Immigration Bill (Thirteenth sitting)

Debate between Sarah Champion and Anne McLaughlin

Tuesday 10th November 2015 Public Bill Committees

[Anne McLaughlin]

I always find—I am sure everyone will agree—that when looking at legislation it is important to remember who we are talking about and think through who will be affected by legislative changes. I will focus on one reason why amendment 226 is so important. I want to share with the Committee the story of Zara, whom I came to know extremely well, though not as well as my sister came to know her.

It took a long time for the trust to build up with Zara. She was extremely religious, came from a middle eastern country as an asylum seeker and had been refused asylum. She was therefore destitute. She came to trust my sister and, in her broken English, eventually managed to tell her what she needed. I do not want to say the words I am going to say, but I am going to say them anyway. What she needed was sanitary towels. She shared two stories—this came later, after more trust was built up—of cringe-worthy, humiliating experiences that she had gone through because she was destitute and had no support.

Once, when Zara was coming off the bus—and before anyone complains that if she had money for bus fares she had money for hygiene products, those bus tickets were given by a Glasgow charity that helps people with getting about—she heard a little boy saying something to his mum. She could not quite make out what he was saying, but he was pointing at her, and she realised was bleeding. Any woman would feel the horror and humiliation of that, but she was extremely religious and that was just the end for her.

Another experience came when a charity had made it possible for Zara to have three nights’ accommodation in the home of a very kind person. The Committee will be able to imagine what I will say. She bled through the night—because of her erratic lifestyle she had no idea that her period was about to come—and she was horrified when she woke up in the morning, went to clean the sheets and discovered the blood had seeped through to the mattress. There was no way of hiding from that very kind person, to whom she was extremely grateful, what had happened.

[Sarah Champion]

As I listen to the story, my heart is being ripped out, but I think what disturbs me most is having to justify someone going on a bus, as if that is an extravagant luxury. Is that what we have come to?

[Anne McLaughlin]

The hon. Lady raises an important point, and I gave the justification I did because in this Committee I think I am getting to the stage when I can read the minds of some of the Conservative Members. As they did not intervene I explained how Zara managed to get on a bus.

I want to make it clear that I appreciate how uncomfortable people in this room might feel at hearing me talk about bleeding and sanitary towels. I would not normally do that; I am normally discreet, easily embarrassed and notoriously squeamish. I feel extremely uncomfortable standing here forcing myself to talk about periods, bleeding and sanitary towels, and repeating myself again and again. I am doing it because I want everyone to feel uncomfortable; I want us all to feel that discomfort, because we need to realise that whatever we feel now is a minuscule fraction of what the women I am talking about experience.

To continue reading minds, some Members might think that there are charities and good Samaritans, and ask whether help could not be got from them; but it was so painful for Zara to ask for that help. There are charities that go out to offer help, but they are primarily focused on putting a roof over someone’s head, and, if they cannot do that, on feeding them, because food is essential and hygiene products are not. They are essential only to someone’s mental wellbeing, and the charities obviously must concentrate on keeping people alive.

Again, to use telepathy—it is working well—Conservative Members may be thinking that the simple solution would be just to go home. That is all very well, but as we have heard so many times, a significant proportion of the decisions made about people are wrong. It may therefore be assumed that a significant proportion of the people who some Members may think choose to stay here and humiliate themselves with having to ask for sanitary products have no choice.

I cringe when I talk and think about Zara. I do not imagine that anyone in the room is not cringing, and I understand that, but we can do something about it. In this amendment, we are not asking for money for fripperies; we are asking for money for absolute essentials, so that people can, first, stay alive; and secondly, and just as important, are allowed their dignity. Anyone who votes against this amendment today must be honest with themselves and know that they are consciously and deliberately denying that dignity to these women and to many others. I appeal to the Minister and to Government Members to defy their Whip and vote aye—vote in favour of dignity for everyone.

Immigration Bill (Tenth sitting)

Debate between Sarah Champion and Anne McLaughlin

Tuesday 3rd November 2015 Public Bill Committees

[Keir Starmer]

Unless the Minister assures me otherwise, that is precisely how far the strip search provisions will go and it heightens the concern about the exercise of these powers. In those circumstances, a powerful case has to be made for the power to exist at all and for it to be as wide as it is, bearing in mind the definition to which I have already referred.

[Anne McLaughlin (Glasgow North East) (SNP)]

I want to focus on Clauses 24 and 25, which hand power to detainee custody officers to perform strip searches. Women are in this country because they have experienced horrific sexual abuse in the countries they have come from. Whether or not they can prove it, does not take away from the fact that they have experienced it. All sexual abuse is horrific and we have all heard truly harrowing stories. I would like to share one with Members.

When I was a Member of the Scottish Parliament, I attended an event addressed by an academic from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, who had sought and been given asylum here. She was addressing a group of MSPs and talked about how on the day that she published her academic research into the sexual abuse of women in the DRC, she got a phone call from her family to say that by way of punishment the army had come to her family home, taken her teenage niece, and stood in a circle round her. One by one they raped that child and the rest of the family was forced to watch. It goes without saying that that is incredibly horrific. She hoped to be able to bring her niece over to this country. I do not know whether she ever did, because I never heard from her again, but let us say that she did and her niece ended up here. Her niece, like many women who have experienced such things, will no doubt have a lifelong terror of anyone in uniform—male and female soldiers conducted the abuse—and of people in authority. If it is absolutely necessary for anyone to undergo a strip search, it has to be conducted with professionalism and sensitivity and must meet the highest standards, which means extremely experienced, highly trained officers.

[Sarah Champion]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[Anne McLaughlin]

I will give way, although I have reached the last sentence of my speech.

[Sarah Champion]

Subsection (8) states:

“A strip search may…not be carried out in the presence of…a person of the opposite sex.”

Does the hon. Lady share my concern that the Bill does not detail whether the search itself may be carried out by someone of the opposite sex?

[Anne McLaughlin]

I am concerned. I see the Minister nodding, which I hope indicates agreement that we have to be exceptionally careful and carry out strip searches only if they are essential. We must bear in mind that, whether or not the Home Office believes that person, we do not know unless we were there—they may well have experienced such horrific abuses.

Immigration Bill (Sixth sitting)

Debate between Sarah Champion and Anne McLaughlin

Tuesday 27th October 2015 Public Bill Committees

[Sarah Champion]

I thank the hon. Lady for her intervention; she is always fantastic on detail. My answer is yes, but I am not a lawyer, so I would like the Minister to lay out, in language that a former charity worker can understand, the protections for people who are exploited. To be honest, I am unclear. A number of our witnesses said they were unclear, although I recall that clarification was sought on this point.

I will give the hypothetical example of a woman who paid a criminal gang for her passage here and came expecting a job. She was given a job, but then told that she had to pay additional costs, which took away all of her income, effectively making her a slave without legal protection under our current system. She could be beholden to that employer for an indefinite period and be too terrified to speak out, because I can guarantee that the employer would use the fact that she would be reported and become a criminal if she did.

I do not see how clause 8 helps that person in any way. I would like clarification from the Minister about how that person could have the confidence to come forward when their employer is telling them that they will be criminalised if they do so. Surely the best approach is to stick with clause 9, under which the employer becomes liable for the actions and will be criminalised for those actions.

We know where the employers are. They will be registered at Companies House and they will be filing their taxes. It will be a lot easier to follow that trail to get the prosecutions, particularly with limited resources, rather than spending an indefinite period trying to track down illegal workers when we do not know who they are, where they are working or their status, just on the off chance that we might catch and criminalise them so that we send out the right message. Surely it is better to go for the employers.

[Anne McLaughlin (Glasgow North East) (SNP)]

I wonder whether there is a misunderstanding, or at least an underestimation, of how vulnerable some of these workers are. Does the Minister realise the extent of their vulnerability? If he does, will he change his mind about criminalising those who work illegally?

I will cite an example of not a young vulnerable woman trafficked here as a sex slave, but someone whom hon. Members might use as an example of why we need to criminalise. On my travels a few years ago, I spent time with a man called Mehdi, who was fit and healthy in his mid-thirties. He was married to Rezi, who was pregnant with their first child. They sought asylum in the UK—I met him some years after all this happened—and ended up in Glasgow where, despite their best efforts, they were refused asylum because they could not prove they were in danger. She had a miscarriage and they were made destitute. They were told they would be deported and they embarked on a terrible downward spiral. They removed themselves from all support mechanisms, so frightened were they of being found and deported to certain danger, but they could not survive here, so Mehdi found a job. He knew he was not allowed to do that, as did his employers, who took advantage of that knowledge and made him work extremely long hours for £3 an hour.

Mehdi was abused, exploited and occasionally beaten. He was worked until he would regularly collapse with exhaustion, but he had no choice. Some Government Members might argue that he did have a choice because he could have gone back to his home country. However, he was not working not just to feed himself and get by in life in Glasgow, but to save money to buy false passports so that the couple could get out of the UK and away from the danger of deportation to his home country. Who among us would not do whatever it took to protect our loved ones and our own lives if we had to?

If the Bill had been in force when Mehdi was doing all that, what might the outcome have been for this loving and protective husband? This kindly but damaged man could very well have ended up in jail, followed by being deported to the country that he was so afraid of returning to. For him, the worst part would have been leaving his wife—

Immigration Bill (Fifth sitting)

Debate between Sarah Champion and Anne McLaughlin

Tuesday 27th October 2015 Public Bill Committees

[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?