Modern Slavery Bill

Baroness Young of Hornsey Excerpts

Monday 1st December 2014 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Butler-Sloss]

My Lords, I support Amendments 4, 7 and 101, which are government amendments. I am very happy to see Amendment 7 at the bottom of Clause 1, as it seems to make entirely clear the situation of consent in relation to children as well as to adults. I am also very pleased that under Amendments 4 and 101 it is made clear what a child is; that is, someone under the age of 18. That is a very useful bit of interpretation, so I strongly support the amendments. I think that I prefer Amendment 7 to Amendment 8, because Amendment 7 sets it out in rather more detail and therefore is preferable.

[Baroness Young of Hornsey (CB)]

I shall speak to Amendment 100, which is also in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee. As both she and the noble Baroness, Lady Royall, were speaking, it struck me that this is something to do with the inadequacy of language, which may be stopping us getting across what we mean in that amendment. When we refer to exploitation it is about this idea of the continuum so, for me, the key phrase is in subsection (1)(c) of its proposed new clause. It says,

“and in particular whether there should be an offence of exploitation which does not amount to slavery, servitude or forced or compulsory labour within section 1”.

Although I hesitate to use such a term, we have really been talking about slightly lower level criminal offences. Organisations such as FLEX, which the noble Baroness mentioned, say that those offences tend to slip through the gaps a bit because they are seen as being not quite serious enough to go the whole way with the kind of sentences that are being proposed, and so on. That is really where the amendment sits.

I take the point about the one year. That is fair enough, were we to institute the proposed new clause, although it is obviously a probing amendment. There is a specific set of problems around the continuum of the seriousness of offences. I am not aware whether evidence exists about the extent to which persistent perpetrators of the offences we are talking about then escalate their criminality into much more serious offences; it would be useful to know whether it does. If so, it would be worth concentrating some effort on trying to root out these slightly lower level crimes. I support the amendment mainly to get some response from the Government, so as to get a sense of where they think some of these other types of offences might sit in relation to the Bill as a whole.