Modern Slavery Bill

Debate between Lord James of Blackheath and Baroness Butler-Sloss

Monday 1st December 2014 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Butler-Sloss]

My Lords, I would like to inject a cautionary note to this debate. Like everyone else in this House, I clearly support the concept that children should not be held in slavery, forced into labour or any other of the ways in which they may be either trafficked, using the English definition of trafficking and not, as has just been said, the European definition of trafficking, which does not require movement.

However, I am not satisfied that any of these amendments is necessary. The two illustrations given by the noble Baroness, Lady Doocey, were, of course, under the old law. In my view, government Amendments 4 and 7, already approved by this Committee, and government Amendment 13, which I would be astonished if the Committee did not approve, already carry Clauses 1 and 2 along the road to including children with adults—none of whom require consent. The idea that the standard for children should be different from that for adults is, if I may respectfully say so, wrong. Neither children nor adults who are enslaved or held in compulsory labour or servitude are required to consent. The government amendment to that effect has already been passed. Children and adults are in the same position.

We should also bear in mind the fact that the sentence for traffickers and those who enslave is already up to life, so there will not necessarily be a longer sentence because children are involved. The judge will have the opportunity to say, “This is a sentence for life”. He or she can say, because an adult is involved and the circumstances are not so serious, “I will give 14 years”, or, because a child is involved, “I will give life”. So there is no need for a different provision for children.

There are dangers with the word “exploitation”, which—despite the admirable subsection (4) of the proposed new clause—is capable of being taken too broadly. What the cases we have heard about, both at Second Reading and today, show is an appalling lack of good practice—and what we need to do is improve the practice of dealing with children. That requires training but it does not require extra legislation. To add that to what is already in Clauses 1 and 2 would be repetitive. I believe that the Government have gone far enough, with the amendments that they have tabled, to cover all sorts of slavery and exploitation that happens to children as well as adults.

[Lord James of Blackheath (Con)]

I shall speak to Amendment 29. First, I should declare my interests. I am the son of a couple who met as children in an orphanage, and my father was put to work as an unpaid kitchen boy for 11 years at Quaglino’s nightclub in London, in return for the orphanage being paid £1 a month for his services. That seems to me to fulfil a pretty good definition of slavery. But if he was standing here instead of me, he would say, “No, it was the best thing that ever happened to me—because I got fed better there, in the restaurant, than I did in the orphanage”. But it was slavery, and that sort of thing does not get a reference anywhere, because we are talking so much about sexual and perversion issues, not about that simple level of labour. But it was so, and it was wrong. I am assuming that we are safe in thinking nothing like that could happen today, so we do not need to cover it—but I do not think that it should pass without at least a thought and recognition, in memory of my father.

Secondly, I want to explain why Amendment 29 is here at all. It is outrageous that any Government should introduce a Bill that criminalises a whole sector of wrongdoers, while not accepting that the same strictures should apply to themselves and their own performance and behaviour. People would respond to that idea by saying, “But the Government don’t traffick children”. In fact, we have been serial offenders for the past 233 years. The first instance occurred in 1678 when, at the request of the Quaker colony in Maryland, we sent 82 children taken directly off the streets of Shoreditch as a gift to the colony, which had lost all its children in a raid by the Native American Indians. This consignment was put together by the mayor and aldermen of London, and shipped out from Rotherhithe. The instructions to the captain of the boat were that he had to bring back a cargo of tobacco to pay for the whole expedition; they were not doing it for free.

In the late 1780s, with the threat of Napoleon coming up, we moved to a position of systematic, government-sponsored trafficking of children to America on the grounds that, “If we are to be overrun by Napoleon, let’s send our children abroad”; and we did, in their thousands. Later, in the 19th century, we have the extraordinary episode of no less a person than Dr Thomas Barnardo, who enjoys near saintly status in this country, taking steps to ascertain how many children each of the Australian states would like if he could provide them. And provide them he did, in their thousands. It is hard to see where he got them from, but I suspect they were the overspill from his own institutional orphanages—in which case that was slavery to make space for more orphans, I suppose. But it was wrong and it was done without any authorisation.