Immigration Bill (Fifth sitting)

Sarah Champion Excerpts

Tuesday 27th October 2015 Public Bill Committees

[Sarah Champion (Rotherham) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship. If I may add to what my hon. Friend is saying, Caroline Robinson, the policy director of Focus on Labour Exploitation, said in her witness statement,

“The point about the protective purpose of the director is very important. For us, the core purpose of that role should be the protection of vulnerable workers and the prevention of exploitation.”––[Official Report, Immigration Public Bill Committee, 20 October 2015; c. 27, Q54.]

That is what the amendment is trying to get at.

[Paul Blomfield]

I thank my hon. Friend for her helpful intervention. Throughout our deliberations, we should seek to draw on the evidence that we heard. The evidence cited by her and by my hon. and learned Friend the shadow Minister has powerfully made the case that the confusion of immigration functions and labour market enforcement is damaging and counterproductive to our objectives for the labour market and for immigration. The amendment seeks to provide absolute clarity. I hope that the Government will accept it.

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[Anne McLaughlin]

If the hon. Gentleman was asking me to agree with him then I agree with him.

[Sarah Champion]

It is a clarification, courtesy of Google. The UN defines trafficking as

“the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of persons, by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability”.

As my colleague has just said, this gets to the nub of the problem. My understanding, and perhaps the Minister could provide clarity, is that when we are talking about trafficked people, the legislation is in place already so it can be enforced. What we are saying here is that a large number of people are in a grey area. They might, as in the example given by the hon. Member for Gower, have paid to come into this country to work but then, very quickly, find themselves in an exploitative situation.

We need clarity about the role of the labour market enforcement director. Is he very clear that he is responsible for enforcing good labour practice? Does he have the resources to do that and can he work collaboratively with the other agencies to make sure that when something like the Modern Slavery Act 2015 is enforced, that vulnerable person is taken care of?

[The Chair]

Just before we move on, I want to say that I have allowed the debate to go fairly wide of the mark on trafficking as it does indeed go to the heart of the Bill. If you recall, I did ask for one of the witnesses to define trafficking. I myself was none the wiser after she had finished speaking, unfortunately.

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[James Brokenshire]

I would point to the fact that immigration enforcement—the directorate within the Home Office that is responsible for the enforcement of immigration rules—is not one of the structures that the director has responsibility for. I will cover in turn the point about remit because there is an important aspect to this. When hon. Members have heard what I have to say, I hope that they will understand that the hon. and learned Gentleman’s concern about some sort of merger is not what this is about. We intend the director’s remit to cover labour market breaches, not immigration offences. The director and the enforcement bodies will work closely with Home Office immigration enforcement wherever labour market breaches are linked to illegal immigrants or people working in breach of their visa conditions, but that is an adjunct and not the purpose of the director.

I was asked why this measure was in an immigration Bill. There are two reasons. First, immigrant workers can be particularly vulnerable to exploitation by rogue employers, a point that has been flagged by hon. Members already this morning. I am sure that that will be a continuing theme during our consideration of the Bill. Secondly, by ensuring that workers are treated fairly, we are preventing businesses bringing in cheap labour that illegally undercuts the wages of people already in this country. Good labour market enforcement has knock-on effects.

Modern slavery has been a theme of some of the contributions this morning. With the Modern Slavery Act, Britain is once again at the forefront of the fight against the inhuman crimes of slavery and forced labour—the hon. Member for Sheffield Central and others made comments on this—but it is important to understand that exploitation occurs in many forms and can start with abuse of employment law. We must step in to protect not just the vulnerable—I will address the point about vulnerability—but also local workers and responsible businesses affected by those who are prepared to exploit cheap labour. That is why there is the need for this strategic approach and for the director to work with the different organisations that are in place. This is not a merger, as the hon. Member for Sheffield Central highlighted in his contribution, but rather we have an over-arching strategy of looking at ways in which we can promote good practice.

I would direct hon. Members to the consultation published alongside the Bill to set out some of those details. It says that:

“The Director will lead and co-ordinate work to promote compliance by employers and labour providers with labour market legislation, and to encourage and enable people to report infringements and exploitation.”

We are conducting a consultation at the moment around the director. We look forward to receiving feedback and input so that we are able to reflect fairly and appropriately.

Our employment law framework guarantees decent minimum rights for workers, including from next April the national living wage for over-25s, and promotes fair competition between businesses. The majority of employment law is enforced by individuals taking their employer to an employment tribunal to seek redress if they believe they have been wronged. State enforcement bodies step in to enforce legislation where there is a higher risk of exploitation or vulnerability.

As I have indicated, clause 3 already defines the director’s role by reference to the legislation and enforcement functions that will be within his remit. It makes it clear that the three enforcement bodies for which the director will set the strategy are the Employment Agency Standards Inspectorate, HMRC’s national minimum wage team and the Gangmasters Licensing Authority. We want the director to bring co-ordination across the whole spectrum of breaches of employment law—from employers who do not know the rules right through to organised, criminal exploitation of workers. That will be the director’s broad remit. However, I am concerned about some of the pictures we see of organised immigration crime and organised criminality more generally that seeks to exploit labour markets and uses the front of employment. We are dealing with a broad spectrum, which ranges from vulnerability all the way to good practice and compliance. It is right that the director should have that remit—setting up strategy, commenting on the balance of resources across each of the three agencies and reporting to the relevant Secretary of State.

[Sarah Champion]

Could the Minister give clarity on how the director would work in collaboration with the Independent Commissioner for Modern Day Slavery? Whether it is in guidance or within the Bill, it would help if the two roles could be clarified, because there is a grey area.

[James Brokenshire]

It is important to stress that they are separate roles. We make that point clearly in the consultation document, where we say that the director will have a role that is distinct from the commissioner’s role. Obviously, the commissioner looks at all types of modern slavery, whereas the focus of the director will be on labour market exploitation and enforcement. The practical roles are equally different:

“The Director will set the strategic plan, priorities for targeted action and overall approach”,

whereas

“the Commissioner has a broad role to look at the effectiveness of all the bodies engaged in the fight against modern slavery, encourage best practice, and make recommendations for improvements. That role will in future include looking at the effectiveness of the new Director and the reformed GLA”,

which we are consulting on now. I hope that is helpful and explains that these are complementary roles. I think that the commissioner, Kevin Hyland, is doing an excellent job. He has a great deal of practical experience from his time in law enforcement. I remember a couple of years ago going out with Mr Hyland on an enforcement raid to do with trafficking, so I know the real passion he has for that job. I think that he will use and work with the new director in a very positive way to continue to confront the appalling evil that is slavery and trafficking, with people being horribly exploited and enslaved for gain. We continue to need to shine a light on this, so that it is seen for what it is.

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[Keir Starmer]

Yes, I thank my hon. Friend for his contribution. I will come later to where the director will put his or her emphasis—on what might be called the higher end breaches, or on more routine breaches. I welcome that contribution and I ask the Minister to deal with it if he can in his comments.

Amendment 59 is intended to clarify the relationship between the director of labour market enforcement and the UK’s existing labour inspection agencies, ensuring that the current role, remit and resources of labour inspectorates are safeguarded. By way of background, I give an example, because practical realities follow from what we hope is a very good initiative. This year we saw the pay and work rights helpline merge with the Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service. The pay and work rights helpline used to provide vital advice; it was a service with an annual cost of £500,000, yet, when it was merged, the money did not go with it, which has led to a strain on the service. As a result, ACAS struggles to meet extra demand with no extra resources. There is some evidence that representatives have been asked not to use it. By making explicit the resource implications in the strategy, we hope to avoid this sort of implication. Where there is a merger of various functions and enforcement without the resources, it becomes ineffective.

[Sarah Champion]

I give another example. During the witness session, I asked Professor Metcalf whether he believed that there were sufficient resources and he said,

“Probably not, but in the consultation document and, I think, in the Bill, it does not actually set out quite what the resources are.”

I went on to ask him what he thought they should be and he said:

“One understands the difficulties with the public finances, but we probably do not have sufficient resources. In the low-skilled report, we calculated that you would get an inspection from HMRC once every 250 years and you would get a prosecution once in a million years. That suggests that we do not have enough resources. In turn, that takes you to the potential trade-off between the resources and the punishments.”––[Official Report, Immigration Public Bill Committee, 20 October 2015; c. 19-20, Q36-37.]

[Keir Starmer]

I am grateful for that intervention, which is another example from the evidence that we heard last week about resources. Unless we tackle the resources issue head on, all that will be achieved is the creation of a director without any real powers to carry out the functions, which I think everybody accepts need to be enforced and enhanced. In a sense, if we try to do more with less, services are jeopardised and, in truth, the vulnerable workers suffer and we will not succeed in reducing the pull factor for illegal migration because exploitation will not be uncovered and penalised.

By way of example, the number of Gangmasters Licensing Authority investigations into the illegal activities of gangmasters dropped from 134 in 2011 to 68 in 2014, and prosecutions were down from 19 in 2010 to three in 2014. I accept that underlying this reduction will be some intelligence-led work, but those figures are stark and they underline the general point made by the witnesses last week, namely, that the concern about labour market enforcement is not so much about the agencies and the enforcement powers as about the fact that the resources are simply not there to allow for investigations and action to be taken very frequently. Unless that problem is addressed head-on, there is the danger that all we will create is a director who does not actually carry out the enhanced functions that it is hoped will be carried out.

Sticking with the GLA itself, its budget, of course, has been cut by 20% since 2010, so we are in an environment where the enforcement agencies are already suffering quite significant cuts. It means that the GLA regulates labour in a £100 billion sector with a budget of 0.004% of that figure.

I have some questions that I hope the Minister will be able to address in his reply. On page 8 of the Government’s consultation document, “Labour market exploitation: improving enforcement”, it states that there has been

“a shift from abuses of employment regulation towards increasingly organised criminal activity engaged in labour market exploitation.”

That shift has occurred during the past 10 years. But what is the evidential basis for that assertion? In other words, that is the shift of abuse from, as it were, lower-level routine abuse to increasingly organised criminal activity. Linked to that is another question. Does the Minister agree that if we do not enforce employment legislation effectively at the lower end of abuse—if you like, minimum wage, health and safety and so on—we will create conditions for higher levels of abuse to develop. So, as I say, where is the evidence to support that assertion? And if we abandon the lower end or do not put resource into it, do we not run the risk of creating conditions in which unscrupulous employers will get away with whatever they want?

Amendments 65 and 66 would include the functions relating to health and safety at work and child labour within the remit of the director. May I just be clear about the spirit in which amendment 65 was tabled? It aims to explore the thinking behind the division of functions here, and to understand why all the functions are not brought together under this director, while also recognising—as we do—the work that the Health and Safety Executive is currently undertaking. So, amendment 65 was tabled in that spirit of properly understanding the Bill’s limited remit. The health and safety at work aspects of the Bill speak for themselves; I think that the child labour functions are enforced by local authorities.

Earlier this morning, the Minister said that the purpose of the Bill was to cover the whole spectrum of labour market enforcement, and therefore the ownership of the HSE and of the legislation to deal with child labour were obvious. There may have been a good deal of thinking behind that, but it would be useful through this exercise to understand that thinking properly, because the exclusion of those functions from the remit of the director of labour market enforcement could have an influence on the issue addressed by amendment 55, namely, the primary purpose of the director. Why is the HSE excluded and what is the thinking behind that exclusion?

Of course, there is also a budgetary consideration. The budget of the three labour inspection agencies covered in part 1 amounts to just over £14 million. That is compared with the £81 million for the Health and Safety Executive, which adopts a cross-labour market role. If the aim is to cover the whole spectrum and there are already resource considerations—of course there are—why do these provisions not cover the whole spectrum and leave out the health and safety and child labour aspects?

Amendments 63 and 64 aim to ensure that labour market offences committed against all workers are included within the scope of the director of labour market enforcement’s work, irrespective of immigration status. I will try to explain our concern clearly. Trafficking offences, as we understand it, are outside the remit of the Bill, save where they touch on the role of workers. That makes sense on one level because we would not expect the director of labour market enforcement to be looking at trafficking offences outside the employment or labour context. The problem as we see it—which may simply require clarification or may require amendment—is that the definition of “worker” within the Bill is then not wide enough to cover all those who may be in the labour market, including undocumented victims of trafficking. Perhaps there is a clear explanation; there may be a simple amendment. We follow the logic of the scheme, but we are concerned that the definition of “worker” is in fact too narrow and will leave some who it is probably the intention of the Government to include outside the scope of the protection. The amendment is put forward in that spirit.

[Sarah Champion]

On that point, I wonder if the Minister could also clarify why clauses 3 and 9 use two different pieces of legislation relating to workers? It seems to be a bit of an anomaly. Some clarity on that would be welcome.

[Keir Starmer]

Finally, amendment 62 touches on the annual report and is intended to ensure that the director of labour market enforcement’s annual report links with his or her assessment about non-compliance in the labour market and the remedies secured by victims and threats and obstacles to effective enforcement. The bullet point is this: as drafted, the director’s strategy does not link with his or her assessment of non-compliance in the labour market and his or her annual report does not link back to the assessment of non-compliance as a baseline. The amendment aims to ensure that the strategy covers everything that it should and that the annual report is tied into the same process.

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[James Brokenshire]

I thank all hon. Members for their contributions in this mini-debate. Equally, I should celebrate and recognise the contribution from the hon. Member for Paisley and Renfrewshire North. I appreciate that this may be a rare moment in the consideration of the Bill—he is supportive of the measures—but, in good spirits, I welcome his comments and the support he has given. I think that there is a shared recognition that we need to deal with exploitation and to achieve better co-ordination, and that we need the strategic response that is provided by the Bill. I welcome his comments in the spirit in which they were made.

The hon. and learned Member for Holborn and St Pancras asked me at the outset about organised criminal activity and the evidence base. It is feedback from enforcement officers that tells us that the incidence of forced labour may be growing at a faster rate than other types of exploitation. It appears to be due to criminal gangs infiltrating the supply chain, which I know is a broader issue that was debated during the passage of the Modern Slavery Act. I will not stray widely, but perhaps that will give him a sense of what we have been looking at.

Amendments 57 and 58 relate to the contents of the director’s annual strategy to address non-compliance in the labour market in the forthcoming financial year. Although I agree entirely with the intention behind the amendments, they are unnecessary because it is the Government’s expectation that the director will feed information of that nature into the planning and reporting cycle. Page 24 of the consultation document says of the strategy:

“It will set out, for the financial year ahead: the priorities for enforcement; the outcomes required from the enforcement bodies; and the budgets for the enforcement bodies, within the total envelope of available funding.”

So we have been quite clear about our expectations.

The issue of how non-compliance in the labour market should be addressed is at the heart of the strategy, which is why clause 2(2)(b)(i) requires the director to propose how labour market enforcement functions should be exercised, or, to put it another way, how the three enforcement agencies under the director’s remit should operate to address non-compliance.

The Government would not consider the strategy to be effective if it did not identify the threats and obstacles to effective labour market enforcement. We expect the director to turn over stones to tell us where the gaps are and to propose how they can be addressed. That is a crucial and valuable aspect of the role. Similarly, the Government would not consider any strategy or report to be effective if it did not examine the important issue of securing remedies for victims, which would naturally include recovering wages owed to workers and sanctions against employers for labour market offences.

[Sarah Champion]

Therefore, will the Minister confirm that, as in amendment 62, non-compliance will be reported on and used as a baseline for forthcoming reports?

[James Brokenshire]

As the hon. Lady will note from the consultation document, the strategy is about setting out information and issues concerning the work of different bodies and agencies, including some themes of non-compliance. How that feeds into communication, good practice and sharing information is at the heart of the matter and needs to be reflected in the strategy.

Amendments 56 and 59 bring me to the director’s role in setting the resources of the enforcement bodies. It is the Government’s intention not that the director of labour market enforcement decides the budgets of the three enforcement bodies, but that the director should recommend how resources should be allocated within the total envelope of available funding. Hon. Members will be aware that the Gangmasters Licensing Authority is funded by the Home Office, and the Employment Agencies Standards Inspectorate and HMRC’s national minimum wage enforcement teams are funded by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills. Funding for those agencies is secured via the usual departmental bidding process. While the Government intend that the relevant Secretaries of State will take the director’s proposals on resources into account during the preparation of those bids, it is right that the Government set the overall level of resources devoted to labour market enforcement in the context of the totality of pressures on public spending. I point out that HMRC has increased its budget for enforcing the national minimum wage; for 2015-16, that has increased by £4 million, meaning that the total budget has increased to £13.2 million.

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[James Brokenshire]

The hon. Gentleman will be aware that information sharing is a specific point in our consultation. There are barriers—legal and otherwise—to sharing data between enforcement bodies. That is why we are consulting on that point, and some suggestions have been highlighted in the consultation document.

We are reflecting carefully on that and have put it out to consultation to consider the most effective and appropriate ways to do so. We want these gateways to information sharing, which we have in other enforcement spheres. I want to reflect on the responses to the consultation on that point to ensure that we act appropriately.

I hope I have set out why we think this role is different in character and nature, in terms of workplace safety and the best interests of the child, and why we do not think it would be appropriate to include the proposal in this part.

[Sarah Champion]

Does the Minister believe the consultation will be complete by Third Reading and able to influence the Bill?

[James Brokenshire]

We have today announced an extension to the consultation period. It was originally due to close at the beginning of November, and it has been extended by about four weeks—I can come back to confirm that. I want to ensure that we get the provisions right on some of these detailed points. The consultation may inform later parts of the Bill. Our judgment is that we should ensure that the consultation is framed to get the right responses from those actively engaged at the front end. That is why we have announced a time extension, which I believe will be welcomed by the different sectors.

There were comments about redefining the term “worker”. The clause and the proposed amendment do not redefine “worker” for the purposes of the Employment Agencies Act 1973, the National Minimum Wage Act 1998 or the Gangmasters (Licensing) Act 2004. The coverage of those respective Acts continues to apply. That means that the Employment Agency Standards Inspectorate and the GLA will still tackle non-compliance by employment agencies, businesses and gangmasters, regardless of whether the affected workers have the right to be or to work in the UK.

We see the director as being focused on improving the way we enforce labour market and employment law rules. The Bill is not about extending labour protections to illegal workers, and we think that the director’s focus should be on making sure that workers who are properly here are better protected.

However, we are committed to tackling serious crimes against individuals, whatever their status. We have set out in the modern slavery strategy and the Modern Slavery Act 2015 enhanced powers and an improved approach to tackling slavery and human trafficking, whether victims are trafficked for sexual exploitation, exploitation involving criminal activity or indeed labour exploitation.

That is why we have implemented life sentences for modern slavery offences, new preventive orders to stop harm before it takes place and improved protections for victims such as a statutory defence. We see an important but specific role for the director in supporting this crucial work. The director’s remit includes modern slavery offences where they are committed against a worker or person seeking work, or where a person is subject to slavery, servitude or forced or compulsory labour. We are also consulting on additional powers for the Gangmasters Licensing Authority to include tackling such offences in their proposed enhanced enforcement role. I draw Members’ attention to that.

We think the balance is right. The director’s role is focused on workers who are here legally, although he can include in his plans action against forced labour as well. Trafficking people from around the world to work in brothels in the UK is an absolutely unacceptable crime, but we judge it is right for the director of labour market enforcement to tackle those aspects that are within the remit outlined in the Bill.