Trafficking in Human Beings

Peter Bone Excerpts

Monday 9th May 2011 Commons Chamber

[Damian Green]

My hon. Friend is right to say that good things were done during the focused police action under the two Pentameter operations. One result is that combating trafficking has become much more a part of mainstream police work than it was a few years ago. There will be further developments on the activities of the national crime agency and, more specifically, on the new trafficking strategy that will be announced in the coming weeks. I will come to that in a second, if he will excuse me.

[Mr Peter Bone (Wellingborough) (Con)]

I absolutely welcome the Government’s decision to opt in to the directive, as does the all-party group on human trafficking. We are concerned, however, about the Government’s decision on the rapporteur. I am all European and I like that sort of thing, and I hope that the Government have not closed their mind to the idea. I do not think that the mechanism that the Minister has outlined is good enough.

[Damian Green]

I am sure that the whole House will echo my pleasure at my hon. Friend welcoming this opt-in to a European directive. I cannot say how delighted I am to be on the same side as him in this argument. As I have said, I will listen to the arguments about an independent rapporteur, but I would merely observe that only two EU countries have adopted the mechanism that he favours. It is therefore reasonable to say that the jury is out on whether that is the most appropriate way forward.

I want to be clear that applying to opt in to the directive is only one part of the wide range of work that we are carrying out to tackle trafficking. Despite the difficult financial climate, we have protected funding for adult victims. We have set aside £2 million a year for the next three years to fund support provision for adult victims of human trafficking. As part of our wider work to tackle trafficking, we have introduced a new model for funding specialist support for adult victims. This will ensure that each identified victim receives support tailored to their individual needs and in line with the standards set out in the Council of Europe convention. It will also ensure effective co-ordination and monitoring of the support on offer, while enabling a greater range of service providers to support victims of this crime. These changes will result in a more comprehensive system of care that will take better account of the particular needs of individual victims. The flexibility of the new model will also mean that we are better equipped to meet the victim care requirements contained in the directive.

The strategy on human trafficking will set out in more detail the direction of our work on trafficking, and this will be published shortly. As I have just mentioned to my hon. Friend the Member for South West Bedfordshire (Andrew Selous), the strategy will set out the steps that we will take across four key areas: disrupting trafficking networks before they reach the UK; smarter multi-agency working at the border; more co-ordination of our law enforcement efforts in the United Kingdom; and improved victim care arrangements. As I said during the anti-slavery day debate in the House last October, the strategy will maintain the focus on victims and also put renewed effort into upstream enforcement, without compromising in any way our commitment to victim care. We will continue to work with a range of partners to achieve this. I hope that the House will support the Government’s intention to apply to opt in to the directive, and I commend the motion to the House.

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[Fiona Mactaggart]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Under Pentameter 2, an expert team was set up at Heathrow, which was able to identify children who came through the airport without their parents, as they were particularly vulnerable. That team is not replicated at other ports of entry, and there seems to be compelling evidence to show that Eurotunnel is a route increasingly used by child traffickers because that same kind of expertise is not deployed to identify and interdict child trafficking at the port.

[Mr Bone]

The hon. Lady is making a powerful speech and knows a lot about the subject. Would Her Majesty’s Opposition support the Government in respect of the border police, as one of its roles is to make sure that trafficked victims are not brought in through our ports?

[Fiona Mactaggart]

The Opposition will support any effective border measures that help to protect this country’s borders against illegal immigration and to prevent the victimisation of people through trafficking. We are absolutely on side when it comes to both those things. The targets that existed under previous nationally initiated police operations are, in my view, necessary to make this kind of work, which I welcome, operate effectively.

Another theme in the directive is the importance of looking after victims. I am concerned about the recent decision to replace POPPY as the provider of victim care. I think that the POPPY project was the most exemplary pioneer in its work on victim care. One thing it was prepared to do because of its independence was to challenge decisions on behalf of victims who were not identified as victims by the national referral mechanism. Will the Minister give a guarantee that the present arrangements for providing victim care will include a willingness to act on behalf of those victims who have not been identified by what amounts, frankly, to a bit of a tick-box exercise when it comes to the questionnaires issued by the NRM? Will the new victim care arrangements allow decisions by the NRM to be challenged so that people who have not been designated as victims of trafficking can be properly protected?

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[Mr Peter Bone (Wellingborough) (Con)]

It is a great pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz) and, as usual, I agreed with every word he said. I very much appreciate his kind words about me and, in return, I shall say that the work of the Home Affairs Committee under his chairmanship is most welcomed in this field.

It would be wrong of me to start without mentioning the two excellent Ministers on the Treasury Bench, the Under-Secretary of State for Justice, my hon. Friend the Member for Reigate (Mr Blunt), and my hon. Friend the Minister for Immigration, who have played an important role in bringing us to where we are tonight. They have both had the time and the patience to talk to the all-party group on human trafficking and we appreciate that.

I welcome the directive and I should also congratulate the previous Government, because, on a non-party political basis, we are building on their work. They took us into the Council of Europe convention on action against trafficking in human beings, which is now being embodied in EU law. The all-party group, under Anthony Steen, did much in the previous Parliament to push that Government in that direction and it is the role of our group to continue to push this Government. Although we welcome the debate and will lavish praise on the Government tonight, we will return to particular points and push the Government hard. My great concern about the EU directive, which I have expressed on many occasions, is that it must be seen as the minimum, not the maximum. We must go much further than it does.

For me, the great thing about opting into the directive is that it sends a message to EU countries that in this country we are serious about the problem, which will encourage other EU countries to do more. We cannot stop human trafficking on our own; we must work with our European neighbours to stop it. To that end, I am pleased with the all-party group’s initiative to try to set up similar all-party groups in other parts of the EU. We have obtained a grant from the EU to do that.

I praise both Ministers for the decision on victim support. The Under-Secretary has not blown his own trumpet enough tonight, as, at a time when there are cuts, it is quite amazing that the Government have managed to increase the funding for victim support. Personally—this is my view, not necessarily that of the all-party group—I think it was right to award the contract for looking after adult victims to the Salvation Army. I have seen the proposal and how it will spread a network of safe homes across the country, involving many different organisations. In a way, it is a big society solution to the problem. Although the POPPY project did an excellent job, it was very London-based. More victims will be looked after better by the new solution and I congratulate the Ministry of Justice on that.

There is one great scandal on which we will continue to press the Government. Adult victims of human trafficking are looked after in this country, previously through the POPPY project and now through the Salvation Army, and they are put into safe homes and helped back into normal life. They can either go home to their country of origin or settle properly into this country and they are given help in bringing prosecutions against the dreadful people who do the human trafficking. It must be far worse for a child victim of human trafficking than for an adult. A young child, aged 15 or so, might be brought into this country having been told that they will have a job in a store, but might suddenly find that they are in a brothel and repeatedly forced to have sex. That must be far worse for a child than for an adult.

What happens to those child victims? As a child, the local authority has to look after them, but there is no particular provision for local authorities to look after trafficked children. They do not even identify them—the provision is a bolt-on to the local authority system. All that happens is that these children are taken into care and then re-trafficked. That scandal must be sorted out. I am pleased that the Government have just awarded a grant to Barnardo’s to set up a safe-home system for children. Admittedly, there will be only 16 children to start with, but that has to be the way forward. We must treat trafficked children differently from ordinary children who come into local authority care. The all-party group will be pressing the Government on that issue over the next few months.

I also welcome the Government’s four-pronged approach to trafficking and to setting the new goals. I also welcome the fact that they are taking time to reach a decision, as I would prefer them to take as long as possible and to get it right. I do not really care whether in Government terms the spring finishes at the end of July, so long as we get it right. There was much criticism of the Government before, saying that they would not opt into the EU directive, but they have done so. Now, there is a lot of chatter that the Government will make a mess of the strategy on human trafficking, but I do not believe that. I hope that when it comes before us we can have another debate and can push the Government further. We are clearly moving in the right direction.

There are two issues about the directive that I want to mention which I think the Government are going to have to consider seriously over the next few months. The first concerns the rapporteur—I have only just learned how to say that word because it is foreign. It seems to me that the Dutch model is better than any of the others. It has a rapporteur and a secretary and they account for the whole cost of the system, so it is a minimal amount of money. The rapporteur reports independently to Parliament once a year on how trafficking is going in the Netherlands and how the Government’s policies work—that is her entire role. It would be really good if we could replicate that system in this country. Of course, I think that our first rapporteur should be Anthony Steen, who was in the Palace of Westminster earlier talking about this very debate, but whomever we might consider for the role, we should look into doing that.

The second issue, which is perhaps more difficult, is the requirement under the directive to have guardianship. I shall be at No. 10 Downing street on Thursday, helping to deliver a petition about guardianship that I believe has more than 600,000 names as a result of a campaign by the Body Shop and ECPAT—End Child Prostitution, Child Pornography and Trafficking of Children for Sexual Purposes. This is a difficult issue—I do not want to pretend that it is not—but we have to get to grips with it and I hope that we in the all-party group can work with the Government to find a solution.

The Government have done an excellent job on this and I respect the effort and time that the Ministers have put in, as well as the constructive criticism that has come from the Opposition. This is a night to celebrate, but I shall come back in future weeks to criticise.