Modern-day Slavery

Pauline Latham Excerpts

Thursday 5th December 2013 Commons Chamber

[Pauline Latham (Mid Derbyshire) (Con)]

I, too, welcome you to the Chair, Madam Deputy Speaker. This is the first occasion on which you have occupied the Chair while I have been in the Chamber, and I congratulate you on your election.

Slavery takes a huge number of forms. I am pleased to note that, apart from the first speaker in the debate, no one has decided to make party political points, because this should not be a party political issue. It should be cross-party, and I think that everyone else has taken that route.

[Fiona Mactaggart]

I do not think that I did make party political points. I welcomed the cross-party consensus on the issue, and praised the Government for their Bill. I did ask the Minister to go a bit further here and there, but I did that in common with Labour Members, and I do not think it fair to suggest that I made a party political speech.

[Pauline Latham]

Perhaps the hon. Lady feels that she did not do so, but I disagree with her on that.

As I have said, slavery takes a huge number of forms. I do not want to focus on international trafficking, although, having recently returned from Burma, I know that the Burmese fear that, following the opening of their borders, an increasing number of young girls will be taken to Thailand for trafficking. We should bear it in mind that they may end up in this country as well, and I think that the police and border agencies should look out for young girls coming here from Burma. Over the last few years, I have been made aware of slavery, trafficking, and the fact that people are groomed.

My hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton), a former Minister, spoke at an event that I organised recently in my constituency, along with Sheila Taylor, an old friend of mine from Derbyshire who set up and used to work for Safe and Sound Derby but is now a member of a committee that advises the Government, and members of CROP —Collective Response of Parents to Child Sexual Exploitation—who work with victims. I also invited the parents of children attending two secondary schools, both of which have between 1,300 and 1,500 pupils. The parents were very white and middle-class; the area that I am talking about is very much a leafy suburb. What shocked me was the small number who turned up to hear those very impressive speakers. Allowing for the fact that each of them might have had two children at one or other of the two schools, I think that there was probably a potential for 1,500 to turn up, but fewer than 20 did so. One or two teachers came along.

I think there is an attitude of, “It doesn’t happen here, does it? It happens in inner cities, it happens abroad, it happens anywhere but in leafy suburbs.” I set up this event because I had spoken to a constituent whose husband had been trafficking some children, particularly her daughter’s best friend. He had been working with these children, grooming them. He has been to prison, but is now out and is still trying to see these children. So this happens all over the world, including on our own back doorstep. I was interested to hear my right hon. Friend the Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip (Sir John Randall) talking about a brothel on the street where he had lived more or less all his life and my hon. Friend the Member for South West Bedfordshire (Andrew Selous) talking about the terrible problems he had had in his constituency.

Derby was one of the first areas to deal with this issue and it had Operation Retriever. A lot of men were grooming women and taking them off to Birmingham and other places, but these men have all been prosecuted and some have gone to prison. The men were from the inner city, but the children they were trafficking were not—again, they were often from very respectable backgrounds. There is a big problem with parents thinking, as they do about grooming and the internet, that their children are not going to be caught up in this. There is an obligation on every one of us in this House to try to make people aware of what might be happening on their back doorstep.

[Mr David Burrowes (Enfield, Southgate) (Con)]

My hon. Friend made the point that this is all around us and she talked about the internet. If we turn to the adverts section in the back pages of our local paper, we will find sex for sale adverts. Should we not heed the words of Detective Inspector Hyland, who says that we should all take action in our local communities to challenge editors of local papers when sex for sale adverts advertise brothels, which are very much linked to trafficking? We can all take steps to try to rid those papers of such adverts.

[Pauline Latham]

That was an interesting contribution and I will now look much more carefully at the Derby Telegraph, as I was not aware of it having adverts for sex. I will look very carefully when I go home this weekend to see whether my local newspaper is part of this selling of sex. If it is, we should be challenging our local editors and saying that they should not be perpetuating this industry.

I do not know how many people are aware that Barnardo’s is working hard to come up with specialist foster placements for children who have been trafficked. It is important that we use as many agencies as we can to help these children, who are mainly, but not exclusively, girls, and give them a proper life after they have come out of this terrible situation. I commend Barnardo’s for the work it is doing. We could probably engage with and help to fund other organisations to help with that work.

I am pleased that the Government are making the effort to introduce this modern slavery Bill, because every day we see things in the national newspapers, and on national and local television, about different situations where girls, in particular, have been trafficked. It is often large groups of men who are grooming these children and moving them along to other cities. I know that the children in Derby were taken to Leeds and Birmingham—they were taken all over the country. They did not know where they were, because they did not know the geography of the country, and they could not escape because they were terrified.

I feel strongly that the Government are working hard to put in place measures to stop this happening, and I look forward to getting the Bill before the House. Every one of us has a duty to speak out about this. I am pleased that we have heard from quite a lot of speakers, but of course it is difficult to get many speakers to participate on a Thursday afternoon. I am sorry about that, because this is such an important subject. I congratulate the Minister on the work he is doing. I am pleased to hear that the Prime Minister is behind this, as is the Home Secretary, and that everyone is working together to rid this country of this evil.