Modern Slavery Bill

Lord Tunnicliffe Excerpts

Monday 17th November 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Tunnicliffe (Lab)]

My Lords, in rising to speak on this important Second Reading I must first pass on the apologies of my noble friend Lady Royall. The noble Baroness, assisted by my noble friend Lord Rosser, will be leading for the Opposition on this very important Bill, but unfortunately today she has to attend a family funeral.

We often think of slavery as history, a story of atrocities past and fights fought and won. The harrowing film “12 Years a Slave” and Doris Kearns Goodwin’s compelling account of Lincoln’s fight for abolition both tell of events that took place centuries ago. However, slavery is not a thing of the past. Sylvia, one of the women whom the Eaves Poppy Project has helped, is 47 years old. She came to the UK from Uganda to escape an abusive husband, after a friend told her that she could work for his friend’s company. On arriving, however, she was taken to a house in Manchester, locked in a room with another girl, raped, beaten and forced into prostitution. Her traffickers would film and photograph her. She was given just one meal a day and not allowed any contact with her son. After four months she escaped but was so scared that she went into hiding. Finally she got the courage to get help and claim asylum, but the Home Office sent her to Yarl’s Wood immigration centre. There, fortunately, she came across the Eaves Poppy Project, which helped to secure her release and prevented her being sent back to Uganda.

This is what 21st-century slavery looks like in Britain: women raped, beaten and forced into prostitution; children groomed and sexually exploited for profit; men exploited, conned and forced to work in inhuman and degrading conditions; families trafficked by gangs across borders but also within our country and sometimes within the same area. I am proud of the work that we did in government through criminalising trafficking in the Sexual Offences Act 2003 and the Asylum and Immigration Act of 2004; the introduction of the offence of forced labour, slavery or servitude; the national referral mechanism; the creation of the UK Human Trafficking Centre; and, of course, the introduction of the Human Rights Act. But we agree that more needs to be done, so I welcome the Bill.

I pay tribute to the Members of this House who have worked so hard on this issue, particularly the noble Lord, Lord McColl, who is tireless in his fight for trafficked children and victims generally, and the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss. I also pay tribute to members of the Joint Committee, including my noble friends Lady Kennedy and Lord Warner, the noble Baronesses, Lady Hanham and Lady Doocey, and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Derby.

The invaluable campaign briefings of the many organisations that fight for the victims will also inform our proceedings. The victims of these terrible crimes should be at the centre of everything we do. We owe it to them to make the Bill as good as it can be. We think that it should go further in tackling the problems it seeks to resolve and we will work with colleagues across the House to amend it accordingly. I will now touch on one or two of the issues that we will pursue.

Let me start with the offences at the heart of the Bill. In 2011-12, there were 15 prosecutions for slavery but no convictions. In the same year, there were 150 prosecutions for trafficking but only eight convictions. Ensuring that the offences under the Bill are well drafted, clear and strong enough to allow us to prosecute and secure more convictions of these criminals is therefore crucial. Currently, the Bill transposes existing offences from three pieces of legislation, maintaining the current offences of holding someone in slavery and merging two existing offences of human trafficking into a single one. Worryingly, the threshold needed to secure convictions is very high.

I am sure that we have all heard of the case of Craig Kinsella. Craig was held captive by the Rooke family in Sheffield and forced to work from 7.30 am until midnight for no pay. He was starved and beaten. Craig was not trafficked into the country: a British national, he voluntarily moved in with the family but was then subjected to appalling abuse and exploitation. Despite extensive evidence, the Rookes were convicted of false imprisonment and other lesser offences, not of slavery and trafficking.

A similar situation arose in Kent, involving 29 Lithuanian chicken catchers. They were beaten and had their wages stolen, and they were living in appalling conditions. The police thought that this was criminal conduct but the CPS said that there was not enough evidence to prosecute. Following this case, Detective Inspector Roberts of Kent Police gave evidence to the Joint Committee and said that they had,

“quite considerable difficulty in working out what is criminal exploitation”.

I am worried that these cases would still not be covered under the Bill. Like the Joint Committee, the Anti-Trafficking Monitoring Group, the Joseph Rowntree Trust and others, I believe that there should be separate offences of exploitation.

If the examples of adults being exploited are abhorrent, the idea of a child being subjected to these crimes does not bear thinking about. The numbers are even more shocking. In 2013, the national referral mechanism received 1,746 separate cases of human trafficking, 432 of them involving minors. The UK Human Trafficking Centre identified 2,744 victims last year, including 600 children—yet, since the introduction of the offence, there have been no prosecutions where the victim was a child.

There is much we could do in the Bill to improve the situation for children. Crucially, we need to introduce new offences of child trafficking and exploitation. Have the Government considered child exploitation in relation to recent UK cases, particularly the sexual exploitation of girls in Rotherham, Rochdale, Oxford and elsewhere? These girls were neither trafficked nor held in slavery, but they were exploited. Putting specific offences in the Bill would move the legislative framework from one looking at individual sexual acts to one in which exerting control over a course of behaviour is more important.

The notion that a child could ever consent to their exploitation is beyond my comprehension. They very rarely understand that they have been trafficked and are often duped by those who traffic them. I do not understand the Government’s reticence on this point and we will want to unpick this in Committee. I am pleased to see a basis for the guardianship system in the Bill—once again, I pay tribute again to the noble Lord, Lord McColl, for his work on this—and welcome the requirement for the advocate to act in the child’s best interests, but this was added late in the Commons and we will want to look again at the strength of the clause. We must also look at the issue of the statutory defence for children. The Bill as it stands does not reflect the specific vulnerabilities of children, and that cannot be right.

It is also key that we look at the role that the regulatory framework and the UK industry have to play. We have all heard calls for stronger action on supply chains. Noble Lords will, like me, have been shocked by stories of men trafficked from Burma and Cambodia and forced to work 20 hours a day for no pay, fishing for prawns for UK shops; and by the collapse of the Rana Plaza factory, where 1,200 people making clothes lost their lives. We need stronger legislation to prevent this happening; other countries are doing it and it has the support of 82% of the British public.

I am pleased that the Government have listened and introduced a new clause. I am not sure, though, that it is strong enough. We need to ensure that it has a wide coverage, that consumers are able to compare and assess how different companies are doing, and that the provisions can be adequately enforced. The Government have to play their part as well. Legislating for supply chains without also looking at expanding the powers and remit of the Gangmasters Licensing Authority to other sectors where forced labour is prevalent, such as hospitality, construction and catering, does not make sense.

It is disappointing that Ministers would not even consider the amendment put forward by my colleagues in the Commons, which was only an enabling power. We will also come back to this in Committee. I am also deeply concerned about the issue of domestic workers being tied to abusive employers. The last Government put in place a regime for migrant domestic workers who accompanied employers to the UK that was internationally recognised as good practice. The current Government changed the regime in April 2012. These individuals are now tied to their original employer and their visas are not renewable beyond the initial six-month duration.

Mira, a Filipina domestic worker, was brought by her employers from the Middle East to the UK. She worked 16 hours a day with no time off, shared a room with the family’s children and had no private time or space. Mira’s employer retained her passport and paid her nothing while she was in the UK. She ate only leftovers and if the family ate out, she went hungry. One day, Mira found her passport and sought help from Kalayaan, which advised that she had only a tied domestic worker’s visa. Thankfully, Kalayaan found Mira legal assistance and referred her to the national referral mechanism. Kalayaan found that 92% of those on the new visa were unable to leave the house unaccompanied. This is clearly unacceptable.

Victims of trafficking should be at the heart of the Bill. If we do not support them, we are leaving people who have been abused to be betrayed once again. The national referral mechanism needs to be strengthened. In 2012, the UK Human Trafficking Centre identified 2,255 victims, but the NRM identified only just over 1,000. Too often, they are treated merely as immigration cases.

At the moment the NRM is an internal process of the Home Office, and there is no transparency or appeal. We have an opportunity to place it on a statutory footing and give it a greater ability and authority to support victims at the time when they need it most. I am aware that the review of the NRM has recently concluded, and we will want to look at its findings in Committee.

Victims should be better compensated. We support the provisions to define trafficking as a lifestyle offence, but I urge the Government to look again at proposals that we made in the Serious Crime Bill to strengthen the recovery of assets. Money cannot go to the victims if we are not recovering it from criminals in the first place. I also welcome the creation of reparation orders, but we must ensure that victims can be compensated even when there has not been a specific conviction.

While I welcome the introduction of the anti-slavery commissioner, their remit needs to be strengthened. At present, it is extremely limited to doing little more than acting as directed by the Home Office. The remit should include supporting victims and a clear mandate to make recommendations across government. We also want greater independence for the commissioner, and that is simply not established by the mere addition of the word “independent” to the title.

The Government are rightly proud of having introduced the Bill, but the victims of trafficking need us to do more. A fortnight ago we found out that the UK will no longer support future search and rescue operations to prevent migrants drowning in the Mediterranean. Many of the men, women and children on these boats will be victims of traffickers—gangs who are exploiting people’s desperation by sending them on unsafe journeys and sometimes deliberately killing them. In that context I am glad that we are opting back in to the European arrest warrant, but there is a lot more we could be doing, whether to prevent families undertaking these dreadful journeys in the first place or to tackle these crimes more generally, if it were not for this Government’s reluctance to work with our European partners.

Abraham Lincoln once wrote:

“If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong”.

All of us agree that slavery is wrong. That is not the issue today. The Bill is not a party-political Bill. It is about the abuse of human rights; it is about the most vulnerable men, women and children who are exploited by their fellow human beings; and it is about victims, their rights, and our ability to support them and bring perpetrators to justice. I am deeply ashamed that in 21st-century Britain slavery is flourishing and blighting the lives of many. Over the coming weeks, as we debate and seek to improve the Bill, we should keep uppermost in our minds the plight of the all too many victims of this terrible crime; think of Sylvia, Craig and Mira. Working to build on the legacy of William Wilberforce, let us ensure that through the Bill we in this House do everything possible to end this heinous practice. We have a responsibility to work together on all sides of this Chamber to ensure that this good Bill can be an even better one.