Modern Slavery Bill

Diana Johnson Excerpts

Tuesday 17th March 2015 Commons Chamber

[Karen Bradley]

These are the amendments that the Government introduced in the other place to improve the Bill. They focus particularly on strengthening the provisions on support and protection for victims. They were broadly welcomed across the parties in the other place and they also deal with many issues raised in debates in this House. I shall not go through them in detail now but will, with the leave of the House, respond to specific points at the end of the debate. I hope that right hon. and hon. Members will feel able to welcome them.

[Diana Johnson (Kingston upon Hull North) (Lab)]

I thank the Minister. I was a little taken aback by the brevity of her opening remarks, considering the number of amendments that have been proposed. I may not be as brief as she was, because there are several points I want to put on the record.

It is important to stress again that the Labour party has always supported the introduction of this important Bill. We recognise that human trafficking is a heinous crime and that its complex nature demands specialist legislation, but it has been a little difficult at times fully to understand the Government’s approach. When the original Bill was first published, many charities, organisations and lawyers shared the view that the Government had failed to provide the level of support for victims that we all wanted to see. There were also some large gaps: for example, at the outset it contained nothing on supply chains.

Progress has been made in Committee in this House and in the other place. I pay tribute to my noble Friends the right hon. Baroness Royall, Lord Rosser and Baroness Kennedy for their work in ensuring that we received this much improved Bill today. I also pay tribute to the work done in the Committee that considered the draft Bill. Tribute has already been paid to my right hon. Friend the Member for Birkenhead (Mr Field) for the work that he and all the members of that Committee did on a cross-party basis to make a set of recommendations that we have been able to consider, question and argue for as the Bill passed through the House.

I want to comment on some of the progress that has been made through the Government amendments in the other place. The position of anti-slavery commissioner has been transformed; it originally seemed to me that they would be nothing more than a Home Office civil servant with a remit exclusively covering prosecutions and with no independent overview of their work programme. Even though that change has not gone as far as we hoped—we hoped for something more akin to the Children’s Commissioner—we are pleased that the commissioner will have control over their finances, will be able to appoint their own staff and promote good practice across the world and that public bodies will have a duty to co-operate with them. Most of all, I am pleased that the commissioner’s remit will include the support available to victims and survivors of trafficking and exploitation.

There have been significant improvements in the formulation of the statutory defence for victims of slavery who commit crimes in the course of their enslavement. The original defence did not recognise the unique nature of child exploitation and the fact that a child cannot consent to their own enslavement. The Opposition therefore welcome the removal of the compulsion element of the statutory defence in relation to children, but we think that a problem remains not just in the conviction of perpetrators of slavery but in the prosecutions and charging decisions. We are disappointed that the Government have not suggested an amendment to require the Director of Public Prosecutions to issue specific guidance on charging in cases of human trafficking victims. Whichever party is in Government after 7 May will need to consider that again.

Another big area on which there has been movement is that of child advocates. Although the new system introduced by the Government is not the system of child guardians required by the EU directive on child trafficking, which was called for by the Joint Committee on the draft Bill and the charity coalition involved in the Anti-Trafficking Monitoring Group, some improvements have been made. I pay tribute in particular to my right hon. Friend the Member for Slough (Fiona Mactaggart), who championed child advocates forcefully in the Bill Committee.

We now have an assurance that advocates will definitely be brought in and that they will be independent of other statutory bodies with responsibility for the child; that they will have access to the necessary and appropriate information; that they will be appointed as soon as is reasonably practicable where there are reasonable grounds to believe that a child may be a victim of human trafficking; and that they will have the power to appoint and instruct legal representatives where appropriate.

I also welcome the practical moves in relation to the Gangmasters Licensing Authority and the fact that we will have a Government report looking at the GLA’s work and a possible extension of its role within 12 months.

On another positive note, we are very pleased with the significant progress that has been made on the reporting requirements placed on large firms in relation to their supply chains. The Government could never claim to be genuinely committed to eradicating slavery in the UK if we did not address slavery in the supply chains of our large companies. It was absurd that the Government did not include supply chains in the original Bill. I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Linlithgow and East Falkirk (Michael Connarty), who has done so much to champion this issue over many years. I am pleased that his tireless efforts have paid dividends in changing the Bill.

The Opposition were clear from the outset that we wanted a reporting requirement that was comprehensive, that allowed direct comparability between companies and that included an enforcement mechanism. Although we welcomed the moves originally announced by the Minister on Report, we still wanted them to go further. She will remember that we were particularly critical of the Government for repeating some of the mistakes that have hampered the transparency of supply chains legislation in California. It has not always been clear which companies that legislation applies to, and it has been hard for non-governmental organisations to find out which companies ought to be complying and whether they actually are complying. Moreover, when two reports were looked at side by side, they were often not directly comparable.

That is why we made it clear that the reporting requirement has to contain clear instructions as to what a report has to have in it. A large firm may have 100,000 suppliers and it will be able to fill a report with good practice, but what we need firms to do is to create a fair evaluation that addresses the key issues, which means that we have to specify the key things to be addressed in the report.

We welcome the guidance as to what a report should contain and we hope it will encourage best practice, but we still think that that should be compulsory guidance rather than just a steer. We would also have liked it to contain a requirement for companies to report on what work they are doing to support victims who are found in their supply chains. I recognise, however, that the Bill has come a long way and I thank the Minister for the way in which she has dealt with the changes to it over the past few months.