Modern Slavery Bill

Lord Warner Excerpts

Monday 17th November 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Warner (Lab)]

My Lords, let me, as the first Labour speaker since my noble friend Lord Cashman’s excellent speech, congratulate him on his maiden speech and commiserate with him on his loss. As someone heavily involved in bringing forward the Human Rights Act 1998, I was pleased to hear his trenchant words of warning about undermining important bulwarks of liberty; long may he continue to chide us, encourage us and speak to us about those bulwarks. I cannot improve on the tributes offered by the noble Lord, Lord Patel, but I have to confess that my own mother was a fanatical supporter of “Coronation Street”, so my filial duty was never to watch “EastEnders” under any circumstances at all.

I approach this Bill as a critical friend who was pleased to serve on the Joint Committee on the draft Bill under the excellent chairmanship of my right honourable friend Frank Field. Modern slavery is one of the great disgraces of our time, and none of us can be comfortable about how it continues to flourish. Our cheap food and clothing too often come at a terrible personal price at the point of their origin. Too often that price is paid by children. The Government are to be congratulated on their commitment to this Bill, particularly in the final legislative programme of a Government. Other people have commented on that well deserved congratulation.

However, as a number of noble Lords have said today, the Bill could still be improved considerably. I suggest to the House that a good starting point in looking at those improvements is the Joint Committee’s report, where there were a large number of well argued, backed-up-by-evidence recommendations which the Government have slightly turned their back on. They need to revisit that report and some of the evidence which led to those recommendations being made, particularly as we go into Committee. If they do not, we will probably bring forward amendments to encourage them further to have a look at some of those arguments again.

I am afraid that I am not as ambivalent as the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, on the offence of child exploitation—I rarely take issue with her on these matters—but I am four-square behind the noble Baroness, Lady Doocey. The lack of successful prosecutions of offences involving children does not suggest that the police and CPS have been doing a crackingly good job in this area. We need to try to do something different. The Joint Committee’s report argued that there was a danger in the way that Part 1 is framed, even as amended, of villains slipping through the net. We need to revisit this issue in Committee and have a good look at the arguments again.

Let me turn briefly to the unsatisfactory position on the national referral mechanism. It was a source of great frustration to the committee that the Home Office took so long to establish that review. It is true that what has come out from it is an extremely good and helpful piece of work which we now need to build on, but now that we have got the review’s report and the rather sorry picture that it paints of the NRM’s effectiveness, we need to consider very seriously—and the committee had some discussions on it—whether we put in the Bill some provisions relating to it. Because we need to consider the detail of that review report, we may well not be able to put a lot of detail in the Bill, but there is a strong case for what I inferred from my first read of the report: that we should make the NRM a statutory entity and should not be afraid to give wide powers to the Home Secretary in establishing that body to draw on the evidence from the report in making sure that it works more effectively. The arguments about leaving these matters to administrative practices will not be very reassuring to many stakeholders and will not do enough to safeguard the position of victims. I hope that the Minister will be receptive at a later stage to amendments in this area. It would be helpful to know how the Home Secretary proposes to deal with the review’s report.

I want briefly to flag up four other areas of concern: protection of domestic migrant workers; the remit of the anti-slavery commissioner; issues around the supply chain; and support for victims. On the first of these, it is very simple: the Government should reverse the 2012 changes to the Immigration Rules to restore the previous protections for domestic migrant workers. They can either assure us that they will amend the Immigration Rules, which may cause a bit of discomfort in some quarters, or must be prepared for us to consider amendments to the Bill.

On the second area, it is a missed opportunity to draw the remit of the new commissioner so narrowly. It is a big decision—a big call—to do so. The noble Baroness, Lady Hanham, has rightly made the point that there will be no quick revising regulation. To make the system work better, we should draw the commissioner’s remit very widely and at the same time take another, rather critical look at the remit of the Gangmasters Licensing Authority.

Thirdly, although the Government have moved on the supply chain, we need to check whether it is as far as we need to go. Like my noble friend Lady Kennedy, I was much impressed by the trenchant remarks from Australia and California about how they had gone about securing change in this area.

Finally, we need to think again about whether the Bill provides adequate protection for child victims. We have come some way since the draft Bill was first framed, but we have to consider providing much greater protection for children and much greater support for those who have been victims, and giving them the chance to make full recoveries from their experiences. I was much taken with the remarks of the right reverend Prelate and of the noble Lord, Lord McColl, about privileging victims in this area. I hope that the Government will look sympathetically at some of those issues.

This is an important Bill. We need to spend the time to put it in better shape and to help the Home Secretary achieve her ambition of a world-leading legislative measure to combat the scourge of modern slavery.