we learn from other countries, and I am interested to know what the panel thinks we can learn from them about effective labour market enforcement. In particular, I am interested in the line of questioning that I was pursuing earlier, which was about the relationship between immigration officers and labour market enforcement regimes. For example, in the States there are clear firewalls, which the Americans think enhance effective labour market enforcement.

John Miley: I have no view on that, I am afraid.

Caroline Robinson: FLEX has just conducted a review of other countries’ labour inspection frameworks, and we have also been looking at research; we have been conducting research as part of a pan-European project on improved identification of victims of modern slavery. That research in particular showed an interesting finding in the Netherlands, which we had previously held up as a great example of labour inspection; it has a very large labour inspectorate and has conducted work in this area in the past. However, the victims of trafficking we spoke to there said that the confused mandate of the SZW inspectorate caused problems on the ground, so that they were unwilling to come forward. That is because the inspectorate serves two functions: one, to identify undocumented workers; and, two, to identify exploitation.

The concern in our research then was that the people we had spoken to had not come forward to be identified by inspectors at the time of inspection, because of the overlap they saw between the inspectorate and the aliens police, which often conduct joint investigations; and the inspectorate has an overlapping mandate.

We are also concerned that where this overlapping mandate exists, it is quite hard to look for two things at the same time. We have our own example of that in the UK. We have the case R v. Khan, Khan and Khan, from 2010, about nine men who were held in in a restaurant by the Khan family in a situation of trafficking for labour exploitation. Those men were there for four years in situations of exploitation before they were discovered and before those perpetrators were convicted of trafficking. During that time, the judge’s report from the court said, there were regular inspections by Home Office officials. So the documents were in order, but the labour exploitation was not; those people were being held and trafficked for labour exploitation, yet regular Home Office inspections identified nothing. Eventually, they were able to seek help from family members or friends to leave that situation.

Kevin Green: Our take on it is that we are part of a global organisation of recruitment businesses called Staffing Industry Analysts. We recognise the need for strong labour enforcement, and there are lots of examples of where it works well.

One area that we would certainly flag up, and where we need to be careful, is in putting too much of an onus on business to address this issue through some kind of licensing regime. We have looked internationally and we cannot find any example of where we think this adds a huge amount of value. We think that a lot of this activity is about criminal activity, where people are trafficked and in forced labour.

We are very clear that the role is, first, to hold large organisations to account, as I have already talked about, through supply chain management, and, secondly, to have a strong inspectorate, which has the resources to investigate and bring people to bear, rather than creating a huge bureaucracy for a lot of legitimate businesses, where there is more responsibility to produce evidence, and which would add cost and complexity to legitimate businesses. What we are really doing here is trying to find the people who are undertaking this activity of forced labour and human trafficking.