Migrant Domestic Workers

Lord Avebury Excerpts

Wednesday 8th June 2011 Grand Committee

[Lord Avebury]

My Lords, I join in the congratulations that have been expressed by others to the noble Baroness, Lady Cox, who not for the first time has raised the issue of rights for migrant domestic workers, as have my noble friend Lord Dholakia and the noble Earl, Lord Sandwich, in previous debates. This problem goes back a long way, as noble Lords can see from the fact that Kalayaan, which has been quoted by everybody who has spoken so far, goes back for more than 20 years. In fact, its briefing quotes from a debate we had on the subject in 1990, by no means the first of its kind, initiated by the noble Lord, Lord Hylton, to whose determination and persistence we should pay tribute.

Throughout the whole of the two decades, the abuse of foreign workers has followed a similar pattern to the description by the noble Lord, Lord Hylton: there are no written contracts of employment or contracts are arbitrarily changed, and wages are often withheld or paid in kind. Then there is compulsion to work excessive hours; inadequate food; denial of privacy; denial of access to friends or often to the outside world; and, in extreme cases, physical attacks, sexual abuse, and credible threats of violence. These things are still with us.

It is true that Kalayaan statistics comparing 1,000 MDWs in a survey done in 1996 with the workers registered with the organisation in 2010 shows some improvement, but from a totally unacceptable baseline. In the earlier year, 100 per cent were being made to work for 17 hours a day, while last year nearly half had to work 16 hours or more. In 1996, 38 per cent were not given enough to eat, compared with 26 per cent in 2010. The only statistic that got worse in those two years was that employers are now withholding the passports of nearly two-thirds of MDWs, compared with 62 per cent in 1996. The ability of the MDW to change employers and in 2008, the extension to MDWs of official status as workers under the points-based system, for which Kalayaan must be given a lot of the credit, should make a big difference in the longer term, but we need to know why a substantial proportion of employers are still ignoring their obligations.

Should not there be a provision in the rules that when an employer is found to have committed serious abuse of an MDW by the employment tribunal, his right to employ MDWs should be suspended for a period to be decided by the tribunal? The Kalayaan statistics on tribunal cases demonstrate that all too many employers are unfit to be given the power over the lives of domestic workers that allows them to break the law with impunity. While two-thirds of those registered with Kalayaan were made to work seven days a week with no time off, for instance, only 14 such cases were reported to the tribunal, so there is still a huge penumbra of abuse which the oppressors successfully conceal. The threat of not being allowed to have domestic servants might be an effective deterrent to the widespread defiance of the law that is continuing.

Another possible way of improving compliance would be to produce an explanatory leaflet in the principal languages of MDWs, and hand it to employers and MDWs at the port of entry. It is all there on the UKBA website, but I doubt whether many of the workers have access to the internet or have adequate knowledge of English to understand that advice.

The treatment of some MDWs equates to trafficking for domestic servitude, as the noble Baroness, Lady Cox, demonstrated, and these cases are brought to the attention of the national referral mechanism, established in 2009 following the Council of Europe's Convention on Action against Trafficking in Human Beings. Up to the end of last year there were 175 adult referrals under the domestic servitude heading, of which 55 were from Kalayaan. Could the Minister give us a breakdown of the agencies that reported the other 120 cases?

What is revealed in the statistics is that 246 of the NRM referrals were of children, of which 104 led to conclusive grounds decisions—a really shocking picture, particularly when you consider the difficulty and danger for a person making the initial complaint while still under the roof of the oppressor. What happens when it is first established that the referral is of a child, bearing in mind that the average time taken to reach a conclusive decision is 190 days, compared with the 45 days reflection period? One would expect that the child would be removed from the employer and fostered pending the NRM decision, but suppose the employer claims to be a close relative, as in the case of Victoria Climbié, for instance. Do we ever allow children to enter the UK now with a person who claims to be a relative but not a parent? Does the NRM refer all the cases reported to it of children to the UKBA with a view to checking on their immigration status? The children obviously did not qualify for admission under the overseas domestic worker regime, first introduced in 1998 and now part of the immigration rules. But one reason given by abused workers for not agreeing to be referred to the NRM is that it would lead to excessive focus on their immigration status. This means that the NRM statistics are the tip of the iceberg, because only those who entered legally as ODWs are likely to register. With an ODW visa, the migrant is free to change employer and frequently does so with minimum support. For the undocumented, Kalayaan recommends the issue of a three-month bridging visa to enable the exploited MDW to find new employment and to apply for an ODW visa, paying tax and national insurance, and eliminating the expense of treating the victim as an illegal entrant.

Finally, I turn to the knotty question of MDWs brought here by diplomats, raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Cox. These workers are not allowed to switch to another employer without losing their immigration status, and the employer's immunity means that although the levels of abuse and exploitation in diplomatic households are similar to those in private households, the FCO does not ask to be informed of trafficking cases identified by the NRM, which itself is a woefully incomplete record. The Austrian Government interview diplomatic MDWs annually, and it would be useful to know how many cases of abuse are thereby uncovered. Does my noble friend think we should have a similar procedure, or better still, that it should be made part of European law?

The annual interview could be an important tool for uncovering abuse throughout the whole of the MDW population. To minimise the bureaucracy involved, the employer could be obliged to complete a form detailing the hours of work and hourly pay; the additional hours the worker is expected to be on standby and the hourly rate for those hours; the details of rest breaks, days off and annual holidays; and the details of tax deducted and national insurance contributions paid. This form should be countersigned by the worker as correct, and it should be available for rechecking at the annual interview. When the worker is said to be treated as part of the family, and to be covered by the family worker exemption, this should be clearly specified, but Kalayaan recommends that the statutory minimum wage should apply to these workers as to all others. Seeing that half of all MDWs are paid less than the minimum wage, it seems likely that the exemption has been widely abused.

The Kalayaan report is a competent and thorough piece of work, and its recommendations demand well considered replies from the Government. In the quarter of a century since the abuse of domestic workers from overseas first became a subject of concern to your Lordships, there have been several attempts at reform, but the extent and nature of the problem has remained the same. It is intolerable and unthinkable that we should fail to act against the criminal employers who treat vulnerable domestic workers, many of them children, like slaves, and I hope that this debate will enable us to signal the determination to stamp out abuse and bring criminal employers to justice.