Anti-Slavery Day

Fiona Mactaggart Excerpts

Thursday 14th October 2010 Commons Chamber

[Andrew Selous (South West Bedfordshire) (Con)]

It is a good sign that you have had to shorten the time limit, Mr Deputy Speaker, and I am pleased that so many hon. Members are interested in the subject.

The scale of this worldwide problem has not sunk in. My hon. Friend the Member for Wellingborough (Mr Bone) opened the debate by saying that 27 million people are in some form of slavery around the world, which is just less than half the population of the United Kingdom. That is a truly shocking statistic.

Some passion has been expended in this House this week, whether on the date of a referendum, the reform of housing benefit, the European Union budget, or contaminated blood. This subject, above all, is one on which we should expend considerable passion. We should state how outrageous it is that 200 years after Wilberforce got rid of the visible slave trade, that cruel and inhumane form of treatment of our fellow human beings has crept back.

We are discussing a truly global phenomenon, which is happening not only in this country and in Europe but around the world. Last night I trawled the internet and picked out relevant press cuttings from the past two days. There are press reports about trafficking across east Africa, and countries such as Tanzania, Kenya and Rwanda are forming a regional network to do something about it.

A national action plan has been established in Greece, where the situation is relevant to this country. Children and young people, often young girls, from Romania, Albania, Ukraine, Moldova, Bulgaria and Russia are often tempted to travel to Athens. Their families may be in economic difficulties, and they are lured to Athens by the prospect of a better life having been told that they will be working as, for example, a hairdresser. They are taken to Athens before being sent to Amsterdam, London, Hamburg or another great European city, where they end up working in brothels as captives. It is good to see Greece taking the matter seriously.

In Malaysia nine people have been arrested in the past two days, seven of whom are immigration officials. I ask the Minister whether we are checking our staff to ensure that they are not complicit with gangs.

Those examples illustrate that we are discussing a worldwide problem, but at the same time it is a local problem that happens in our constituents’ streets. We know that brothels operate in private houses; we know that people are being used for domestic servitude in private houses; and we know that people are being forced to work as bonded labour in businesses that are close to us and to our constituents. We can all do our bit, because we can all be eyes and ears. We all need to look out and help the police and the authorities. Even buying Fairtrade chocolate provides us with an assurance that the chocolate that we are eating has not been produced by children who have been forced to work on cocoa plantations in Africa.

Prevention is obviously better than cure. How much public education and awareness raising is being done in the source countries from which people are being trafficked? How engaged are the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the Department for International Development in trying to spread public education and awareness, so that those young girls realise that there is great danger in being lured to be a hairdresser in Europe, and that it will probably not end up that way.

As Members of Parliament we all have a close relationship with our local newspapers, yet virtually all those newspapers—this is certainly true of the five newspapers in my constituency—carry advertisements for “adult services”, as they are euphemistically called.

[Fiona Mactaggart (Slough) (Lab)]

The hon. Gentleman mentions advertisements in newspapers. Will he praise Newsquest, the newspaper publishing organisation, which has just banned such advertisements?

--- Later in debate ---

[Fiona Mactaggart (Slough) (Lab)]

I know that Members will forgive me if I do not respond or refer to every contribution, but what is striking about this debate—a debate that I am rather proud to have provoked from the Back Benches, and which I am now responding to from the Front Bench—is the extent of concern and the shared views across those on all Benches. Ten months after he introduced his Bill—now the Anti-Slavery Day Act 2010—I think that Anthony Steen would be proud that we are about to celebrate anti-slavery day. That must be some kind of record for implementing a policy.

I want to focus on an issue that Members on both sides of the House have raised, which is the EU directive. The Minister has said that the Government’s position on the matter will be reviewed, and I am grateful for that. I hope that he will forgive me for being boring about this subject—for continuing to persist with it—because he will recall that his party did exactly the same in opposition. Indeed, I recall the Prime Minister—then the Leader of the Opposition—claiming credit in March 2007 for the Government’s signing of the convention, when he asked a question about it across this Dispatch Box and the then Prime Minister, Tony Blair, said, as I recall, “We’re doing it on Friday.” The argument that he made at that time still holds: this is an international problem, and we need the best possible international collaboration between the countries that create movements of people across borders and those that receive them. I hope that the review will be concluded speedily, and that we will opt into the directive. Members have made the need for that clear today. My hon. Friend the Member for Wigan (Lisa Nandy) also explained in very human terms why we cannot possibly opt out of providing guardians for children.

My next concern is about policing. There is a risk that centres of expertise, such as the one that the hon. Member for Stourbridge (Margot James) has just mentioned, could become diluted by being merged with other institutions. I recall the words of the hon. Member for Ashford (Damian Green), when he was the Opposition spokesman, in the debate on Anthony Steen’s Bill. He said:

“The existence of one central point of information on trafficking has clearly been valuable to police forces, the Crown Prosecution Service and other agencies.”—[Official Report, 5 February 2010; Vol. 505, c. 555.]

He was talking about the UK Human Trafficking Centre, and told the House how such centres of excellence improved the quality of policing. I am worried that we now risk losing some of that specialist focus. We began to sense that risk when the UKHTC was merged with the Serious Organised Crime Agency, and further mergers into the proposed national crime agency and a move to elsewhere in the country will mean that it will continue to exist. The widely respected director of the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre, Jim Gamble, told the Home Affairs Committee recently that he believed he would be “fighting for airtime” in a national crime agency.

We need to focus on how we can improve the policing of human trafficking. It is not enough to depend on a specialist border force, because many trafficked people are unaware that they are being trafficked when they cross the border. At that point, the trafficking experience has not kicked in. We need all-through expertise in order to police the issue properly. I am deeply concerned that we are about to see a cut in the number of police officers, and, without these centres of expertise, we might find ourselves policing the problem much less effectively.

I urge the Minister to make another commitment, which involves one of the requirements of the EU directive. We need to lead the training of police officers in the policing of this issue. We know that, in the best forces, where there is effective collaboration between the police and social services, we can make a real difference on this issue. If there were a proper cascading of policy and information, so that every police organisation could be at the level of the best, we could make better progress on this matter. I hope that the Minister will tell us that that is going to happen.

The hon. Member for North Swindon (Justin Tomlinson) told the House that the national referral mechanism was overloaded. I heard from Kalayaan just two days ago how often it has to hesitate before referring someone to the national referral mechanism because to do so would be too burdensome, because its client would not be guaranteed advocacy, or because the bureaucracy involved would add to the stress being experienced by an already-stressed person. We need to ensure that the UK Border Agency’s domination of the processes is squeezed out, as the hon. Gentleman rightly suggested, and that we use the voices of the voluntary sector and of those people who have advocated on behalf of trafficked women and children. Of course, it is overwhelmingly women and children—people who are already vulnerable—who are the victims of this vile trade. We should therefore use this expertise to protect women and children.

I hope that the Minister will also be able to assure us about prosecution policy—that there will be more prosecutions for trafficking crime, that they will be effectively conducted and that specialist prosecutors who understand the experience of the vulnerable people who have been trafficked will be used. I would like the Minister to inform us whether the offence of paying for sex with someone who has been subject to exploitation is being effectively prosecuted, as I am anxious that it is not. Will he also tell us how many prosecutions are happening, as they provide an important mechanism to prevent trafficking by reducing the demand for it?

After all, Anthony Steen passed his Bill and we are marking anti-slavery day because we want slavery and trafficking to come to an end. We have talked about ways of prosecuting those engaged in this vile trade and we have talked about ways of protecting the victims, but what we really need to do is to prevent it. To achieve that, we need effective international collaboration and effective international policing, and we need to ensure that the people who have been trafficked are not trafficked again.

One of the most horrific things about the victims is how vulnerable they are to being re-trafficked. Many trafficked people, after they have been rescued, are re-trafficked. We know, for example, that trafficked children brought into this country to work in cannabis farms—we have heard something about that experience today—who are taken into local authority care usually, and I mean usually, disappear within weeks or months into the hands of their traffickers. If they are rescued again, they disappear again. It is unacceptable—and I believe every Member of this House believes it is unacceptable—for that to continue to occur.

I believe that the European directive provides a quite powerful mechanism that can be used to help in those circumstances by providing each child with a guardian. I want the Minister to sign up to the directive and I hope that he is going to tell us that he is taking steps to do so. If he does not sign up to it, however, the least he can do is to ensure that he really does what I am sure the Prime Minister believed we were really doing, which is doing everything in that directive.

I have been a Home Office Minister and, frankly, I know that Home Office officials have form in telling Ministers, “We are already doing that, Minister.” I believe that this Minister might have the guts to say to those officials, “Actually, show me how. Here is the provision in the directive; show me precisely how it works. If you cannot show me precisely how, let us implement a policy to do it.” I am scared that, with the cuts in policing and other expenditure cuts, even the protection that we are currently able to offer women and children will be watered down. I hope, however, that this Minister will not let that happen.