Human Trafficking

Debate between Margot James and Denis MacShane

Wednesday 18th May 2011 Westminster Hall

[Mr Denis MacShane (Rotherham) (Lab)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Cities of London and Westminster (Mr Field) on securing this debate and on making an excellent speech. I should make it clear at the start that I consider this an all-party matter, but the fact that it is an all-party campaign does not mean we should let the Government off the hook.

I have been enjoying reading the Foreign Secretary’s biography of William Wilberforce. There are some parallels. Wilberforce started his campaign to eradicate slave trafficking in the late 1780s. It took a long 20 years—with ups and downs such as fighting a little war against Napoleon, and having to divert money to other causes—before the legislation came into effect, and a number of decades passed before other countries followed suit.

We are at the start of a long campaign, and certain fundamental issues must be addressed. I invite the Minister, who has a wholly responsible approach to this matter, to reread his speech to the House of Commons in 2008 in which he made a powerful plea for guardianship, an increase in resources to the Human Trafficking Centre, and more joined-up work between local authorities and the police—all the points that were made by the hon. Member for Cities of London and Westminster. It was a compelling speech in which he attacked and criticised my right hon. and hon. Friends who were then in the Home Office.

Sadly, the Minister is now in the position of having to resile, deny and turn back almost everything that he called for at the time. We have shut down the UK Human Trafficking Centre. Pentameter is no more, and we will not appoint a guardian. After six months of campaigning—I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Wolverhampton North East (Emma Reynolds) for that—we have signed up to the EU directive, but without the core element in it of a rapporteur. However, we cannot sign up to a directive without finding the resources to give effect to it. Moreover, it requires us to work collaboratively across the European Union. There again, for good or ill, we have a Government who prefer not to work collaboratively to build a stronger EU and stronger cross-border policing and judicial procedure.

The hon. Member for Derry—[Interruption.] Forgive me—given my particular Irish descendancy, I cannot easily stick “London” in front of “Derry”. The hon. Member for East Londonderry (Mr Campbell) said that we must be robust with the new EU member states and any others that may be trafficking people into this country. I agree with him, but is not the real robustness that we need on the demand side? These women—girls, children even—are here only because honest British men think that if they put down £20, £30 or £50, they have a God-given right to the use of a woman to put their penis into at will. I am sorry to use such strong language, but we must face up to the fact that unless we tackle demand, the supply will continue to increase, and all the words that the Minister will say—I do not for a second doubt his sincerity and I understand that he is working within terrible financial constraints—will come to nought and we will be having this debate next year and the year after that.

We have laws. Without opposition from the Minister, who was in his shadow post at the time, my hon. Friend the Member for Slough (Fiona Mactaggart) and other former Ministers changed the law to say that it is a crime to pay for sex with any person who may have been coerced or forced to work as a prostituted woman. To my knowledge, and I stand to be corrected, there has not yet been one single arrest, prosecution or conviction using that new law. The police have the ability to go into massage parlours and brothels—they are not that hard to find; a couple of phone calls and they can find where to go—and challenge the men and put them in front of magistrates courts. Those men should be named and shamed. It is not just a certain French gentleman in New York who should attract all the attention—and yes, I know that he is innocent until proved otherwise. There are hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of British men who are clients of this trade. They are providing the demand and the money. The police must be asked why they have not used their powers.

I regret the shutdown of the different police agencies dedicated to trafficking and their absorption within the Serious Organised Crime Agency, which is to face a further dilution. The police are there with every energy in the world to tackle driving offences and to find out how many points somebody has or has not got on their licence, and to take part in other worthy investigations. None the less, the language of Government should be the choice of priorities. I put it to my colleagues here and to the Minister—not in a critical way—that the police have not focused hard enough on this matter. We do not know the figures and I do not want to enter into the figures debate. The hon. Member for Cities of London and Westminster cited some that were available, but as he acknowledged, they have been widely criticised by other expert groups. We could have a row on figures, but suffice it to say that we are talking about a substantial number; it is not just one or two people, as this odd organisation the English Collective of Prostitutes claims, with occasional support from journalists as well.

We need a rapporteur. Appointing an individual and giving them a task to achieve can change policy. We need to have a guardian for each child taken into care. I can produce the figures on the children who disappear from care. Children are put into care in Hillingdon, from Heathrow; their traffickers come round, and out they go through the door—obviously we cannot lock up a child—to work as sex slaves.

Moreover, we must change the culture of making the victims of trafficking into associate criminals. The approach of the Home Office and the UK Border Agency is to catch and deport. The figures can then be produced. It happened under Labour because of the mass hysteria from some organisations and the right-wing press. Almost any foreigner in Britain was unwelcome; it was said that there were too many of them. We have this tick-box culture of wanting to report the numbers that have been deported. Of course, women are the most vulnerable; they are easy to catch and deport.

[Margot James]

The right hon. Gentleman makes some good points about how the system treats children. Is it not a scandal that according to ECPAT, children are more likely to be convicted of offences—often they are forced through their trafficked status to commit offences such as growing cannabis—than the perpetrators themselves?

[Mr MacShane]

It is a scandal, and I am grateful to the hon. Lady for making that point. This question of criminalising the victims is one that should shame us. I know that it is hard because everybody loves to kick the immigrant, the asylum seeker, the economic migrant and the person here without papers, and they are easily victimised. We even had the noble Lord Glasman saying in Progress Magazine that Labour lied about immigration. He is a Labour lord accusing the Labour Government of telling lies. We may have got some things wrong, but he was expressing the notion that Ministers had lied. That was the language of the election and it is a culture that we need to change.

In his 2008 speech, the Minister eulogised the work of Eaves and its POPPY project, which was a standard-bearer and a model. The Conservative party was right behind it and called on the Government of the day to give it more resources. I am now extremely distressed to find that Eaves is being shut down and its money handed over to a religious organisation that has its proselytising and evangelising duties. I have worked closely with many church charities, so I am not condemning it. None the less, we now have a mono-religious organisation, the Salvation Army, being told that it must be in charge of women from different cultures and different faith backgrounds. I am not criticising the Sally Army for one second; it is a great outfit. However, it is not appropriate for it to replace the Eaves organisation and its POPPY project.

The Salvation Army wrote to MPs—I do not know if it wrote to all MPs or just those who are interested in combating human trafficking—to say that it is now going to transfer hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of pounds to an outfit called STOP UK. I have tried to find out about STOP UK. It has a website, but that is all. It has no publications and there is no board of directors. It has a chief executive whom I think works in the Serious Organised Crime Agency. One of the big problems with victims of human trafficking is that they need to be dissociated from potential police and criminal investigations for being prostituted women. STOP UK has a couple of people with mobile phones, and I tried to call them. It has an office somewhere in south London. I do not doubt the sincerity of the outfit, but it is almost virtual and the Government, having shut down the support for Eaves and the POPPY Project, are now potentially giving it hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of pounds. I put it to the Minister gently—I respect him—that that is opening the way for a scandal further down the line.

I also worry that the National Register of Unaccompanied Children, which was set up in 2004, has been shut down. Why? We have still got children leaving care—in Rotherham, Hillingdon, London and elsewhere—and we also have the problem of unaccompanied minors coming into the UK. My view is that no airline should be allowed to fly somebody under the age of 14, possibly even under 16, if they are unaccompanied. There is also the problem of St Pancras. We had the remarkably complacent answers in the Lords from the noble Earl Attlee, saying, “Oh, there’s no problem, they’re all checked when they get on the train and go through passport control in Paris or Brussels.” For heaven’s sake: any of us who have gone through the maelstrom of getting people on to the Eurostar train as quickly as possible know that the notion that the hard-working officials in Paris or Brussels—I do not criticise them—are spotting potentially trafficked children is ludicrous. It is exactly that complacency that is the problem.

I will finish there, as other colleagues want to speak. There are other points that I want to make, but I think there will be further debates on this issue. My sense is that the House of Commons is seized of this issue. My hon. Friend the Member for Wellingborough (Mr Bone)—I call him my hon. Friend and my colleague—is not here in Westminster Hall today, but he is one of my heroes because he is working so hard on this issue, as did Anthony Steen. Indeed, Anthony Steen is still continuing his work on combating human trafficking. I have visited his offices down at Puddle Dock, and I thank the hon. Member for Cities of London and Westminster for helping to arrange those very good facilities there.

I put it to the Minister that the debate on this issue will continue, and I invite him to make a name for himself on it. I also invite him to read the Foreign Secretary’s biography of Wilberforce, and to try to put himself in the shoes of that great Yorkshire MP at the end of the 18th century. Everybody, independently of party affiliation, will appreciate it if there is substantial change on human trafficking on this Government’s watch. However, as is apparent from the points I have made, I am concerned that we are going backwards, not forwards, on this issue.