Modern Slavery Act 2015 Committee Report

Lord Watson of Invergowrie Excerpts

Friday 28th March 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Watson of Invergowrie (Lab)]

My Lords, it was a privilege to serve with colleagues under my noble friend Lady O’Grady, and the committee was brilliantly supported by our clerk Sabrina Asghar and her team. With the introduction of the Nationality and Borders Act 2022 and the Illegal Migration Act 2023, the previous Government deliberately conflated modern slavery and human trafficking with people smuggling and irregular migration and removed protections for survivors of modern slavery, making it harder to prosecute perpetrators and for survivors to receive support. I am glad to say that the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill will repeal much of the Illegal Migration Act, including those sections that cover modern slavery. However, public order disqualifications will remain in place, and I hope that my noble friend, whom I am very pleased to welcome to his inaugural debate as a Front-Bencher, will say when they will be rescinded.

I want to concentrate on two main aspects of our report, both of which have been covered already by other noble Lords—I would say, unsurprisingly. The first concerns the care sector. Some 57% of all skilled worker visas issued in 2022-23 were health and care visas. This is a vital sector of the economy, but it is straining at the seams, with around 130,000 vacancies at the moment. That, sadly, has led to abuse by some care providers in their attempts to fill the gaps with care workers from overseas.

I am pleased that the Government have this month introduced regulations that will require care providers which hold a licence to sponsor foreign workers to first try to recruit from a local pool of migrant care workers who seek employment due to no longer having sponsorship because their sponsors have been unable to offer sufficient work and/or have lost their sponsor licences. This has to happen before employers can sponsor any new recruits from other immigration routes or overseas. Workers in the pool may have undergone exploitation, including modern slavery, and may be living in adverse circumstances, including homelessness, and in some cases, destitution. That change is very much a positive step, and it will be important to monitor the effect that it has over the next year.

The Employment Rights Bill will introduce the fair work agency, which will absorb the statutory duties of the Gangmasters and Labour Abuse Authority, including its duty to identify and refer potential victims of modern slavery. That will be an overdue tightening of employment practices in the sector.

I also want to highlight issues in supply chains where due diligence of employers is required. I have to say to my noble friend that this is a part of our report to which the Government’s response was disappointing. The committee called for publication of statements on the modern slavery register to be mandatory. I would have thought that this was a straightforward request, but the Government’s response speaks only of the voluntary uploading of statements. That approach has been shown to be insufficient. There needs to be enforcement, otherwise nothing will change in a meaningful sense. If the Government are serious about ethical supply chains—and I certainly do not doubt that—they need to show that to those companies that do not see it as a priority.

Our committee recommended that the Government introduce proportionate sanctions for organisations that fail to comply with supply chain requirements. In response, the Government said that they are “reviewing” how they can

“strengthen penalties for non-compliance and create a proportionate enforcement regime”,

and

“will set out … steps more broadly”—

in normal parlance—“in due course”.

That was three months ago. Can my noble friend say whether there has been any progress? The current reliance on the Home Secretary seeking an injunction to require compliance simply is not adequate in this situation.

In her excellent opening speech, my noble friend Lady O’Grady called on the Government to direct the Department for Business and Trade to act on supply chains. I have to say that the committee was treated very poorly by the department, which for several weeks refused to send anyone to give evidence to us. It occurs to me that the department’s officials may well be responsible for urging caution on the Government regarding sanctions. If so, I very much hope my noble friend and other Ministers will resist it.

I welcome that the Home Office is currently working with business, academia and civil society to update the Section 54 statutory guidance in this space. That will improve the quality of the statements, but they remain voluntary, and the committee believes that this is not enough. I accept that it is difficult to set up ethical supply chains, but more and more companies now understand the issues and what needs to be done.

Like the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Bristol, I met Primark—not with the right reverend Prelate—and I found that it was an excellent example of what can be achieved with the right approach. That company has been taking action on supply chains for 20 years and now has 130 people in its ethics and sustainability team. It pays for all its own audits, which ensures that they are independent. Those audits are carried out before appointing a supplier, not after, although of course they update constantly. Primark’s emphasis on using local partners to build its capacity in the country of origin with the aim of leaving a legacy to ensure that standards are maintained is a model that many more companies could and should follow, but I come back to the point that without some form of sanction, there is no reason to believe that those who do not currently do so will change.

As my noble friend Lady O’Grady said, great credit is due to the noble Baroness, Lady May of Maidenhead, for her pioneering work in this area. As Home Secretary, she was primarily responsible for the Modern Slavery Act 2015. Despite being—shall we say—somewhat distracted by other events when she became Prime Minister, she has never lost focus. She once called modern slavery

“the great human rights issue of our time”,

so it is no surprise to learn that she has set up a foundation through which to continue her campaigning. That is undoubtedly necessary, as there are now 122,000 people estimated to be living in modern slavery in the UK. Ten years on from the Act, there is still much to do, and our report sets out many useful steps to be taken on that journey.