People Trafficking

Earl of Sandwich Excerpts

Thursday 2nd February 2012 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Sandwich]

My Lords, for nine years I was a council member of Anti-Slavery International. I heard of many cases of slavery in north Africa but there are now cases in the UK and the rest of Europe that show the depths to which our own criminal gangs can sink. We have heard already that British victims have recently been trafficked in Europe by rogue gangs that force them to work for long hours in filthy conditions for little or no payment.

Some 10 or 12 years ago, the Home Office showed that at an absolute minimum there were hundreds of children and women being trafficked; now we are talking of at least tens of thousands. The Government have changed their mind and opted into the new EU trafficking directive, but we have only a year in which to comply. As the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, has just said, the Children’s Society says that child protection is being sacrificed to immigration rules. Will the Minister assure me that the legal framework will be revised for trafficked children to conform to international standards and that these children are not going to be treated as immigrants?

There is no single monitoring body in the UK tasked to look at the scale, nature and trends of human trafficking. I suggest, with Anti-Slavery International and others, including my noble friends, that an independent watchdog responsible to Parliament would be best placed to research and document that abuse. The Government may say that the National Crime Agency will have a key role in building on the existing arrangements once it is established next year, but without an independent monitoring system we cannot be sure how effective and co-ordinated its work will be.