Lisa Nandy
Main Page: Lisa Nandy (Labour - Wigan)Department Debates - View all Lisa Nandy's debates with the Home Office
(10 years, 5 months ago)
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Mrs May
My hon. Friend must be psychic. I was about to say that the treatment meted out to victims by traffickers and slave drivers is inhumane, degrading and often disturbing, and there can be no better use of the assets seized from a perpetrator than to provide reparation to their victims. Courts currently have the power to order convicted traffickers to pay compensation to their victims and can use money collected under a confiscation order to ensure that such compensation is paid in full. It is therefore unacceptable that in the past 11 years there have been only three such cases in which a criminal convicted of a principal offence of human trafficking has been ordered to pay compensation in that way. The Bill seeks to remedy that by creating a bespoke order for modern slavery offences so that, where a perpetrator has assets available, the court must consider making an order to provide reparation to the victim and give reasons if it does not do so.
Lisa Nandy (Wigan) (Lab)
The Home Secretary will be aware that successful prosecutions of cases involving children are very low. One of the reasons for that is encapsulated in a problem with the Bill, which is the omission of a specific definition of child trafficking. As she will know, children cannot consent to their own exploitation. I draw her attention to clause 39, which states:
“A person is not guilty of an offence if…the person is compelled to do that act.”
Children cannot consent to their own exploitation, and therefore that defence is no use to children. That is why I hope she will join me and many other Members on both sides of the House in supporting the inclusion of a specific definition of children trafficking in the Bill.
Mrs May
We have looked at that issue, which was one of the issues raised in the various discussions, including in the Joint Committee. We have not included a specific child trafficking offence because of the difficulties that that could lead to in a prosecution, such as arguments about whether an individual should be prosecuted for the specific child offence or for the more general offence. That is why we have taken a different approach. [Interruption.] The hon. Lady shakes her head, but she should let me finish my response. That is why we have left it with a general offence, but we make it absolutely clear—this specifically addresses the point that she raises—that the slavery, servitude and forced labour offence can be effectively prosecuted where the victim is vulnerable, for example a child. We are aware of the issues that she raises about whether it could be argued that a child is not able to give consent, and therefore whether they are able not to give consent, but that is explicitly covered in the arrangements in the Bill. There are very good arguments why there would be considerable difficulties in dealing with a specific child offence. Another issue that would be raised is that an individual’s age often cannot be proved. If we did not have a general offence, it would make a prosecution more difficult.
Lisa Nandy
I am grateful to the Home Secretary for giving way, and I do not want to take up other people’s time, but this point is incredibly important. I worked with child trafficking victims for nearly a decade before I came to this place, so I know, and the Home Secretary knows, that children go through a gruelling process. They are often told by their trafficker to say certain things. They say things in interviews because they have been told what to say, or they say what they think the interviewer wants to hear. They often cannot cope with the processes that they are put through, so having a specific child trafficking offence in the Bill would ensure that those children are seen and recognised as what they are, which is children. They are not trafficking victims, immigrants or children who have been moved for the purposes of exploitation; they are children who have been abused. Including such an offence would send a powerful message that we need to get those processes right.
Mrs May
I absolutely appreciate the passion with which the hon. Lady makes that point, and the experience on which she draws in doing so, but we have taken evidence from a number of areas and heard a number of people point out quite forcefully the difficulty of a child-specific offence where age is uncertain. For example, in evidence to the pre-legislative scrutiny Committee, Riel Karmy-Jones, a barrister who deals with trafficking offences, said that
“problems arise over separate offences that pertain specifically to children—for example, when the age of the child is not easily determined and you end up relying on age assessments, which I have done in some of the Nigerian trafficking cases.”
In those circumstances, if we did not know the age of the child, we would end up in court arguing about whether the specific offence was right, rather than being able to rely on the general offence.
Similarly, Detective Inspector Roberts, when asked whether a child-specific offence would help, replied:
“Not as a separate offence. The legislation perfectly encompasses it, but I would share Mr Sumner’s view—
another police officer—
“about the sentencing guidelines certainly around children and it being an aggravated offence… I think wholly different legislation would be unnecessary and complicated.”
We want to ensure that prosecutors and the police can deal with this as sensibly and easily as possible so that we get more prosecutions, but the evidence indicates that trying to introduce a child-specific offence might complicate prosecutions rather than make them easier.
Yvette Cooper
My hon. Friend makes an important point, which goes wider than devolution. Wherever across the United Kingdom trafficking victims are identified, we must make sure that they are properly supported as victims of trafficking throughout the system, and that they are not simply identified by one agency as needing support as victims because they have been abused and enslaved, but end up being treated by another agency as criminals or illegal migrants, with the abuse effectively being multiplied because their vulnerability and experiences are simply not identified within the system. Such a purpose is vital. The Home Secretary is right that this is not simply about legislation, but about the way in which organisations operate, the training given to staff and how staff respond. My hon. Friend’s point is therefore extremely important.
That is particularly important for children, about whom many hon. Members intervened on the Home Secretary to raise concerns. Trafficking is an evil trade, but it can exploit weak systems of child protection. Of the 2,000 potential victims of human trafficking identified in 2012, 550 were children, but that is likely to be the tip of the iceberg. Some 65% of those cases were not recorded on the national system, which would have increased the protection of those children. Too often, they are treated as immigration cases, not as trafficking victims. Several of my hon. Friends made important points about the way in which such children can, in practice, be abused, including by being told what to say by their traffickers.
Most appalling of all is the figure that shows that almost two thirds of rescued children go missing again. They have been found, rescued by the authorities, put into care and they simply disappear again, presumably picked up by the same or other trafficking gangs. Already abused, they are let down by a system that is supposed to keep them safe.
Lisa Nandy
As my right hon. Friend knows, many trafficked children also believe that the trafficker is their friend, their uncle or their boyfriend. It is not just that they have been frightened into saying that; they genuinely believe it. I therefore hope that she will press the Home Secretary on her call, which I support, for a statutory system of guardians, because somebody has to be able to instruct the lawyer in a case where a child believes that they have not been exploited to ensure that the relevant person is brought to justice.
Yvette Cooper
I will do that and I agree with my hon. Friend. We would like the law and the Bill to be strengthened on child guardians and child offences. Let me make a few points about that.
My hon. Friend is right that the situation for children can be complex, and often the adult who is abusing them is the only adult they know: the only adult with whom they have contact and who speaks their language, if they have been trafficked across borders.
Charities describe finding children who do not even know which country they are in. Some are sexually exploited in brothels or tend cannabis factories, like Deng, who was trafficked from Vietnam to work as a gardener in a cannabis factory. When police raided the house, Deng was arrested and spent almost a year in prison. On release, he fell back into the hands of traffickers, who regularly beat him so badly that he was hospitalised. Passed from local authority to local authority, his case was eventually assessed and an independent age assessment concluded that he was only 16 or 17. He had already experienced years of abuse, including a year of imprisonment at the hands of the British authorities. Children like Deng have their childhood taken by the traffickers. By 17, they have often been held by the traffickers for several years, moved through several countries and forced to grow up very fast, but they are still children in desperate need of care.
If those children know no other life and nothing of the UK, they can often return voluntarily to their traffickers because they feel that they have no choice. There is a real problem with the idea that a child could ever consent to their exploitation. That is why we believe that we should pursue a separate offence of child exploitation. I listened carefully to the Home Secretary’s points and, clearly, we do not want to make it more difficult to prosecute. I think that we have the same objectives, but I did not find her answers very convincing or clear on why creating such an offence would make it harder to prosecute. Of course, there will be cases where the age may be difficult to identify at the margins, but surely it is possible to draw up the law in a way that allows the prosecutor to decide whether the case is clear cut and can be prosecuted as a child offence or whether it is not clear cut and therefore should be prosecuted under the wider legislation on the basis that somebody is vulnerable.
If the Home Secretary has any overwhelming objections to that, she needs to explain them much more clearly. The Opposition simply cannot see why we should not pursue the Joint Committee’s proposals for a separate offence of child exploitation and why that would not help us all in our objective of tackling slavery, particularly the awful and extreme abuse of children.
We would also like a system of independent guardians to be introduced. They are a requirement of the EU directive that the Government eventually signed up to, and the system has been implemented elsewhere in Europe and shown to work well. After three years of campaigning, we welcome the Government’s pilots for child advocates and the enabling provisions, but we do not believe that they go far enough. The position is unclear, but the advocates do not appear to be the same as the child guardians for which a huge coalition of charities, including Barnardo’s, UNICEF and the Children’s Society, have called. During the Bill’s passage, we will seek to strengthen the powers given to child advocates, thereby establishing guardians who can act independently of local authorities and in the best interests of the child.
I raised those who are in domestic work conditions and are particularly at risk in an intervention on the Home Secretary. I urge her to look again at the domestic worker visa and the risks to those forced into domestic slavery, unable to escape. Earlier, I cited the evidence from the charity Kalayaan. The Home Secretary knows that when the tied visa was introduced, many, including Kalayaan, warned her that it would increase the risk of servitude and domestic abuse.
In addition to the figures that I cited earlier, Kalayaan also found that 92% of those on the new visa were unable to leave the House unaccompanied. That is slavery. The Home Secretary seemed to suggest that that was just a small number of people, but that is not the point. One of the examples that Kalayaan gave was the case of Rupa, who arrived in the UK with her employers. She had worked for them in India and had little choice about coming to the UK. Once here, she worked long hours and got no proper breaks. Looking after a baby, she was on call all the time. Like 85% of those interviewed by Kalayaan, Rupa did not have her own room, so she slept on the floor, next to the cot. For all that, she was paid just £26 a week and had her passport confiscated. Eventually, Rupa ran away and a stranger helped her find her way to Kalayaan.
However, because of the changes that the Home Secretary introduced to the visas, Kalayaan could do nothing. Under the old system, the charity would have contacted the police, had Rupa’s passport returned to her and helped her find other work. Now Rupa’s options were limited: to return to her employer or be deported. With a sick family to support in India, Rupa decided to return to her employer and a life of servitude. That is slavery. It is what the Bill should abolish. The Opposition will table amendments on the matter, but I hope that, if the Home Secretary has an alternative remedy, she will come forward with it during the Bill’s passage. We cannot have a situation whereby all the work that the House is trying to do to tackle modern slavery is undermined by visa changes elsewhere in the system.
We also need more action in the world of work. The Home Secretary talked about the importance of tackling the supply chain, and we agree, but again, we would like to go further. The Bill provides a great opportunity to build on the work of the Gangmasters Licensing Authority. We would like to consider how that can be extended to cover exploitation in hospitality, care and construction, and also how the law on exploitation in the workplace can be strengthened.
Slavery in the UK is only a small part of the problem. The Joint Committee was clear in its recommendations for stronger action on supply chains. Other countries are legislating on that, and there is a growing consensus that legislation that requires large companies to report on their actions to eradicate slavery in their supply chains will make a difference.
In the past few months, all hon. Members will have been shocked by, for example, the details of the investigation by The Guardian into the fishing industry. There were stories of men trafficked from Burma and Cambodia, forced to work 20 hours a day for no pay fishing for prawns for shops in the US and Europe, and also for British supermarkets. One rescued worker, Vuthy, a former Cambodian monk, said:
“I thought I was going to die. They kept me chained up, they didn’t care about me or give me any food… They sold us like animals, but we are not animals—we are human beings.”
Another said that he had seen as many as 20 fellow slaves killed in front of him, one of whom was tied limb by limb to the bows of four boats and pulled apart at sea. All Members will be horrified by such stories, but it is even more horrifying if that slavery, abuse and murder could be linked in any way with the goods that end up on shelves in our supermarkets. That is why we believe that the Bill should go further.
According to polls, 82% of the UK public want legislation on the matter. The charity sector is equally clear and the Joint Committee supported action. So, too, did the businesses that gave evidence to the Committee. Marks and Spencer said that legislation could play an important role. Amazon, IKEA, Primark, Tesco and Sainsbury all gave evidence and said that they could support legislation. Many businesses have said that they do not want to be undercut by unscrupulous employers.
That is why the idea of a voluntary agreement simply does not go far enough. The Ethical Trading Initiative and its 80 corporate members that are campaigning for legislative measures in the Bill are right to do so. Perhaps the Home Secretary will let the Prime Minister know that the Opposition will table amendments on that. I hope she can persuade him that the House should be able to support that action, which so many businesses support. It will allow them and all of us to be ethical, and to recognise how far the problem stretches—it stretches not just across this country, but across the world.
Lisa Nandy (Wigan) (Lab)
I want to talk about what is not in the Bill, rather than what is in it, because what is in it is, on the whole, a real step forward. Hon. Members have rightly highlighted problems with the Bill, but we should not lose sight of the fact that it represents a huge step forward, and it is one that I did not think would be taken during the eight years that I worked with vulnerable children and young people, including many children who were caught up in trafficking and exploited horribly. We see a Home Secretary pushing forward measures that will help to protect and support those young people and to bring to justice the people who perpetrate these awful crimes against them; and we see a shadow Home Secretary urging her to go further. That is a good day for the House. I wanted to start by saying that, and I hope that the Minister takes my comments in the constructive way in which they are intended.
I do not think it will come as a surprise that I want to focus my remarks on children. I make no apology for doing so, because this is really about children; it is not about criminality, crime, trafficking or immigration. Too often what I have seen when working with children caught up in these systems is that every bit of their identity becomes taken over by something else, and we forget that in the middle of all this is a child who is alleging abuse. It would be inconceivable in any other situation that we would treat a child who is alleging abuse in the way that we treat many of these children when they come into contact with our systems.
I want to explain why, as I raised with the Home Secretary earlier, it is essential that there is a separate offence of child trafficking. I took her point that a small number of people hold a different view, but a vast range of agencies and individuals with a wealth of experience in this area are pushing, pressing, begging and pleading with her and her Minister to listen to why such an offence matters.
Children are different. They are different because they cannot consent to their exploitation by virtue of their age and maturity. That is a principle that has been established internationally for decades, and we should not seek to water it down in a Bill that is supposed to protect them. They are different, too, because they cannot cope with the sorts of systems that they end up in at the moment.
A separate offence of child trafficking would send a strong signal that these children need to be treated as children first and foremost—that they are vulnerable because of their age. It would also set in train a process that would be different. In the years that I worked with child migrants, watching them giving interviews to the Home Office and going through all the processes such as the national referral mechanism, which was established just before I came into this place, I was struck by the fact that children often make unreliable witnesses. They often do not have the information about what happened to them so they cannot answer basic questions about how they got here, who sent them, what their father did for a living. These are all questions that are routinely thrown at children who are coming through the immigration, trafficking and child protection systems, and they genuinely do not know the answers to them. They often also do not tell stories in chronological order, which can be extremely confusing for people interviewing them, and that is often then used by the Home Office to undermine their credibility—I have seen that on countless occasions. They tell stories as they remember them rather than in chronological order, as adults would do. They are coached by traffickers to say certain things as well, and they are deliberately targeted by traffickers because their age makes them vulnerable. They also have a tendency to say what they think is expected of them and what the adult wants to hear.
All these things mean that the process children go through has to be different. We have to make sure that we treat these children who are alleging abuses in the way that we would treat any other child. That is why a separate offence with a lower threshold for child trafficking, recognising the very particular circumstances around children, is essential.
This Bill refers to taking someone’s vulnerability into account, and it states:
“For example, regard may be had to any of the person’s personal circumstances (such as their age, family relationships, and any mental or physical illness) which may make the person more vulnerable than other persons.”
That is so weak as to be almost ineffective before it has even been passed into law. It says regard “may” be had, but regard must be had to those things, and it says age “may” make a person more vulnerable, but age always does. A child cannot consent to their exploitation and that is not at all clear in the Bill. If anything, this Bill makes the situation worse because it makes it incredibly confusing. Without this being changed, we are not going to get the truth from these children and we are not going to get the prosecutions that I am sure the Home Secretary genuinely wants.
With regard to a point made by my right hon. Friend the Member for Birkenhead (Mr Field), this measure needs to go alongside a definition of what constitutes a child, because the Bill contains references to age in clause 1 and to being young in clause 3, so it is inconsistent and confusing. We have always been clear that for the purposes of the law, unless there are exceptions—and there are some exceptions—a child is somebody who is under the age of 18, and I do not see any reason why we would not make that clear in the Bill. It is confusing otherwise.
I take on board the Home Secretary’s point about the difficult issue of age assessments. That has been troubling Home Secretaries and Home Office Ministers and children’s Ministers since I was born. Certainly I know that there were debates in 1983—some Members might even remember them, but I will not name them—about whether it was appropriate or possible to determine children’s ages by X-ray, which is one of those awful debates that seems to resurface with alarming regularity every decade before it is rightly killed off because it is immoral and inaccurate.
There are two ways to solve the problem of age assessments. One is to have the presumption that unless there is good evidence to the contrary, that young person is a child, and I strongly welcome the measure that seeks to do that and congratulate Ministers on introducing it. The second way to do that is to do something the Immigration Law Practitioners Association spent several years working on in its report, “When is a child not a child?”, and that is to set up a series of regional age assessment centres that are capable of determining the age of the child, taking it out of the hands of immigration officers and local authorities—both of whom have an interest in the outcome because if the person turns out to be a child, local authorities have to support them, and if they turn out to be an adult, the Home Office has to support them—and putting it into the hands of children’s experts. That is the way to do it and I am very sorry that progress on that seems to have completely stalled. The Government would do well to look at it again if they really want to get the measures right for children.
There is no way of separating out what is happening to children who have been trafficked, and the trafficking systems and child protection systems that have been put in place, from what is happening in the immigration system. Not all of these children come through the immigration system, but, by God, an astonishing number of them do. When I worked for the Children’s Society with refugee and migrant children, we looked at the children in our projects who had been trafficked. We found that on average they had been in contact with eight or nine separate agencies or organisations before they came to us and we discovered that they had been trafficked. I say that not to claim that we were better than those other agencies, but because it made me wonder how many young people we were letting through the net—how many were going on to other agencies before this fact was discovered, and how many were never discovered to have been trafficked.
The immigration service is one of the key institutions that such children come into contact with, and the way they are treated in it has an enormous bearing on whether we ever end up identifying them as trafficked in the first place. My experience of children going through that process is that it is dehumanising, challenging and adversarial, and it works against people who are genuinely in fear of their lives, who have suffered exploitation and who have been trafficked.
Many years ago I did some training for the UK Border Agency and its staff in what to look for in terms of child protection and how to support vulnerable children who were coming into its systems. My findings surprised me. We had been pushing for a long time for better protection in law for those children. What quite often happens is that these children are seen as immigrants first and children second, and are therefore not treated properly and their concerns are not acted on. We managed to persuade the Government to extend measures in the Children Act 2004 to that group of children—and congratulations to them for doing that—so that the UK Border Agency also had a duty to promote and safeguard the welfare of children. That was a big step forward for those children. What I found when I went to do this training for the UK Border Agency was that there were staff there who were desperate to do more to keep children safe. They knew they were not getting it right. They knew that they did not have the tools, the skills and the knowledge at their disposal to be able to do that. I do not know how much that has changed, but I certainly saw it start to change before I came into this place. However, for as long as there are really tough immigration tipping-point targets that are used to refuse people entry to and to remove them from this country, and for as long as these children are part of those targets and statistics, I am not sure that those staff will ever have the space, time and confidence they need to offer a challenge when they see a child being treated badly.
This issue is relevant to this debate, because if we identify a child as having been trafficked and accept not just that they have been horribly abused, exploited and mistreated, but that they would probably be so again on their return, the right thing to do is of course to grant them status and leave to remain in this country, so that they do not have to go back and face the same situation all over again, which too many children do. That has an impact on the immigration statistics, and we are not going to solve this problem unless we take this group of children out of those statistics and targets altogether.
Having watched children go through the entire immigration process, I know that an adversarial process is not at all appropriate for those who are alleging abuse, yet that is what children who are claiming asylum and who have been trafficked are having to experience. It is absolutely horrendous to have everything about you—your background, your identity, your credibility—threatened, challenged and undermined, and it is simply not appropriate. The process is handled much better in other countries. Instead of an adversarial system, there is an inquisitorial system through which the claims the child makes are looked into, and supporting evidence is gathered and a decision is reached.
The national referral mechanism is a really important part of the process. However, I do not think that it works. I have to say that I have not worked closely with the NRM for three or four years, or had any such cases in my constituency, but I have had regular contact with those who do. There are real problems with the way in which children of particular nationalities are treated. I welcome the interim review, but I am concerned by the answer the Home Secretary gave to a question from my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield Central (Paul Blomfield). She said that the review would come before the conclusion of the Committee stage. It is really important that the Committee have the opportunity to consider and debate the outcome of the review, because I suspect that it will highlight that there are problems with putting children through an adversarial system that is located in the Home Office and is immigration-focused, rather than child-focused.
As I have said before, it would be absolutely inconceivable to try to construct a system for children who are alleging abuse in which they can be challenged on every single aspect of their identity, and have to fight to prove their claims against people who have an interest in not granting them the help and support they need. That is one reason why the emphasis on guardians is so important. I welcome the progress that has been made in that regard. The Bill includes something on guardians, and Ministers, the shadow Home Secretary and the shadow Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull North (Diana Johnson), should be congratulated on pushing for this.
However, if guardians are to have any influence whatsoever, they must have a statutory basis. The Government have commissioned a pilot, which will determine whether guardianship should be rolled out, without granting statutory powers to those involved in the pilot. I worked closely for many years with the excellent Refugee Council’s children’s panel, and I saw how difficult and frustrating it was to be unable to make people do the things they ought to be doing for children because it had no statutory remit. The panel did amazing things through persuasion and persistence, but the welfare of children should not rely on the persuasion and persistence of a handful of committed but underfunded individuals in one charity. We need a proper system that works for those children, and such people should be appointed at the point at which any concerns have been raised. The truth is that it is not possible to get through the NRM without that support, which is needed from the moment somebody has raised a concern; that is when the guardian must be appointed.
I want to press the Minister on an important point that I have raised many times with her colleagues and my own party when we were in government. At the moment, children who are recognised, first, as children and secondly, as potential trafficking victims, go into the care of the local authority, but nobody has parental responsibility for them. As a result, there is nobody to instruct their lawyer. Let me give the Minister a personal example. While working in this field, I came across the case of an eight-year-old child who had been brought to the UK for, we think, organ harvesting. He thought that his trafficker was his daddy. That is what he said and what he believed, and he would not be told otherwise by anybody.
My hon. Friend the Member for Slough (Fiona Mactaggart) talked compellingly about the many reasons why such situations occur. As she is aware, sometimes such children cannot acknowledge to themselves that they have been trafficked and exploited in that way because it is simply too earth-shattering to even begin to comprehend. Therefore, once they get it into their head that this person is their boyfriend, uncle, daddy or auntie, it can be incredibly difficult to get them to think otherwise. That eight-year-old child had a lawyer. He told the lawyer that the trafficker was his daddy and was looking after him, so the lawyer made that case in court because they were duty-bound to act on the child’s instructions. That cannot be allowed to carry on. That is why guardians have to have a statutory basis, so that there is someone with the expertise, knowledge and skills to act in the best interests of the child when they are incapable of acting in their own best interests, which, because of their age and vulnerability, they often are.
I have listened to the arguments made concerning the commissioner, and it is important that they are seen to be independent of the Home Office. The commissioner has to command the confidence of children who are going through this process and are struggling to come to terms with the fact that somebody has done this to them, and that they have perhaps gone along with this willingly and feel complicit in their own abuse. Such situations are harrowing, awful, and hard. These children are in a strange country, often do not speak the language and do not know whom they can trust. They need to look to the commissioner as a figure they can trust, and who is separate from the Home Office, which holds the balance of power over their lives. In many ways, it holds the keys to their future, because it can determine whether they are allowed to remain here with support until they have come to terms with their situation and can make a decision for themselves, or whether they will be sent back into the awful situation they faced before. If the commissioner does not have that independence, their role will be undermined from the outset.
Let me give the Minister an example of a lesson learned. The last Government established a series of children’s commissioners for the separate nations of the United Kingdom. The Children’s Commissioner for England was established as part of the Department for Education and Skills, as it then was. All the staff who worked for the children’s commissioner were originally based in Sanctuary Buildings and had DFES e-mail addresses. That immediately undermined their credibility and standing with the children, and the people who work for, advocate for and support them. Lessons were quickly learned from that. The then Children’s Commissioner, Al Aynsley-Green, was a good champion of that process, saying that we needed to be out of that building, have different e-mail addresses and be seen to be independent.
Hywel Williams (Arfon) (PC)
The hon. Lady is making a very good point. The contrast between the situation of the Children’s Commissioner for Wales and the Children’s Commissioner for England was very instructive. In fact, at the time, consideration was given to not allowing the Office of the Children’s Commissioner for England to join the European circle of children’s commissioners, specifically because of that lack of perceived independence.
Lisa Nandy
Absolutely. I do not want to labour the point, but we did learn the lessons from that approach, and it would be a tragedy if we did not apply them to this most important of areas.
I absolutely support the Home Secretary in what she is trying to do, but these children are invisible—that is a feature of how this crime works, but it is also a feature of many of the systems they are put through when they come to this country. Children who are going through the immigration process are often not seen as children first, but as immigrants, trafficking victims, criminals or perpetrators. I have come across many children who were picked up in cannabis factories, one of whom was then prosecuted for the most unbelievable offence of circumventing electricity—I did not even know that was a crime. That tells us how far we have to go; it was recognised that this young man was a child, yet he was still going through a court process when I and Chris Beddoe, a fantastic champion for children, who was at ECPAT UK at that time, came across him. Children are so invisible through this process and I say to the Minister that this Bill compounds that, not on purpose, but by accident, for all the reasons I have outlined.
As someone who has worked in this field for such a long time, I know that there have been many missed opportunities to get this right for children. I am concerned that there are children who have not yet been trafficked but who will be, because this is the sort of crime that continues day after day, year after year. There are children somewhere in the world to whom this is about to happen. If we get this Bill right, these perpetrators will be brought to justice, but if we get it wrong perhaps they never will be. Everyone in this House needs to think about that when we scrutinise the Bill. When I say to the Minister that a series of things are fundamentally wrong with the Bill, I say it in that spirit: we have a golden opportunity now to get it right for some of those brave, brave children who are going through this at the moment or who will go through this in the future. I know they will survive it and come out of it, because I have seen so many of them come through it, fight it and change their lives and those of so many others because of their bravery. But if we do not get this right for children, what an opportunity we will have missed.