Home Affairs

Yvette Cooper Excerpts

Tuesday 10th June 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mrs May]

The hon. Gentleman is right that the service provided is now under a new contract. A greater range of facilities is now available to individuals— for example, the advice phone line.

Of course, one of the key issues in dealing with modern slavery is being able to identify those who have been subject to it or to human trafficking. That is why it is so important to train our Border Force officials to spot people who may have been trafficked when they enter the country, and it is why the national referral mechanism review will crucially look at identification. At the moment we know, in a formal sense, who is referred to the NRM, but we fear that there are many more victims of slavery and/or trafficking, as I said earlier.

Crucially, more arrests and more prosecutions will mean more victims released from slavery, and more prevented from ever entering it in the first place. At the same time, we must improve and enhance protection for victims and give them the support they need to recover from their ordeal. The Modern Slavery Bill—the first of its kind in Europe—will substantially strengthen our powers to tackle this crime. It will do so by doing three things. First, it will ensure that measures are in place so that law enforcement agencies and the judiciary can crack down on offenders and give them the punishments they deserve. Secondly, it will provide vital new policing tools to help prevent further cases of modern slavery. Thirdly, it will ensure that victims receive the protection and support they deserve during the judicial process and in accessing vital victim support services.

Currently, modern slavery and human trafficking offences are spread across a number of different Acts. The Bill fixes that by consolidating and simplifying existing offences in one single piece of legislation, providing much needed clarity and focus and making the law easier to apply. Punishments will now fit the crime, with the maximum sentence available increased to life imprisonment. Slave-drivers and traffickers will have their illicit gains seized and, wherever possible, used to make reparations to victims. A new anti-slavery commissioner will drive an improved and co-ordinated response. The Bill will also introduce a statutory defence for victims who are compelled to commit a crime as a direct consequence of their slavery, alongside other measures to enhance protection and support for victims.

The Bill has benefited considerably from pre-legislative scrutiny and the detailed evidence heard during that process. I am enormously grateful to the right hon. Member for Birkenhead (Mr Field) and other members of the Committee for their unstinting dedication and I share with them a determination to see an end to modern slavery. We have listened to the Committee’s findings and, where practicable, have put forward proposals to address its key concerns. A detailed response to its work has been published today. However, as I indicated earlier, stamping out modern slavery in Britain will require more than legislation alone. Law enforcement must play a robust and effective role in tracking down, arresting and prosecuting offenders. That is why I have made tackling modern slavery a priority for the National Crime Agency, and at our borders I have established specialist teams to help identify and protect victims being trafficked into the country.

Victims must be at the heart of everything we do, so I have ordered a review of the national referral mechanism, as I indicated in response to the hon. Member for Linlithgow and East Falkirk (Michael Connarty). Recognising the particular needs and vulnerabilities of child victims, I am putting in place trials for child advocates. The Bill gives those advocates a statutory basis and the status they need to support and represent the child effectively. We are also encouraging businesses to look at their supply chains and ensure that they are free from trafficking and exploitation.

[Yvette Cooper (Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford) (Lab)]

Will the Home Secretary clarify that point about child guardians? Will the Bill include statutory provision to bring in child guardians, or simply the permissive power to do so depending on the trials, the length of which we do not know?

[Mrs May]

The Bill will provide the enabling legislation that we undertook to provide when the Immigration Act 2014 was going through this House, following an amendment made in another place. We are doing it that way because we want to see what the best model is for child advocates; there are differences of opinion over which model will work best. We are therefore including an enabling power to ensure that we adopt the best model when that becomes clear from the trials.

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[Yvette Cooper (Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford) (Lab)]

The Home Secretary has set out the Bills and measures announced in the Queen’s Speech, including measures on modern slavery and on tackling organised crime and helping, we hope, pay back the profits of crime—which we have called for before—as well as action on female genital mutilation, child neglect and terrorism abroad. All of those measures will have strong cross-party support and I want to address some of them. I also want to talk about what is missing from the Queen’s Speech, because the Home Secretary’s proposals are not sufficient to address some of the challenges that Britain faces for the future.

I will start with the Bill that we welcome most—the Modern Slavery Bill. I pay tribute, as the Home Secretary has done, to the members of the cross-party Joint Committee, including my right hon. Friend the Member for Birkenhead (Mr Field) and my hon. Friends the Members for Slough (Fiona Mactaggart) and for Linlithgow and East Falkirk (Michael Connarty), who have argued for changes and improvements to the Bill.

The Home Secretary was right to talk about the torture, rape and persecution of those who see no way out. The gangmasters, traffickers and slave drivers are not just stealing vulnerable people’s money; they are stealing their freedom and stealing their lives. Tougher laws and penalties are needed, and I also hope the Bill will go further in providing more support for victims by making sure they are not punished in the immigration system or sent back to those who sold them in the first place. It also needs to make sure that there are child guardians, which we have been calling for since 2010, because it is chilling that two thirds of children rescued from trafficking in Britain just disappear. They are betrayed by their abusers only to be betrayed for a second time by the authorities, which fail to protect them when their abusers and traffickers steal their lives and freedom all over again.

The Home Secretary also needs to look again at the domestic workers visa and the risks to those forced into domestic slavery, unable to escape. The charity Kalayaan has found that since the Home Secretary changed the visas, 60% of those on the new visa were paid no salary at all, compared with 14% on the original visa. That is slavery, and the evidence suggests that the Home Secretary’s visa reforms have made it worse. We will also press her to support joint action on supply chains, as the Joint Committee has suggested.

I am glad that the Home Secretary is doing more to recover the proceeds of crime. She will know that less has been recovered in recent years. The amount collected by the police and the volume of confiscation orders have fallen, yet we know there is still £1.5 billion-worth of outstanding orders—ill-gotten gains that criminals are still stashing away. We have already called on the Home Secretary to end early release with regard to default sentences where organised criminals refuse to pay, and to stop loopholes whereby criminals transfer assets to families. I hope those measures will be in the Bill.

We welcome further action on organised crime and those aiding and abetting criminals, and we certainly need stronger action against those who are mutilating the bodies of girls and young women. It is a stain on our country that so many young women are at risk and no one has yet been successfully prosecuted.

More action is also needed against online child abuse. We are glad that the Home Secretary is looking at new offences, but what is she doing to reverse the fall in Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre arrests and the drop in the number of chid abusers being caught?

I am also glad that the Home Secretary is looking at terrorist offences overseas, but after all the noise yesterday about the Prevent programme she needs also to recognise that there is a significant gap in her policies on preventing terrorism and extremism. She claimed yesterday that it was okay for the Home Office to narrow the work it does and to stop funding work by communities themselves to prevent extremism, because, she said, the Department for Communities and Local Government is doing that instead—but it is not.

The reality is that neither the Home Secretary nor the Communities Secretary—nor even the Education Secretary—are taking seriously enough the need to work with communities on preventing young people from being seduced into going to Syria. Some of the strongest voices and most effective people in counteracting the ideology of the jihad are those within the communities, in faith groups and friends in social media, yet not enough work is being done with those communities or to give them support. I hope the Home Secretary will make sure that that happens.

[Keith Vaz]

May I endorse what my right hon. Friend the shadow Home Secretary has said? In my constituency, 52% of the people are from ethnic minority communities and there are more than 27 mosques, 35 Hindu temples and five gurdwaras in Leicester. It is important to bring communities with us. Of course, a tough strategy is very important. We did not get it absolutely right under the previous Government and Prevent had to be modernised, but without those communities we cannot make change.

[Yvette Cooper]

The Home Affairs Committee has done some important work on this issue and my right hon. Friend is right that we will always have to keep reforming the programmes and learning from things that do not work, because preventing extremism is a difficult area. However, experts in countering extremism and preventing terrorism have raised concerns with me that some of the work done previously with the Somali community to ensure that it got the support it needed to prevent people from going to Somalia to fight is not being replicated to prevent people from going to Syria.

[Kate Green]

I also represent a constituency with a highly diverse population and many families from minority communities. They tell me of a deep sense of bubbling anger and that they are no longer being made to feel welcome or respected in the community as a whole. Does my right hon. Friend agree that it is important that the broader strategy engages the whole community and respects and honours everyone’s contribution as members of our country?

[Yvette Cooper]

My hon. Friend is right. She knows that many of the strongest advocates of fighting extremism or preventing extremism—for example, preventing Islamist extremism—are those in the Muslim communities themselves, such as Muslim community leaders who have done excellent work on preventing extremism. The Government should do more to support those communities in the work that such communities are often better at leading.

A lot is missing from this Queen’s Speech. There is no serious action to tackle domestic violence or rape, of which reported cases are going up, but prosecutions and convictions are going down on the Home Secretary’s watch. There are no national standards, and no commissioner on violence against women to make sure that such standards are enforced. I still fail to understand why the Government will not do more to prevent violent relationships among young people. Where is the proposal for the compulsory sex and relationship education that all our children should get to ensure that they are taught zero tolerance of violence in relationships from the start?

What about immigration? The Home Secretary’s approach is failing. She set a net migration target, and the Prime Minister promised—no ifs, no buts—that he would get immigration down to the tens of thousands. The Home Secretary said that she would meet the target by the end of the Parliament. Yet net migration is now at 212,000, which is hardly less than the 222,000 at the time of the last election. Despite all her rhetoric and four years’ worth of legislation, the public are more worried about immigration now than when she started as Home Secretary. However, universities and businesses are concerned that they cannot attract the best international talent, which they need. In the past year alone, the number of people saying that immigration is their biggest concern has doubled. It is the worst of all worlds, so why does she not stop pretending about meeting her failed target and act to address some of the practical concerns that people have about the impact of immigration on wages and jobs?

[Pete Wishart (Perth and North Perthshire) (SNP)]

Will the right hon. Lady tell me what the Labour party is going to do? It seems to me that there are only two ways to deal with UKIP’s agenda: either to accommodate and pander to it, or to challenge the very assumptions on which it is based. Labour cannot look two ways on this matter—will it challenge or pander?

[Yvette Cooper]

UKIP is exploiting people’s fears and concerns, and it needs to be challenged every step of the way. We need to set out the practical reforms that would address people’s concerns about the impact of immigration on their wages and jobs when employers exploit immigration to undercut local wages and jobs. I do not understand why the Home Secretary will not take such measures—we could support them—in a new immigration Bill.

[Andrew Percy]

The shadow Secretary of State came to my constituency recently. She did not give me notice of her visit, but she may have heard from residents in Goole of their concerns about immigration. The visit did no good: the Labour vote completely collapsed in the Euro elections. Will she now take this opportunity to apologise to residents in Goole for what happened in 2007, which led massive numbers of immigrants to come to our town and put huge pressure on schools, housing and our public services?

[Yvette Cooper]

I must tell the hon. Gentleman that, unfortunately, public concern about immigration is much higher now than it was at the time of the general election. I hope that he will apologise to his constituents for backing a net migration target and promising that it would be met by the time of the next general election, but utterly failing to meet it.

The Government are not setting out the practical things that they could do. For example, they could stop agencies recruiting only from abroad, close loopholes in the minimum wage, go much further on unfair zero-hours contracts and make serious exploitation a crime. All those are things that the Government could do.

In response to my hon. Friends’ questions, the Home Secretary commented about the Passport Office, but I must say that her answers were incredibly complacent and simply do not reflect the experience of MPs right across the country. She claimed that all the targets are being met. From what she said, we would think that everything was absolutely fine. Tell that to James Bowness from Cumbria, who nearly missed his chance to qualify for the Commonwealth games because his passport did not arrive in time; pensioner Eileen Shepherd from Darlington, who missed her dream cruise because her passport did not arrive; or the Vernon family from Coventry, who missed their first family holiday abroad. They all applied in time, but the Passport Office let them down.

[Mr Donohoe]

One of the problems faced by Members of Parliament and their staff is that when they phone the ministerial hotlines, they do not get an answer for two or three days, and when they do it is incomprehensible and does not help them with the particular case.

[Yvette Cooper]

My hon. Friend is right. Many of us have had the experience of trying to ensure that our constituents get their passports in time to go on the holiday that they have put all their savings into, or to go on a business trip abroad. We are told that there is a backlog of 500,000 cases. We all know that people are now in a state of panic and, for fear of losing their money, are putting extra money in to pay for fast-track services or rushing across the country to Durham or elsewhere to pick up their passport.

[Keith Vaz]

For my right hon. Friend’s information, the Home Affairs Committee has called the head of the Passport Office to appear before us on Tuesday. We have heard that the real problem is that 80 members of staff have been moved off passport fraud duties to help with the backlog, meaning that they are not doing the very important work of checking fraud that they are required to do.

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[Yvette Cooper]

My right hon. Friend is exactly right. I know that he and the Committee will scrutinise this matter in great detail. It is deeply troubling if important security measures have been dropped simply because there is a crisis in the Passport Office and the Home Secretary has taken her eye off the ball.

We know that the delays are even longer for Brits living abroad, such as the family who cannot come home from Qatar with their baby because they cannot get him a passport to fly. With expats stuck abroad and unable to come home, keeping Brits out of the country seems to be the Government’s only chance of meeting the net migration target. This is a shambles.

There are some sensible measures in this Queen’s Speech, but too much that is not in it. Frankly, from our debates over the past week, people would not have known even about the measures that are in it. The Home Secretary was not talking about them on the day of the Queen’s Speech. In fact, no one was talking about them, and even the fainting page-boy struggled to get a look in. We had the headlines, “Cabinet at war over extremists in schools”, “Angry Cameron rebukes rivals as Tory rift widens”, and “Tory bloodbath over Muslim schools fiasco”. We had to pity the poor Prime Minister, who was standing on the sidelines and desperate to talk about pensions or fracking, and even the Deputy Prime Minister, who was trying to get noticed and madly waving his plastic bags. No one heard about the slavery Bill or the crime Bill on Queen’s Speech day, because the Home Secretary had started her own plot to cause a parliamentary explosion on the day the Queen came to Parliament.

Yesterday, the Home Secretary told the House that she did not authorise the publication of the letter on the website or in the media. Presumably, she woke up on Wednesday morning to be as shocked by the headlines as everyone else. Presumably, she was as horrified as the Prime Minister that the Gracious Speech we should have been talking about was overshadowed. Presumably, she rushed into the Department and said, “Oh, Fiona, what on earth have you done? Take it down. Quick—rush across and make nice to the Education Secretary. Get me the Prime Minister on the phone, and I’ll apologise for this dreadful departmental mistake on such an important day.” Except that she did not; there was no contrition, no rush to limit the violence and no punishment for the culprit in her Department.

Yesterday, the Home Secretary got terribly touchy about the ministerial code. She said that she had not breached it, but let us see what it says. Under section 2.1, ministerial correspondence should be confidential. Yet she kept the letter on her website for three days. Under section 3.3, she has responsibility for her special adviser. Is that why she will not tell us who leaked the letter? These are blatant breaches of the ministerial code and she knows it. If she wants those charges against her to be dropped, she should answer these questions. Who agreed to put the letter on the website? Who agreed to give it to the press? Why did she write it after she had heard about the briefing from The Times, and did she write it knowing that it would be leaked? When did she find out it was on the website, and why did she not take it down?

The Home Secretary launched a sabotage attack on the Queen’s Speech, even though her own Department had some perfectly reasonable measures that she should have wanted to include. The Queen’s Speech just does not do enough to tackle the serious problems in the country. There is not enough on crime, immigration or violence against women, and the Home Secretary has taken her eye off the ball. She has been too busy in briefing wars with the Education Secretary to keep her own house in order, and too busy worrying about her next job to get her day job right, and the country is being let down.