Foreign National Offenders

Peter Bone Excerpts

Monday 19th December 2011 Commons Chamber

[Damian Green]

The hon. Gentleman has been here long enough to know that if the shadow Minister for Immigration asks an urgent question, it is answered by the Minister for Immigration. That is the way things work.

[Mr Peter Bone (Wellingborough) (Con)]

Would not the British Government prefer foreign nationals who come here, commit a crime and are put in prison to be sent home to their country early, rather than be kept in prison and let out again to commit further crimes?

[Damian Green]

As I explained to the right hon. Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Frank Dobson), it seems slightly perverse for anyone to want to send out a signal that if someone commits a serious crime in Britain, uniquely in the world they will get off with either no sentence or a very short one. We want people to know that if they commit a crime in this country, they will be caught and convicted. If they are convicted, they should serve a proper sentence. Of course it would be preferable if they could serve some of that sentence in their own country, and we have negotiated arrangements to that end with certain countries.

Oral Answers to Questions

Peter Bone Excerpts

Monday 12th December 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

I have been saving the hon. Gentleman up. I call Mr Peter Bone.

[Mr Peter Bone (Wellingborough) (Con)]

Does the Immigration Minister agree that on rare occasions something good comes out of the European Union and that we should appoint a national rapporteur on human trafficking?

[Damian Green]

I am afraid that on this issue I am more Eurosceptic than my hon. Friend, as I do not believe that a national rapporteur would improve our already very effective combating of human trafficking. Indeed, only two other EU member states have such a rapporteur.

UK Border Force

Peter Bone Excerpts

Monday 7th November 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

Order. The hon. Gentleman will resume his seat. This is a statement about Government policy. That is the purpose of the exercise, let us be clear.

[Mr Peter Bone (Wellingborough) (Con)]

On Friday, while in my constituency, I received a phone call from someone who had been in the country illegally since 1965. This person had left the country, had been prevented by border officials from coming back in and then recently—on that very day—had been given six months to stay here. It is a question not just of checking these people, but of doing something about them when we see them.

[Mrs May]

My hon. Friend makes a very important point, and this is why we have an exercise in place to improve our ability to remove people who are in this country without having a right to be here.

Protection of Freedoms Bill (Programme) (No. 3)

Peter Bone Excerpts

Monday 10th October 2011 Commons Chamber

[James Brokenshire]

We have sought to structure the programme motion to enable consideration of the Bill, and that is right and proper for Report. A priority appropriately has to be given to enable scrutiny of the Bill as drafted. Obviously, it is for the House to decide within the programme motion the extent to which it will debate particular clauses, but we have had to strike as fair a balance as we can on the provisions of the Bill to ensure that appropriate scrutiny is applied.

[Mr Peter Bone (Wellingborough) (Con)]

I appreciate that my hon. Friend is a coalition Minister and not a Conservative one; before we got into power, the Conservative party was against having programme motions.

Given that we have lost three hours or so to statements, would not a fair balance have been to have allowed us to go for three hours extra tonight? We have been away from this place for a long time; surely an extra three hours this evening would have been fair. That is what democracy is about—we are not trying to force things through. Let us have three hours extra tonight.

[James Brokenshire]

My hon. Friend takes the issues of the House extremely seriously, and I respect him for that. The Government have made important changes to how legislation is scrutinised. We are having two days on Report for the Bill, and that is markedly different from what we would have seen from the previous Government; we would have had a day for consideration of a Bill of this kind.

The terms of the programme motion will come as a disappointment to my hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Mr Leigh) and the other right hon. and hon. Members who have put their name to new clause 1. Despite the two days that we have set aside for Report, twice the normal allocation that we were accustomed to seeing in the last Parliament, regrettably it is unlikely that the House will be able to consider all the new clauses tabled for debate.

As I said, the programme motion has been constructed to ensure that there is adequate time to consider the key provisions already in the Bill. I believe that that is the right approach. Although this is not the occasion to consider the substance of new clause 1, which seeks to amend section 5 of the Public Order Act 1986, I fully recognise that the matter is of considerable interest to a number of Members on both sides of the House. That much is clear from the number of right hon. and hon. Members who have added their names to the new clause.

We agree that the issue should be examined further. That is why, in the next few days, we will publish a consultation seeking views on whether section 5 should be amended along the lines proposed by my hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough. I will be happy to meet him to hear his views on this important issue. Once the consultation has concluded—it will run to early in the new year—the Government will set out their conclusions as quickly as possible, so that they can inform the debate on the issue while the Bill is in another place. I have no doubt that there will be other opportunities for the House to consider section 5, either when we next examine the Bill on its return from the other place or on some other suitable occasion. I can assure my hon. Friend that through the consultation we want to promote debate on this issue, not seek to curtail it, by widening and broadening it outside this House.

--- Later in debate ---

[Dr Huppert]

So the hon. Gentleman says, from a sedentary position. I tend to agree with him, but that is a topic for another debate.

I entirely support the new clause tabled by the hon. Member for Gainsborough. However, I have concerns about his amendment to the programme motion. I would like the issue debated, but I am concerned because we need to discuss issues such as DNA and fingerprinting. DNA is a topic of particular interest to me, as someone who used to work on it, and we are at risk of reducing our debate on it to something like an hour. I am concerned about that, and for that reason I shall not be supporting his amendment to the programme motion, although I support his proposed amendment to the Bill. I very much welcome what the Minister said about how the Government are going to get on with it, and I hope that we will have an opportunity to discuss that in this House.

[Mr Bone]

The hon. Gentleman is making a fair point. Given what the Opposition spokesman said, does that mean that he will be voting against the programme motion in toto, so that we can have proper debate?

[Dr Huppert]

It might be tempting to vote against all these things. I would love to see a reform of our entire process, so that time is not taken up on things that the public simply do not understand. However, I will not vote against the programme motion. I have seen what happens in the other place when there are no programme motions, which is filibusters. I do not think that many right hon. or hon. Members in this Chamber could claim that they have not been aware of any filibusters in this House or any efforts to waste time simply to put things off—not necessarily on this occasion, but on a number of others. I would like to see better self-government by this House and the other place, and then we could move away from programme motions.

Oral Answers to Questions

Peter Bone Excerpts

Monday 27th June 2011 Commons Chamber

[James Brokenshire]

I certainly recognise the value of CCTV, but we must be careful to ensure that there is no loss of trust and confidence in its use among communities throughout the country. We have learned what can happen in such circumstances from the experience in Birmingham, and in light of that, Sara Thornton, chief constable of Thames Valley Police, produced a report that underlined that accountability, consultation and transparency must be core considerations. That is precisely what we are reflecting in our approach.

[Mr Peter Bone (Wellingborough) (Con)]

I thought it was a core principle of this Government that we were going to do away with unnecessary red tape, but it appears that we are creating more. What regulations are we doing away with in bringing this one in?

[James Brokenshire]

Our approach is focused on the points I have identified: ensuring trust, confidence and genuine belief in the use of CCTV moving forward. That is at the core of our proposals, because if that is eroded, it will undermine the very use of this powerful, important tool in protecting our communities from crime.

National Crime Agency

Peter Bone Excerpts

Wednesday 8th June 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mrs May]

My hon. Friend absolutely has my confirmation and reassurance on that point. We are very conscious of the excellent work of CEOP, and nothing that we are doing will upset it. CEOP will continue to work in the way that it has, but it will also be able to build on its work because of the links that it will have with other commands under the National Crime Agency. I suggest that if he has any further concerns—I hope he will not, following my reassurance—he look at the comments that the chief executive of CEOP made a couple of weeks ago on the “Today” programme. He was absolutely clear that moving to the NCA would in no way degrade or affect CEOP’s ability to carry on doing its work.

[Mr Peter Bone (Wellingborough) (Con)]

May I thank the Home Secretary for coming to the House to make a statement yet again? It is a real improvement in parliamentary form. At this late hour, Members on both sides of the House have still been very interested in hearing what she has said.

Will the NCA effectively lose responsibility for human trafficking? The non-governmental organisations are very concerned that after the specific trafficking centre in Sheffield went into SOCA, it may now get lost. I know that the Government are keen to move forward on human trafficking, but that is a concern.

[Mrs May]

My hon. Friend obviously has a particular interest as chairman of the all-party group on human trafficking. I know that he is waiting, I hope with some interest and excitement, for the Government’s publication of our human trafficking strategy in a matter of weeks, when we will be able to set the matter in more context. The aim is that human trafficking will come within the National Crime Agency’s remit. Whether it is in a specific unit in the organised crime command or dealt with in another way will be a matter for the NCA when it is set up, but once we have an individual in place who is driving the creation of the NCA, I expect that to be exactly the sort of issue that they will want to examine.

Prevent Strategy

Peter Bone Excerpts

Tuesday 7th June 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Peter Bone (Wellingborough) (Con)]

I thank the Home Secretary for coming to the House again to keep us informed. In Wellingborough prison, the imam is in charge of all the religious affairs. I am sure he is very good, but what checks are made in prisons to ensure that the imams there are not preaching extremism?

[Mrs May]

My hon. Friend’s question refers back, in a sense, to that asked by my right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis). In considering how we deal with prisons, we will do much more work to examine exactly what is happening there. We will work with prison governors and staff and with the National Offender Management Service to get better information about what is happening in prisons, which is a key aspect of the strategy. We recognise that more work needs to be done.

Passenger Name Records

Peter Bone Excerpts

Tuesday 10th May 2011 Commons Chamber

[Damian Green]

I am grateful to the hon. Lady for her support, but I do not agree that we should take a blanket decision always to opt in at the beginning. With some directives, of which this is one, we are clearly leading a majority of European countries towards a position that would be extremely desirable, and without which the directive would be much less powerful. As for the human trafficking directive that we agreed to opt in to last night, in that case there was more of a threat than a promise during the negotiation procedure, and we needed to know that when we reached the end of the procedure the directive would still be entirely safe for Britain. As the hon. Lady will know, one difficulty is that if we opt in at the beginning there is no chance of opting out at the end if we discover that the negotiations have gone wrong. This is a question of taking every case on its merits, and that is what we seek to do.

Oddly enough, what has happened in the past 24 hours illustrates the virtues of such pragmatism. For the trafficking directive it was sensible to opt in at the end of the process, and for this directive it was sensible to do so at the beginning. With other directives it will be sensible for us not to opt in at all, because they might be harmful. I can assure the hon. Lady that the Government will continue to operate a pragmatic case-by-case approach to such directives.

[Mr Peter Bone (Wellingborough) (Con)]

My view is completely the reverse of what the hon. Member for Wolverhampton North East (Emma Reynolds) has just said. It was absolutely right to opt in to the human trafficking directive yesterday after it was finalised. I am a bit worried that we are now opting in to a directive that we cannot opt out of before we see the final version, although the Minister already has concerns about it. Why does he think that we should opt in now, rather than waiting until the end, as we did with the human trafficking directive?

[Damian Green]

Because one of the crucial elements of this directive concerns travel between EU states. That, more than anything else, is what will help make British citizens safer, as 72% of the flights in and out of this country are flights between EU member states. Although the directive would still be useful if it did not cover such flights, it would be significantly less useful. We have devoted our negotiating efforts, successfully so far, towards building a coalition in the EU to promote that policy. So far, that is going well. This is a prime example of where opting in at the beginning and leading the discussions will be to the advantage of this country and its citizens.

Trafficking in Human Beings

Peter Bone Excerpts

Monday 9th May 2011 Commons Chamber

[Damian Green]

My hon. Friend is right to say that good things were done during the focused police action under the two Pentameter operations. One result is that combating trafficking has become much more a part of mainstream police work than it was a few years ago. There will be further developments on the activities of the national crime agency and, more specifically, on the new trafficking strategy that will be announced in the coming weeks. I will come to that in a second, if he will excuse me.

[Mr Peter Bone (Wellingborough) (Con)]

I absolutely welcome the Government’s decision to opt in to the directive, as does the all-party group on human trafficking. We are concerned, however, about the Government’s decision on the rapporteur. I am all European and I like that sort of thing, and I hope that the Government have not closed their mind to the idea. I do not think that the mechanism that the Minister has outlined is good enough.

[Damian Green]

I am sure that the whole House will echo my pleasure at my hon. Friend welcoming this opt-in to a European directive. I cannot say how delighted I am to be on the same side as him in this argument. As I have said, I will listen to the arguments about an independent rapporteur, but I would merely observe that only two EU countries have adopted the mechanism that he favours. It is therefore reasonable to say that the jury is out on whether that is the most appropriate way forward.

I want to be clear that applying to opt in to the directive is only one part of the wide range of work that we are carrying out to tackle trafficking. Despite the difficult financial climate, we have protected funding for adult victims. We have set aside £2 million a year for the next three years to fund support provision for adult victims of human trafficking. As part of our wider work to tackle trafficking, we have introduced a new model for funding specialist support for adult victims. This will ensure that each identified victim receives support tailored to their individual needs and in line with the standards set out in the Council of Europe convention. It will also ensure effective co-ordination and monitoring of the support on offer, while enabling a greater range of service providers to support victims of this crime. These changes will result in a more comprehensive system of care that will take better account of the particular needs of individual victims. The flexibility of the new model will also mean that we are better equipped to meet the victim care requirements contained in the directive.

The strategy on human trafficking will set out in more detail the direction of our work on trafficking, and this will be published shortly. As I have just mentioned to my hon. Friend the Member for South West Bedfordshire (Andrew Selous), the strategy will set out the steps that we will take across four key areas: disrupting trafficking networks before they reach the UK; smarter multi-agency working at the border; more co-ordination of our law enforcement efforts in the United Kingdom; and improved victim care arrangements. As I said during the anti-slavery day debate in the House last October, the strategy will maintain the focus on victims and also put renewed effort into upstream enforcement, without compromising in any way our commitment to victim care. We will continue to work with a range of partners to achieve this. I hope that the House will support the Government’s intention to apply to opt in to the directive, and I commend the motion to the House.

--- Later in debate ---

[Fiona Mactaggart]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Under Pentameter 2, an expert team was set up at Heathrow, which was able to identify children who came through the airport without their parents, as they were particularly vulnerable. That team is not replicated at other ports of entry, and there seems to be compelling evidence to show that Eurotunnel is a route increasingly used by child traffickers because that same kind of expertise is not deployed to identify and interdict child trafficking at the port.

[Mr Bone]

The hon. Lady is making a powerful speech and knows a lot about the subject. Would Her Majesty’s Opposition support the Government in respect of the border police, as one of its roles is to make sure that trafficked victims are not brought in through our ports?

[Fiona Mactaggart]

The Opposition will support any effective border measures that help to protect this country’s borders against illegal immigration and to prevent the victimisation of people through trafficking. We are absolutely on side when it comes to both those things. The targets that existed under previous nationally initiated police operations are, in my view, necessary to make this kind of work, which I welcome, operate effectively.

Another theme in the directive is the importance of looking after victims. I am concerned about the recent decision to replace POPPY as the provider of victim care. I think that the POPPY project was the most exemplary pioneer in its work on victim care. One thing it was prepared to do because of its independence was to challenge decisions on behalf of victims who were not identified as victims by the national referral mechanism. Will the Minister give a guarantee that the present arrangements for providing victim care will include a willingness to act on behalf of those victims who have not been identified by what amounts, frankly, to a bit of a tick-box exercise when it comes to the questionnaires issued by the NRM? Will the new victim care arrangements allow decisions by the NRM to be challenged so that people who have not been designated as victims of trafficking can be properly protected?

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Peter Bone (Wellingborough) (Con)]

It is a great pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz) and, as usual, I agreed with every word he said. I very much appreciate his kind words about me and, in return, I shall say that the work of the Home Affairs Committee under his chairmanship is most welcomed in this field.

It would be wrong of me to start without mentioning the two excellent Ministers on the Treasury Bench, the Under-Secretary of State for Justice, my hon. Friend the Member for Reigate (Mr Blunt), and my hon. Friend the Minister for Immigration, who have played an important role in bringing us to where we are tonight. They have both had the time and the patience to talk to the all-party group on human trafficking and we appreciate that.

I welcome the directive and I should also congratulate the previous Government, because, on a non-party political basis, we are building on their work. They took us into the Council of Europe convention on action against trafficking in human beings, which is now being embodied in EU law. The all-party group, under Anthony Steen, did much in the previous Parliament to push that Government in that direction and it is the role of our group to continue to push this Government. Although we welcome the debate and will lavish praise on the Government tonight, we will return to particular points and push the Government hard. My great concern about the EU directive, which I have expressed on many occasions, is that it must be seen as the minimum, not the maximum. We must go much further than it does.

For me, the great thing about opting into the directive is that it sends a message to EU countries that in this country we are serious about the problem, which will encourage other EU countries to do more. We cannot stop human trafficking on our own; we must work with our European neighbours to stop it. To that end, I am pleased with the all-party group’s initiative to try to set up similar all-party groups in other parts of the EU. We have obtained a grant from the EU to do that.

I praise both Ministers for the decision on victim support. The Under-Secretary has not blown his own trumpet enough tonight, as, at a time when there are cuts, it is quite amazing that the Government have managed to increase the funding for victim support. Personally—this is my view, not necessarily that of the all-party group—I think it was right to award the contract for looking after adult victims to the Salvation Army. I have seen the proposal and how it will spread a network of safe homes across the country, involving many different organisations. In a way, it is a big society solution to the problem. Although the POPPY project did an excellent job, it was very London-based. More victims will be looked after better by the new solution and I congratulate the Ministry of Justice on that.

There is one great scandal on which we will continue to press the Government. Adult victims of human trafficking are looked after in this country, previously through the POPPY project and now through the Salvation Army, and they are put into safe homes and helped back into normal life. They can either go home to their country of origin or settle properly into this country and they are given help in bringing prosecutions against the dreadful people who do the human trafficking. It must be far worse for a child victim of human trafficking than for an adult. A young child, aged 15 or so, might be brought into this country having been told that they will have a job in a store, but might suddenly find that they are in a brothel and repeatedly forced to have sex. That must be far worse for a child than for an adult.

What happens to those child victims? As a child, the local authority has to look after them, but there is no particular provision for local authorities to look after trafficked children. They do not even identify them—the provision is a bolt-on to the local authority system. All that happens is that these children are taken into care and then re-trafficked. That scandal must be sorted out. I am pleased that the Government have just awarded a grant to Barnardo’s to set up a safe-home system for children. Admittedly, there will be only 16 children to start with, but that has to be the way forward. We must treat trafficked children differently from ordinary children who come into local authority care. The all-party group will be pressing the Government on that issue over the next few months.

I also welcome the Government’s four-pronged approach to trafficking and to setting the new goals. I also welcome the fact that they are taking time to reach a decision, as I would prefer them to take as long as possible and to get it right. I do not really care whether in Government terms the spring finishes at the end of July, so long as we get it right. There was much criticism of the Government before, saying that they would not opt into the EU directive, but they have done so. Now, there is a lot of chatter that the Government will make a mess of the strategy on human trafficking, but I do not believe that. I hope that when it comes before us we can have another debate and can push the Government further. We are clearly moving in the right direction.

There are two issues about the directive that I want to mention which I think the Government are going to have to consider seriously over the next few months. The first concerns the rapporteur—I have only just learned how to say that word because it is foreign. It seems to me that the Dutch model is better than any of the others. It has a rapporteur and a secretary and they account for the whole cost of the system, so it is a minimal amount of money. The rapporteur reports independently to Parliament once a year on how trafficking is going in the Netherlands and how the Government’s policies work—that is her entire role. It would be really good if we could replicate that system in this country. Of course, I think that our first rapporteur should be Anthony Steen, who was in the Palace of Westminster earlier talking about this very debate, but whomever we might consider for the role, we should look into doing that.

The second issue, which is perhaps more difficult, is the requirement under the directive to have guardianship. I shall be at No. 10 Downing street on Thursday, helping to deliver a petition about guardianship that I believe has more than 600,000 names as a result of a campaign by the Body Shop and ECPAT—End Child Prostitution, Child Pornography and Trafficking of Children for Sexual Purposes. This is a difficult issue—I do not want to pretend that it is not—but we have to get to grips with it and I hope that we in the all-party group can work with the Government to find a solution.

The Government have done an excellent job on this and I respect the effort and time that the Ministers have put in, as well as the constructive criticism that has come from the Opposition. This is a night to celebrate, but I shall come back in future weeks to criticise.

Oral Answers to Questions

Peter Bone Excerpts

Monday 7th March 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Peter Bone (Wellingborough) (Con)]

The question refers to the date on which the new policy on human trafficking will be announced. I congratulate the Government on recognising the need to change the policy, but may I urge a big society solution? While the policy is being considered and drafted, perhaps the key non-governmental organisations could be involved in co-operating—not just consulted—so that the overall policy is a big-society solution.

[Lynne Featherstone]

I thank my hon. Friend. Indeed, the Minister for Immigration met those organisations recently and I have no doubt that we will take that forward. Our common-sense and extensive strategy will try to prevent trafficking in the country of origin, do more on the border to stop it coming in and, if it is in this country, do more with policing.