Modern Slavery Bill

Debate between Lord Patel and Baroness Butler-Sloss

Monday 23rd February 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Patel (CB)]

My Lords, I rise to support the amendment moved by the noble Baroness, Lady Doocey. I have added my name to it. I will be brief as both the noble Baroness, Lady Doocey, and the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, who has just spoken, have made the case clearly and forcefully that the current law must be inadequate as there have been no convictions. I have heard the argument before that there is no issue with the law, but that it is the practice which is the problem, and that is why there have been no convictions. However, as the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, has just said, it cannot be that it is just the practice, it must be that the law is deficient in some way, otherwise there would have been convictions against those who commit this horrible crime against children.

The treatment of cases involving children must reflect that in international law children are a special case because of their particular vulnerability and so cannot consent to exploitation. As it stands, Clause 1 of the Bill does not state clearly enough that there is no need to show that force, threats or deception were present in cases of child exploitation. Subsection (3) of the proposed new clause set out in Amendment 5 makes the point that there is a need to include that in the Bill.

The noble Baroness, Lady Doocey, mentioned the letter written by the Minister to the noble Baroness, Lady Royall, on 16 February. It stated:

“Where a person deliberately targets a vulnerable person, such as a child, there is no requirement for any force, threats or deception to be used to induce the child into being exploited”.

This statement perfectly encapsulates what the Bill itself should state so that there are no grey areas and those prosecuting cases are 100% clear what the thresholds of proof are in children’s cases. Government Amendment 4 is welcome, but in my view it does not go far enough towards including that. The Government must formally commit to their intention that force, threats or deception are not required in children’s cases. A failure to improve the current Clause 1 offence leaves the Bill open to interpretation on this key issue, which would be a major disservice to child victims. They must be able to trust in our laws to protect them and ensure their access to justice for the heinous crimes committed against them. I hope that the Minister will be able to comment on that, if not in the Bill, then to state it clearly for the record that that is the Government’s intention.

[Baroness Butler-Sloss]

My Lords, I am the first person not to support the amendment moved by the noble Baroness, Lady Doocey. I have sympathy for the points she has made and I am very relieved by government Amendment 4 which was discussed earlier. However, one important point that the noble Lords, Lord Carlile and Lord Patel, have rather overlooked is that the present law will be changed by this Bill. Therefore one hopes that when it becomes law, there will be the prosecutions which have been so lamentably absent under the previous law.

A lot of what has been said turns on issues of training and practice. This morning I met the Independent Anti-slavery Commissioner, who was at pains to tell me that he sees his job as commissioner to include pushing the College of Policing, pushing the chief constable, Shaun Sawyer, with whom he has been in conversation several times and is seeing again next Monday, and pushing the Crown Prosecution Service towards better practice and better training. He sees all this as some of the most important parts of his work.

I hope that when the Bill becomes law much of what has been said so far today will fall into the background. It is also important to remember that when the joint pre-legislative scrutiny committee, of which I was a member, discussed child exploitation, we rather bravely and rashly put forward our own Part 1 of the Bill. In it, we had a child exploitation clause, but within the wording that we put forward in the clauses that we recommended. The Government did not accept our Part 1 of the Bill and have put in, under Clauses 1 and 2, different propositions. If we now have a child exploitation clause, it will clash with and to some extent repeat what is already in Clause 1. There will therefore be a degree of confusion for the police, the Crown Prosecution Service and even at the end of the day, I suspect, for the judge instructing the jury as to what the position really is. It is very important that when the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, for whom of course I have the greatest admiration and respect, spoke about the child exploitation clause, he was doing so in the context of giving evidence to the Select Committee at a time when he was looking at our draft as well as at the former government draft, which is not the same as the present one.

Another point, made by the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, is that age dispute issues in the Administrative Court are easy to resolve. They appear, from what I am told, to be a great deal less easy to resolve in the criminal courts. Indeed, Kevin Hyland, the commissioner, said to me that when he was head of the human trafficking group in the Metropolitan Police, he was present at a trial when an issue was raised of whether the child was or was not a child under 18. It took up so much of the time, and the jury clearly was not satisfied whether the child was or was not a child and acquitted. There is no shortage of young women coming into this country who are attractive and mature; they may well be 14, or they could be 19 or 25. We are not talking perhaps so much about English children brought up in this country, but children from Nigeria.

Modern Slavery Bill

Debate between Lord Patel and Baroness Butler-Sloss

Monday 1st December 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Patel (CB)]

My Lords, I rise briefly to support the amendment of the noble Baroness, Lady Doocey, to which I have put my name. The reason why I strongly support it has been given by some of the noble Lords who have already spoken. We have evidence that the current levels of prosecution for trafficking children are woefully low. In fact, they are negligible. The Minister might correct me by giving me the exact number of prosecutions.

We also know that children face many different kinds of abuse and exploitation at the hands of traffickers, and that they represent a quarter of all known victims of modern slavery. The government amendment to Clause 2 is limited to consent to travel, which is not part of the international definition of trafficking. It is the exploitation itself to which the child cannot consent, not the level of travel. I am concerned that this will serve only to create further confusion over what ought to be a simple definition of child trafficking.

The noble Baroness, Lady Doocey, referred to the evidence in the Rotherham cases, among others, and demonstrated practitioners’ continued confusion over the consent of child victims of exploitation and society’s failure to prosecute those who abuse children. A child exploitation offence would contain a simple definition of child exploitation that includes the range of exploitation that children face. Some of it has already been mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy. A separate offence of child exploitation would help to bring abuses to prosecution and conviction. Therefore, I support the amendment. However, I intend to listen to the other arguments, particularly those of the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, who is about to speak, who may have a different opinion.

[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.