King’s Speech

Baroness Butler-Sloss Excerpts

Monday 18th May 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Butler-Sloss (CB)]

My Lords, I should like to add my sorrow at the retirement of the noble Lord, Lord Hennessy. He will be sadly missed.

I strongly oppose the current proposals of the Government in relation to jury trials, for the reasons so brilliantly set out by the noble Lord, Lord Wolfson, but I would like to speak, in the short time I have, about modern slavery and the potential for dealing with it in the immigration and asylum Bill which is proposed.

I entirely agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, that there has been no evidence to show any serious abuse of the system of finding victims of exploitation. It was said by the last Government; it is said by this Government, and so far we do not know why. It might be of interest to the Government to check the figures. Some 77% of negative decisions in the NRM were changed to a positive outcome, and only six people last year were disqualified for having said that they were exploited when they clearly were not. One of the major concerns is a lack of training for the police, who are the first responders to the national referral mechanism, the NRM.

I will move briefly to the supply chains. It is very sad that nothing is being done or being proposed. The Select Committee of which I was a member recommended that the Government look at mandatory rules in relation to supply chains—everything is currently voluntary—and at the moment nothing has been done, despite the EU having now a directive on due diligence. That is something that, again, the Government should be looking at.

There is a worrying lack of co-ordination among agencies, with a lack of data about victims and a failure to share the data when it actually exists. I hope that the Bill may underline the usefulness of prevention and risk orders, which came in in the 2015 Act and are not used to the extent to which they could be. They are very useful. They can take away passports and prevent people going to certain places and so on and could be very much better used.

There have been only 243 convictions for slavery and trafficking during the last year, and one of the major reasons why this happens and why there are so few convictions, and indeed so few prosecutions, is the failure to look after the victims—so the victims disappear. They are not there when the trials commence and, consequently, it is much more difficult to get a conviction. The failure of support for victims is a serious issue; we ought to be doing better than 243 convictions in a year. There are excellent multi-agency arrangements for exploited children, at least half of whom are British, but it would be very useful if that could be rolled out right across the country.