Modern Slavery Bill

Debate between Lisa Nandy and Hywel Williams

Tuesday 8th July 2014 Commons Chamber

[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.