Jess Phillips
Main Page: Jess Phillips (Labour - Birmingham Yardley)Department Debates - View all Jess Phillips's debates with the Home Office
(1 year, 9 months ago)
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Jess Phillips (Birmingham, Yardley) (Lab)
Just to correct the Minister, it was not the hon. Member for Glasgow South West (Chris Stephens) who made that criticism, but the Salvation Army, which the Home Office employs as its main contractor on trafficking.
I asked the Prime Minister this, and I got no answer, so I am trying again. When I worked on a Home Office contract, I met many women and children who had been brought here illegally to be repeatedly raped as sex slaves. The Prime Minister tweeted that such victims would be denied access to support from our modern slavery system—a tweet that will be an absolute delight to traffickers. How will we help to prevent a woman who is brought here illegally from being repeatedly raped if she is denied access to our modern slavery system?
Robert Jenrick
The hon. Lady and I agree that we want to do everything we can to support the victims of human trafficking, but we disagree on how we do that. She is content for people to be brought across the channel in small boats at the behest of human traffickers. We want to break that cycle once and for all, and we believe that that is the fair and the moral thing to do. Today, a majority of the cases being considered for modern slavery are people who are coming into the country—for example, on small boats. We are seeing flagrant abuse, which is making it impossible for us to deal appropriately with the genuine victims, to the point that 71% of foreign national offenders in the detained estate, whom we are trying to remove from the country, are claiming to be modern slaves. That is wrong, and we are going to stop it.