Human Trafficking

Denis MacShane Excerpts

Wednesday 18th May 2011 Westminster Hall

[Mr Field]

I entirely agree with the hon. Gentleman. It would be wrong to suggest that the entirety of the problem is caused by the 10 nations that joined the EU over the past seven years, particularly Romania and Bulgaria, to which I referred earlier. However, it is clearly a substantial problem, and the relatively open borders in much of the EU play a part.

I was discussing St Pancras. Eurostar has relatively lax controls, and children under the age of 12 can travel unaccompanied from Brussels and Paris, so long as they have a letter from the parents or guardians. Have the Government considered making points of entry more robust, not only at St Pancras but in those parts of the country not covered by Paladin?

Turning to the EU directive, one of its key requirements is to provide every trafficked child with a court-appointed guardian to look after their interests. That idea, which was championed by Anthony Steen, was referred to earlier by my hon. Friend the Member for Carshalton and Wallington. I note from last Monday’s debate that the Minister is not convinced of that route, believing that local authorities are best placed to fulfil the guardianship role. With local authorities under the most enormous budgetary pressure, how will the Minister ensure that that duty is being fulfilled, and can he convince all stakeholders that the Government are not merely absolving themselves of responsibility?

I am reminded of the problems encountered by my local authority, Westminster city council, where there was a marked increase in homelessness following EU enlargement in 2004 and 2008. It had terrible difficulty extracting additional funds from the Home Office to deal with the localised effects of a national policy. As a quick aside, I secured a debate here some four years ago and the Home Office—at that juncture we had a Labour Government—mysteriously arrived an hour before the debate with cheque in hand. I accept that these things can happen—

[Mr Denis MacShane (Rotherham) (Lab)]

I hope it happens again.

[Mr Field]

That is wishful thinking. It would probably have to be the right hon. Gentleman making the speech.

In a similar way, the matter of trafficked children is probably bearing more heavily on certain local authorities. For example, I imagine that the London boroughs of Hillingdon and Hounslow take a great number of the children that come through Heathrow. If the guardianship role is to be taken on by local authorities, will the Minister assure hon. Members that, if there is evidence of certain areas being badly affected, those local authorities will be adequately funded and not be forced to choose which of the competing aspects of child protection to fund?

I have referred to the Government’s commitment to making human trafficking a coalition priority, but there is concern that the slipping time scale for producing a robust anti-trafficking strategy is pushing some of the best experts away. The Minister may have seen a report by Mark Townsend in The Guardian this weekend on the loss of key UK staff in this area—it is an excellent piece. A former police officer, one of the most senior figures involved in investigating trafficking, reportedly stated that one of his greatest concerns is the lack of continuity in the Home Office team. Mr Townsend also highlighted concerns that the inter-ministerial group on trafficking has met only once. I would appreciate hearing the Minister’s response to these specific criticisms.

Does the Minister believe that an independent rapporteur to track our progress on tackling trafficking—such an appointment was suggested last Monday by my hon. Friend the Member for Wellingborough (Mr Bone)—might prove useful in reassuring those who criticise the Government by introducing a genuine sense of accountability?

In last October’s Westminster Hall debate, it was suggested that we should have a Pentameter 3, Pentameters 1 and 2 being two police operations to raid brothels, massage parlous and private homes where trafficking was suspected. The idea is that Pentameter 3 would send out the message that we are and continue to be tough on traffickers. The fact has been highlighted that precious few operational police units specifically target trafficking. I appreciate that those matters are essentially operational police matters, but I wonder whether the Home Office has had discussions with the police teams.

Yet more issues could be covered today, such as the role of the Crown Prosecution Service, the responsibilities of local authorities and details of how the UKHTC operates. Unfortunately I do not have time to touch on them, as others wish to speak.

Without being able to assess accurately the extent of the problem, I accept that it is difficult for any Government to be sure of the level and type of resources that are best suited to tackling it. It is all too easy to ignore trafficking. In short, if we do not go looking for the victims, we can too easily pretend that they are not there. When money is tight, the problem can only get worse. I sincerely hope that today’s debate will give some small voice to that forgotten group of the most vulnerable in our midst, and that it will provide the Government with an opportunity to reassert their commitment to rooting out this most despicable ill.

[Mr Denis MacShane (Rotherham) (Lab)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Cities of London and Westminster (Mr Field) on securing this debate and on making an excellent speech. I should make it clear at the start that I consider this an all-party matter, but the fact that it is an all-party campaign does not mean we should let the Government off the hook.

I have been enjoying reading the Foreign Secretary’s biography of William Wilberforce. There are some parallels. Wilberforce started his campaign to eradicate slave trafficking in the late 1780s. It took a long 20 years—with ups and downs such as fighting a little war against Napoleon, and having to divert money to other causes—before the legislation came into effect, and a number of decades passed before other countries followed suit.

We are at the start of a long campaign, and certain fundamental issues must be addressed. I invite the Minister, who has a wholly responsible approach to this matter, to reread his speech to the House of Commons in 2008 in which he made a powerful plea for guardianship, an increase in resources to the Human Trafficking Centre, and more joined-up work between local authorities and the police—all the points that were made by the hon. Member for Cities of London and Westminster. It was a compelling speech in which he attacked and criticised my right hon. and hon. Friends who were then in the Home Office.

Sadly, the Minister is now in the position of having to resile, deny and turn back almost everything that he called for at the time. We have shut down the UK Human Trafficking Centre. Pentameter is no more, and we will not appoint a guardian. After six months of campaigning—I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Wolverhampton North East (Emma Reynolds) for that—we have signed up to the EU directive, but without the core element in it of a rapporteur. However, we cannot sign up to a directive without finding the resources to give effect to it. Moreover, it requires us to work collaboratively across the European Union. There again, for good or ill, we have a Government who prefer not to work collaboratively to build a stronger EU and stronger cross-border policing and judicial procedure.

The hon. Member for Derry—[Interruption.] Forgive me—given my particular Irish descendancy, I cannot easily stick “London” in front of “Derry”. The hon. Member for East Londonderry (Mr Campbell) said that we must be robust with the new EU member states and any others that may be trafficking people into this country. I agree with him, but is not the real robustness that we need on the demand side? These women—girls, children even—are here only because honest British men think that if they put down £20, £30 or £50, they have a God-given right to the use of a woman to put their penis into at will. I am sorry to use such strong language, but we must face up to the fact that unless we tackle demand, the supply will continue to increase, and all the words that the Minister will say—I do not for a second doubt his sincerity and I understand that he is working within terrible financial constraints—will come to nought and we will be having this debate next year and the year after that.

We have laws. Without opposition from the Minister, who was in his shadow post at the time, my hon. Friend the Member for Slough (Fiona Mactaggart) and other former Ministers changed the law to say that it is a crime to pay for sex with any person who may have been coerced or forced to work as a prostituted woman. To my knowledge, and I stand to be corrected, there has not yet been one single arrest, prosecution or conviction using that new law. The police have the ability to go into massage parlours and brothels—they are not that hard to find; a couple of phone calls and they can find where to go—and challenge the men and put them in front of magistrates courts. Those men should be named and shamed. It is not just a certain French gentleman in New York who should attract all the attention—and yes, I know that he is innocent until proved otherwise. There are hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of British men who are clients of this trade. They are providing the demand and the money. The police must be asked why they have not used their powers.

I regret the shutdown of the different police agencies dedicated to trafficking and their absorption within the Serious Organised Crime Agency, which is to face a further dilution. The police are there with every energy in the world to tackle driving offences and to find out how many points somebody has or has not got on their licence, and to take part in other worthy investigations. None the less, the language of Government should be the choice of priorities. I put it to my colleagues here and to the Minister—not in a critical way—that the police have not focused hard enough on this matter. We do not know the figures and I do not want to enter into the figures debate. The hon. Member for Cities of London and Westminster cited some that were available, but as he acknowledged, they have been widely criticised by other expert groups. We could have a row on figures, but suffice it to say that we are talking about a substantial number; it is not just one or two people, as this odd organisation the English Collective of Prostitutes claims, with occasional support from journalists as well.

We need a rapporteur. Appointing an individual and giving them a task to achieve can change policy. We need to have a guardian for each child taken into care. I can produce the figures on the children who disappear from care. Children are put into care in Hillingdon, from Heathrow; their traffickers come round, and out they go through the door—obviously we cannot lock up a child—to work as sex slaves.

Moreover, we must change the culture of making the victims of trafficking into associate criminals. The approach of the Home Office and the UK Border Agency is to catch and deport. The figures can then be produced. It happened under Labour because of the mass hysteria from some organisations and the right-wing press. Almost any foreigner in Britain was unwelcome; it was said that there were too many of them. We have this tick-box culture of wanting to report the numbers that have been deported. Of course, women are the most vulnerable; they are easy to catch and deport.

[Margot James]

The right hon. Gentleman makes some good points about how the system treats children. Is it not a scandal that according to ECPAT, children are more likely to be convicted of offences—often they are forced through their trafficked status to commit offences such as growing cannabis—than the perpetrators themselves?

[Mr MacShane]

It is a scandal, and I am grateful to the hon. Lady for making that point. This question of criminalising the victims is one that should shame us. I know that it is hard because everybody loves to kick the immigrant, the asylum seeker, the economic migrant and the person here without papers, and they are easily victimised. We even had the noble Lord Glasman saying in Progress Magazine that Labour lied about immigration. He is a Labour lord accusing the Labour Government of telling lies. We may have got some things wrong, but he was expressing the notion that Ministers had lied. That was the language of the election and it is a culture that we need to change.

In his 2008 speech, the Minister eulogised the work of Eaves and its POPPY project, which was a standard-bearer and a model. The Conservative party was right behind it and called on the Government of the day to give it more resources. I am now extremely distressed to find that Eaves is being shut down and its money handed over to a religious organisation that has its proselytising and evangelising duties. I have worked closely with many church charities, so I am not condemning it. None the less, we now have a mono-religious organisation, the Salvation Army, being told that it must be in charge of women from different cultures and different faith backgrounds. I am not criticising the Sally Army for one second; it is a great outfit. However, it is not appropriate for it to replace the Eaves organisation and its POPPY project.

The Salvation Army wrote to MPs—I do not know if it wrote to all MPs or just those who are interested in combating human trafficking—to say that it is now going to transfer hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of pounds to an outfit called STOP UK. I have tried to find out about STOP UK. It has a website, but that is all. It has no publications and there is no board of directors. It has a chief executive whom I think works in the Serious Organised Crime Agency. One of the big problems with victims of human trafficking is that they need to be dissociated from potential police and criminal investigations for being prostituted women. STOP UK has a couple of people with mobile phones, and I tried to call them. It has an office somewhere in south London. I do not doubt the sincerity of the outfit, but it is almost virtual and the Government, having shut down the support for Eaves and the POPPY Project, are now potentially giving it hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of pounds. I put it to the Minister gently—I respect him—that that is opening the way for a scandal further down the line.

I also worry that the National Register of Unaccompanied Children, which was set up in 2004, has been shut down. Why? We have still got children leaving care—in Rotherham, Hillingdon, London and elsewhere—and we also have the problem of unaccompanied minors coming into the UK. My view is that no airline should be allowed to fly somebody under the age of 14, possibly even under 16, if they are unaccompanied. There is also the problem of St Pancras. We had the remarkably complacent answers in the Lords from the noble Earl Attlee, saying, “Oh, there’s no problem, they’re all checked when they get on the train and go through passport control in Paris or Brussels.” For heaven’s sake: any of us who have gone through the maelstrom of getting people on to the Eurostar train as quickly as possible know that the notion that the hard-working officials in Paris or Brussels—I do not criticise them—are spotting potentially trafficked children is ludicrous. It is exactly that complacency that is the problem.

I will finish there, as other colleagues want to speak. There are other points that I want to make, but I think there will be further debates on this issue. My sense is that the House of Commons is seized of this issue. My hon. Friend the Member for Wellingborough (Mr Bone)—I call him my hon. Friend and my colleague—is not here in Westminster Hall today, but he is one of my heroes because he is working so hard on this issue, as did Anthony Steen. Indeed, Anthony Steen is still continuing his work on combating human trafficking. I have visited his offices down at Puddle Dock, and I thank the hon. Member for Cities of London and Westminster for helping to arrange those very good facilities there.

I put it to the Minister that the debate on this issue will continue, and I invite him to make a name for himself on it. I also invite him to read the Foreign Secretary’s biography of Wilberforce, and to try to put himself in the shoes of that great Yorkshire MP at the end of the 18th century. Everybody, independently of party affiliation, will appreciate it if there is substantial change on human trafficking on this Government’s watch. However, as is apparent from the points I have made, I am concerned that we are going backwards, not forwards, on this issue.

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[Fiona Mactaggart (Slough) (Lab)]

As is usual on this subject, we have had an excellent debate with a great deal of consensus among Members of all parties. I thank the hon. Member for Cities of London and Westminster (Mr Field) for bringing this subject before the House once again. As he pointed out, it was an accident that we discussed it only last week, but it is often helpful for Members of Parliament to be able to follow up on a previous debate. Some issues in the last debate were not resolved, and I hope that when the Minister responds, we will hear some of the answers that have been re-requested during this debate.

I welcomed the hon. Gentleman’s call for a multi-agency, one-stop approach. I agree that we need a strategy: not just broad aims, but specific commitments. In order to deliver that as the House and society would want, we need a rapporteur of sufficient independence for everyone to have confidence in the information that they produce. I welcome all those aspects of his remarks.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Rotherham (Mr MacShane) reminded us that to tackle trafficking, we must have an effective strategy for driving down demand for the products of trafficking. I was concerned to hear his remarks about STOP UK, and I hope that the Minister will deal with that in his response.

My hon. Friend the Member for Wolverhampton North East (Emma Reynolds) reminded us that the women and children involved in trafficking are treated as commodities, like used cars. It is not enough for us to say the right words across parties; we need action to tackle the problem, and specifically action to prevent the threat from coming to London along with the Olympics in a year’s time.

My hon. Friend the Member for Linlithgow and East Falkirk (Michael Connarty) remarked on the Home Office’s problems in managing the process and advised us of the opportunity to consider whether what Scotland is doing on child guardianship can provide models or lessons for the rest of the United Kingdom.

In my view, we are a little complacent about our quality of victim care. I was rather shocked to read a research report by the London School of Economics and the university of Goettingen suggesting that the United Kingdom was less effective than Albania at tackling human trafficking. The reason why the report came to that conclusion involved our treatment of victims. Most of the study was done while the POPPY project, which we all admire, was providing victim services, but the researchers felt that the UK habit of convicting the victims of trafficking—we have heard about children being convicted of cannabis cultivation, for example—means that the quality of our trafficking strategy is less good than that of many countries that we would expect to outperform.

[Mr MacShane]

My hon. Friend mentioned the London School of Economics. Is she aware of its feminist political theory course, taught by Professor Anne Phillips? In week 8 of the course, students study prostitution. The briefing says:

“If we consider it legitimate for women to hire themselves out as low-paid and often badly treated cleaners, why is it not also legitimate for them to hire themselves out as prostitutes?”

If a professor at the London School of Economics cannot make the distinction between a cleaning woman and a prostituted woman, we are filling the minds of our young students with the most poisonous drivel.

[Fiona Mactaggart]

I share my right hon. Friend’s view about those attitudes. I hope that the LSE provides sufficient contest to Professor Phillips’s frankly nauseating views on that issue.

To return to victim care, one of my absolute concerns is that victims should be supported to be identified as victims. I am anxious that the national referral mechanism requires a referral, through a multi-tick-box questionnaire, by an appropriate authority, does not accept all attempts at referral and does not always make good decisions. During our recent debate, I asked the Minister whether he would ensure that the new victim care organisations—the Salvation Army and its subcontractors—were supported in challenging decisions under the national referral mechanism if victims were not initially identified as such, and that they were funded to support those people. The experience of the POPPY project is that many trafficked victims were not originally given reasonable-grounds decisions or conclusive decisions on their trafficking status.

The Minister reminded me that

“support providers are asked to, and helped to, provide information about victims’ experiences and circumstances to the competent authority precisely to ensure that the correct NRM decision is reached”.—[Official Report, 9 May 2011; Vol. 527, c. 994.]

I hoped, in the cut and thrust of debate, that that was a positive answer, but my view on reflection is that it is not. I would like a specific commitment from him today that if an organisation supporting a victim helps that victim challenge a decision by the NRM, it will be funded to support the victim. One of the tasks of such organisations, if they believe professionally that someone is a victim of trafficking, is to advocate on their behalf with the competent authorities. I hope that he can give us that assurance.

In addition, I am concerned, as are other hon. Members, about the transparency of the process. The Serious Organised Crime Agency has not produced an annual report since Jacqui Smith was Home Secretary. We do not have any compelling data about decisions under the NRM or enforcement actions taken by police. One reason for calling for a rapporteur is to ensure that such data exist.

The Minister suggested that the role of rapporteur could properly be fulfilled by the inter-ministerial group, the NRM and the United Kingdom Human Trafficking Centre. At the moment, that is not happening. Will he make a commitment during this debate to a specific mechanism for ensuring transparency? Unless we have a formal rapporteur charged with providing that transparency, we cannot properly interrogate what the Government are doing.

A specific example is the disappearance of children from care, which Members have mentioned. If we believe that local authorities are providing adequate guardianship services, can we please have a national study of how many trafficked children are in local authority care and of which local authorities lose children and how many, and a report to Parliament on how those issues are handled?

The Minister makes a reasonable point when he says that it is possible for the directive’s guardianship requirements to be fulfilled by local authority responsibilities. I think that that could be possible. I am not saying that his decision to do that is mere penny-pinching—although it obviously is, partly because of pressure on funds—but it cannot be done under the present arrangement, because so many local authorities are, frankly, incompetent in this area. We do not know how many are involved or which ones are making good progress. I hope that the Minister will commit to that, because without that kind of transparency, any claim to fulfil a rapporteur-type function is unfounded.

My final concern relates to the role of the police. My hon. Friend the Member for Linlithgow and East Falkirk mentioned how Vic Hogg was invited to address the all-party group on the trafficking of women and children, but did not turn up because apparently, at the last moment, he did not have a job. I have spoken to representatives from civil society organisations involved in this field. They feel that meetings with the Home Office to discuss the strategy have been frustrating, disorganised and unclear.

I do not believe that the Minister wants a disorganised and unclear strategy—I am not accusing him of a deliberate policy. Nor do I believe that he wants to exclude those excellent organisations—ECPAT UK, the POPPY Project, the Salvation Army, the Medaille Trust and so on—from contributing to the strategy. I am concerned, however, that there is a real risk, because the former strategy was extremely specific and connected police operations, which have been the most powerful way of discovering the extent of trafficking.

The hon. Member for Cities of London and Westminster has pointed out how the research is not very good, because the subject is an illegal activity. Actions by the police have been more effective. They have illustrated more powerfully the range of trafficking and where it is to be found, and have led to some successful prosecutions. I am concerned that, at present, we do not have any nationally directed operations, and that the consequence of that will be that we will lose expertise among the police.

I hope that the Minister can reassure us that, even if the Home Office does not wish, at present, to direct police forces to mount those kinds of national operations, it will support and enable them to do so. Without Operation Golf, the excessive trafficking of children from the town of Tandarei in Romania, many of whom were trafficked into my constituency, and the grotesque profits made by criminals in that town, would have continued unabated.

Strategic national interventions that are properly directed can protect people more effectively than a strategy and the warm words that we are able to produce in this Chamber. I believe that we are all on the same side, but we need a strategy to ensure that the shared ambition to eradicate this modern form of slavery actually works in practice.

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[Damian Green]

Straightforwardly, no. That is simply not the case. It is one of the areas that has been protected. While I am talking about the Salvation Army, I strongly reject the comments about that organisation made by the right hon. Member for Rotherham (Mr MacShane). As he knows, I agree with many of the things that he said, but his attack on the Salvation Army was deplorable. He seemed to suggest that a faith-based organisation could not deal adequately with victims of other faiths or of no faith. That is a disgraceful thing to say. If he is saying that a Christian-based organisation is not capable of fulfilling such a role, that is anti-Christian bigotry and he really should be ashamed of himself.

[Mr MacShane]

For heaven’s sake! The Minister is rather spoiling a good debate. I am appalled at the bigotry against the Eaves organisation—the POPPY project. Yes, I do believe that an organisation based on women is best suited to help trafficked women from different faiths. That was my point. I said on the record that I have nothing but praise and respect for the Salvation Army. It is the decision to remove the money from Eaves and the POPPY project that is deplorable.

[Damian Green]

When he reads the record, the right hon. Gentleman will wish to reflect on what he actually said about the Salvation Army.

The separation between sharing information with the police and access to services is important in ensuring that victims can reflect and recover, and to engage with law enforcement if and when they feel safe enough to do so. The strength of our approach to tackling human trafficking lies in its diversity and in having the UKHTC as our repository for collecting data and the NRM to draw together all those who may be involved in a trafficking case to make the right decisions on victim status. However, I recognise the importance of ease of access to the information that is available to victims of trafficking on how to report their experiences, as a number of hon. Members have mentioned. In that regard, my hon. Friend the Member for Cities of London and Westminster recommended having a website for all the relevant information. I suggest that, given the situation in which many victims find themselves, access to a website may not be the most useful solution. Victims of forced prostitution might be locked in basements and will not have access to any basic services, let alone the internet.

In response to my hon. Friend’s points about the Metropolitan police’s human trafficking unit, the previous Government decided to discontinue that funding, which was provided on a time-limited basis, because they believed that trafficking work should be mainstreamed into the Metropolitan Police Service budget, as it is core police business. The team’s expertise was therefore not lost and reorganisation ensured that it retained its capability to support victims and mount investigations against trafficking.

I agree with my hon. Friend in congratulating the team that runs Operation Paladin, which acts as a point of expertise and guidance for all UKBA officers and Metropolitan police officers. It is important to note that although Paladin is a Met-UKBA joint operation, advice is not only restricted to the ports in London. Paladin offers an advisory service and routinely offers support to officers outside the London area. A specific point has been made about St Pancras. Of course, all passengers arriving at St Pancras have been cleared for immigration purposes at juxtaposed controls in France and Belgium. If there is any suspicion that a child arriving at St Pancras is at risk, UKBA will refer to the appropriate authorities. Specifically, Operation Paladin’s coverage extends to St Pancras.