Rape Gangs: National Statutory Inquiry

Julie Minns Excerpts

Tuesday 21st October 2025 Commons Chamber

[Jess Phillips]

That opportunity has already been presented to them and I would be more than happy. I know one of them but not the other. That opportunity is always available, and one of them has my phone number. On the idea that I do not listen and have not been making myself available, I have tried to keep the process fiercely independent of Government intervention so that it can happen and victims can feel safe in that, but of course I feel sad that this is how it has ended. Actually, I hope that this is not how it has ended and I will commit to making sure that this is not the end. My door is always open to them.

[Ms Julie Minns (Carlisle) (Lab)]

In 2012, a Bangladeshi national was sentenced in my Carlisle constituency for attempting to recruit four girls, aged 12 to 16, into prostitution. In his summing up, the judge described how the man’s conduct had corroded

“the foundations of decency and respect by which all right-thinking people live their lives whatever their ethnic or religious background.”

Will the Minister take the opportunity to again reassure all right-thinking people that this inquiry will look at everything to find answers, including the role of ethnicity?

Borders and Asylum

Julie Minns Excerpts

Monday 1st September 2025 Commons Chamber

[Yvette Cooper]

We have established the agreement with France as a pilot agreement, and we want to develop and expand it. It allows us to detain people immediately on arrival at Western Jet Foil in Dover in order then to be returned. The first cases have been referred to France, and we expect the first returns to start during the course of this month. As well as the impact of undermining the criminal business model of the gangs—the deterrence that the hon. Gentleman talks about—there is the important principle that people arriving illegally on dangerous boats having paid criminal gangs should be returned, but the UK should do its bit, in a controlled and managed way alongside other countries, for those who apply through legal routes and go through proper security checks.

[Ms Julie Minns (Carlisle) (Lab)]

I welcome the Home Secretary’s statement and strongly welcome the enforcement action taken recently by UK Border Force, Cumbria police and local trading standards to crack down on illegal trading and illegal retail work in my Carlisle constituency. Will she reassure my constituents that there will be no let-up in that enforcement activity, and that the same rigour will be applied to migrant workers employed as delivery riders?

[Yvette Cooper]

I, too, welcome the law enforcement work in my hon. Friend’s constituency. We have set up a domestic organised immigration crime taskforce to work across different police forces on the networks that are exploiting illegal working, which often have networks into all kinds of other organised crime, undermine communities and town centres, and exploit individuals and border security. We are strengthening that domestic work, which had never before been done, as a result of the report by His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire and Rescue Services.

Oral Answers to Questions

Julie Minns Excerpts

Monday 2nd June 2025 Commons Chamber

[Yvette Cooper]

I can tell the hon. Lady that more than 400 additional neighbourhood police officers will be on the streets in London this year as a result of our neighbourhood policing guarantee.

[Ms Julie Minns (Carlisle) (Lab)]

T8. There is increasing concern in my constituency that a number of Deliveroo riders are subcontracting to unregistered riders, some of whom are working illegally. Will the Minister say what is being done to crack down and ensure that all Deliveroo riders are registered and are not here working illegally?

[Dame Angela Eagle]

There is an amendment to the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill that extends the requirement to check illegal working to the gig economy, the zero-hours economy and all those areas that have non-traditional employer-employee relationships. I look forward to being able to operationalise that when the Bill becomes law.

Modern Slavery Act 2015: 10th Anniversary

Julie Minns Excerpts

Thursday 27th March 2025 Commons Chamber

[Chris Murray (Edinburgh East and Musselburgh) (Lab)]

I pay tribute to the right hon. Member for Staffordshire Moorlands (Dame Karen Bradley), both for securing this debate and for her legacy in this field. As the Chair of the Home Affairs Committee, her ongoing commitment to the issue is palpable, and I look forward to working with her on it in the years ahead.

We are 10 years on from the Modern Slavery Act. While I am not in the habit of praising the Home Office under the previous Conservative Government, I am not so nakedly partisan that I cannot break that habit on this occasion. It is true that the UK’s Modern Slavery Act was world leading. Its Scottish counterpart, the Human Trafficking and Exploitation (Scotland) Act 2015, which is also 10 years old this year, was equally groundbreaking. While we recognise that, we must also admit that although the Act took us two steps forward, we have undoubtedly gone one step back.

The terms “modern slavery” and “human trafficking” strike fear into our hearts and capture our attention. They sound like the stuff of a TV drama, and frequently they do involve the most horrific, vivid crimes in society and the worst of humanity, but we must not let that fool us into thinking that modern slavery only happens at the extremes, or only in the big metropolitan city far from us—it happens everywhere, in every community and every constituency. As we have heard from several hon. Members today, it affects men as well as women; its victims are children as well as adults; it affects British people as much as foreign nationals, and indeed more than foreign nationals; and it is labour exploitation as much as it is sexual exploitation.

[Ms Julie Minns (Carlisle) (Lab)]

On my hon. Friend’s point about modern slavery happening everywhere, Carlisle is the most northerly city in England. On 3 October 2018, officers from Cumbria police, the National Crime Agency, and investigators from the Gangmasters and Labour Abuse Authority freed a man who had been kept in captivity on the outskirts of Carlisle for 40 years. He was vulnerable because of his learning disability, and had variously “lived”—been kept—in a horse box and in a disused caravan. When he was found, he was in a damp, rotten garden shed with neither heating nor lighting. The window did not close, the water poured through the door, and his makeshift bed was congealed with vomit.

Does my hon. Friend agree that the fact that someone could be kept in such a circumstance for 40 years on the outskirts of one of England’s cities should shame us all, and that we should recommit ourselves to ensuring that every single person who might still be in that circumstance is found and freed in the same way that that gentleman was?