Home Affairs

Debate between Emily Thornberry and Lord Field of Birkenhead

Tuesday 10th June 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Field]

I am immensely grateful to the hon. Gentleman for that intervention, but I would take his argument a stage further. I think that the Prime Minister has a duty to protect British business men and women from undertaking activities that are deemed to be heinous crimes. I think that the Prime Minister needs to develop a level playing field, so that not just the good businesses ensure that their products are not tainted by slavery; those that are slower in coming up to the plate must also make their contribution.

[Emily Thornberry]

My right hon. Friend was not here when the shadow Home Secretary raised her concerns about the new domestic workers visa and the fact that 60% of people on it have no salary at all. Will he comment on that?

[Mr Field]

All the Joint Committee’s recommendations were unanimous, and they certainly were on that. However, to be honest, in listing the things that I hoped the Government would do, I did not think that they would jump to attention on that one, given that they deliberately made a change in policy. We did not include it in the Bill because changing it does not actually require an Act of Parliament; it requires the will of the Home Secretary. If this Home Secretary does not see her way to changing it, I hope that a future Home Secretary will.

One of the impacts of the evidence review on the Joint Committee has been for the Government to include in the Bill a section on victims. It is morally right that the Bill will be victim-focused. However, even if we cannot do it for the right reasons, we ought to do it for another reason: that the Government are serious about escalating the number of successful prosecutions. We will not increase the number of successful prosecutions unless those victims of slavery feel that they are secure in this country. I am immensely grateful to the Government for listening to the arguments put on that front and for including a major section of the Bill that transforms the position of victims of slavery in this country. I commend them for doing so.

For all the good measures in the Bill, it is still incomplete. Victims of slavery came to give evidence to us at all our evidence sessions before and during the Joint Committee. It is impossible for any of us in the Chamber to describe the horrors that people go through when they realise they have been trapped and now have a slave existence. How anyone recovers from that train of events, God only knows, but many do so, and we wish many more to do so. This crime is probably one of the most heinous in the world today. We now have an opportunity to make this not just a good Bill, because it is already good, but the very best in the world—a world leader. I hope that that will ring in all our ears when we start the parliamentary process in this place and, perhaps more importantly, in the other place, where it is easier for reason to prevail on a Government than it is here.