Modern-day Slavery

Debate between Gareth Snell and Darren Jones

Tuesday 9th October 2018 Westminster Hall

[Gareth Snell]

My hon. Friend must be somewhat prescient, because he has read ahead in my speech before I have managed to get to that point. I shall touch on it later.

I welcome the announcement by the Government of the review of the Modern Slavery Act, which will be ably chaired by my right hon. Friend the Member for Birkenhead (Frank Field) and the right hon. Member for Basingstoke (Mrs Miller), as well as the noble Lady Butler-Sloss. That is a triumvirate of expertise if ever there were one. I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for being present this afternoon.

I want to talk about the processes in the Modern Slavery Act. It was a step forward in properly attacking and dealing with some of the horrible situations people find themselves in, but it also contained important preventive measures that helped to reduce modern slavery in all forms, whether sexual exploitation, domestic servitude, forced labour or criminal exploitation.

For me, one of the most important parts of the Act is section 54, which requires large companies with a turnover of £36 million or more to place on record transparency in their supply chains. Such modern slavery statements are a welcome process to deal with these problems but, if we are honest and up front, the implementation is simply not working properly. At a meeting of the Public Accounts Committee, on which I sit, the Home Office confirmed that it does not compile a list of companies that may be required to make a declaration, does not have a list of those that have done so and, importantly, does not maintain the database. Any further analysis of the information in the declarations is made by non-governmental organisations.

[Darren Jones (Bristol North West) (Lab)]

On that point, will my hon. Friend join me in congratulating TISCreport, which was developed and is based in Bristol? It has looked at the 18,000 companies with revenue of more than £36 million, and it is the only organisation that maintains a database of the companies that comply with section 54. The database is now searchable via a zoomable map. Will he encourage the Minister to engage with TISCreport and to allow it to help the Home Office in its endeavours?

[Gareth Snell]

My hon. Friend makes an excellent point. NGOs are doing some excellent work but, fundamentally, I believe that such work should be done by the Home Office and by Government—because we are talking about something set out in statute—rather than relying on the benevolence of third-party organisations.

Despite the work of the organisation in my hon. Friend’s constituency, and even though the matter has been progressed, I know that the Minister is aware of concerns about how section 54 is being implemented. Back in April I asked a question in the Chamber of a Department for International Development Minister, who confirmed that a hub was being set up. Will the Minister present today confirm what progress has been made on that hub?

What is really worrying, however, is that an investigation by The Guardian demonstrated that of the companies that had made a modern slavery statement, more than two thirds had failed to refer specifically to the risk of modern slavery. They had made a declaration, but it did not comply with the requirements of the Act. More worryingly, only 19% of all agricultural businesses that should be making a statement have done so, and that is an area in which exploitation could be rife.

Unfortunately, because everything is being done by third-party NGOs, the ability to compel necessary information simply does not exist. Until the Government introduce something on a formal statutory basis, more and more organisations will seek to put aside their responsibilities. The Co-operative Group, which I shall talk about later, has estimated that it is cheaper and easier for organisations simply to ignore the requirements than it is for them to produce the statements and submit them. There is no validation and so no penalty for failing to make a declaration.

The section 54 requirement also applies only to commercial organisations. The public sector, however, is a huge spender of money—billions and billions of pounds are spent in procurement—yet no public authority is required to make declarations to demonstrate their actions to reduce modern slavery. Were we to extend section 54 to cover public bodies and authorities, that might not stop certain aspects of modern slavery happening, but we would be able to have oversight of where the billions of pounds in public procurement are ultimately being spent, and Members could look for the impact on modern slavery.

Data Protection Bill [ Lords ] (Seventh sitting)

Debate between Gareth Snell and Darren Jones

Thursday 22nd March 2018 Public Bill Committees

[Darren Jones (Bristol North West) (Lab)]

I welcome new schedule 1, in the name of my right hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill and my hon. Friends the Members for Ogmore and for Sheffield, Heeley. I should declare that I was first on Facebook as a 19-year-old. Now, as a 31-year-old, I can declare that I do not think there is anything on there that I am embarrassed of.

[Gareth Snell (Stoke-on-Trent Central) (Lab/Co-op)]

Lucky you.

[Darren Jones]

I reserve the right for other hon. Friends to remove content from their social media.

I wanted to refer to the issue of data ownership. When we think of the world in terms of things that we own, there are legal bases for that ownership. We have a legal right to the houses that we buy, once the mortgage has been paid off, and we have a legal right to the clothes that we buy. However, we have no legal right to the ownership of the data about us or the data that we generate. In the context of people making money off the back of it, that feels fundamentally incorrect.

Even the language that we use suggests that the relationship is not balanced. The idea that Facebook is my data controller, and that I am merely its data subject, suggests that the tone of the conversation is incorrect. I support the fundamental principle of ownership, because I think that we need to have a much more fundamental debate about who owns this stuff. Why are people making money off the back of it? If they do things with our property that is against the law, or that incurs us a loss, we should have the right to enforce that principle.

We have seen that not just in the context of the personal data that we might create about the things we like to buy or the TV programmes we like to watch. Sir John Bell, in the report “Life sciences: industrial strategy”, talked about the value of NHS data. We are in a unique position in the world, because of our socialist healthcare system, where we have data for individuals in a large population across many years. That is extremely valuable to organisations and others. We on the Science and Technology Committee are doing reports at the moment on genomics data in the health service and on the regulation of algorithms. I recommend those reports, when they are published, to Members of the Bill Committee.

We need to try to avoid allowing, for example, health companies—I will not name any particular ones—to come into this country, access the data of NHS patients, build and train algorithms, and then take those algorithms to other parts of the world and make enormous profits off the back of them. But for the data that belongs to the British people, those businesses would not be able to make those profits.