Modern Slavery Bill
Debate between Mark Lazarowicz and Michael Connarty(9 years, 10 months ago)
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Michael Connarty (Linlithgow and East Falkirk) (Lab)
It has been an enlightening afternoon—I have sat through most of the debate. I am sorry for those Members who did not get manage to get slipped away before I was called to speak; as the right hon. Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip (Sir John Randall) said, I can be pretty emotional and repetitive on this issue, but I make no apology for that.
I want to compliment the right hon. Member for Meriden (Mrs Spelman), who became engaged in this issue when she stepped down as a Government Minister. Having taken an interest in the supply chains, she bolstered my determination to convince the Government that we need to change the law to bring companies into line with at least the situation that exists in California, if not something better, if we are really to make an impact and increase the scope of the anti-slavery movement that started more than 200 years ago, because slavery does not happen only in the UK. If we deal only with the UK, we might prosecute a few people and stop a few hundred people being exploited, but we will not deal with slavery, and this is called the Modern Slavery Bill.
I am glad that my hon. Friend the Member for Slough (Fiona Mactaggart) has returned to the Chamber, because I thought that her speech was a tour de force that articulated the need for this Government really to deal with slavery. We should look at the documents. We had the draft Modern Slavery Bill and then the excellent report from the Joint Committee. As many Members have said, we could not really put a cigarette paper between the opinions and motivations of its Members, who were from parties on both sides of the Lords and the Commons. We then had the Government’s response to that report, and at the same time the Bill was published. I have to say that parts of the Government’s response to some key issues were so thin and poor that they had to be exposed, as I think they were in the speech made by my hon. Friend the Member for Slough.
On the question of whether there should be a specific crime of trafficking children, which I will come to later, I think that the strength lies with the Joint Committee, not with the Bill before us.
I want to talk first about the thanks we owe people. Every member of the Joint Committee requires thanks, because, in the same way as happens when people go on a foreign trip, we bonded over the common purpose of trying to improve the draft Bill. It is amazing how Committee members from all parties and different belief systems came together, but I am sorry that the Government have not taken into account the report in its entirety, so we have a lot to talk about.
Soroptimists UK invited me to speak at their conference. That is not an organisation that would usually take such a forward position on an issue of such massive import. I thank in particular Miss Billie Wealleans, the organiser of the Scotland north branch. The conference carried the motion that it would campaign this year to get the supply chains amendment inserted in the Bill. The conference came to the same conclusion as my hon. Friend the Member for Slough did in her ten-minute rule Bill, and as I did in my private Member’s Bill, which, sadly, was talked out.
The Human Trafficking Foundation and Anthony Steen have been mentioned. The previous speaker, the hon. Member for Salisbury (John Glen), entered Parliament in 2010, but he missed the best part, because it was the energy of the generation before 2010 that brought us to where we are. Many compliments have been paid to people since the publication of the Centre for Social Justice report, “It Happens Here”, but that was way down the line—it was after my private Member’s Bill had been debated and talked out on the Floor of the House. It was the first time that a Conservative-led organisation took the issue seriously. It is led by someone who was a bête noire of mine when I was in local government in Scotland. To see it take such a forward position was heartening to me, but it was perhaps just a little late to save my Bill. ECPAT UK has done so much good work over 20 years, particularly, as the hon. Gentleman has said, on the question of children.
The Catholic bishops conference was fully behind my supply chains Bill. Unfortunately, that was not noted by the hon. Member for North East Somerset (Jacob Rees-Mogg), whom I believe is devout in that particular faith. The conference backed the Bill, but he volunteered—the Whips arranged it—to talk my Bill out on the Floor of the House. I pointed out to him that it was also supported by the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, particularly its then moderator, Albert Bogle. He told me that he was not afraid of the Church of Scotland, but that he was a little afraid of the fact that the Catholic bishops conference supported my Bill.
There is a wide range of support, including from individual bishops of the Church of England, including the bishop who sat on the Joint Committee, and Christian Action Research Education. They all hearten me because I am a humanist and an atheist. I am not just a humanist without a church; I am someone who does not believe in the whole nonsense of totem poles and pie in the sky when you die. I think you have to earn it every day, here.
Focus on Labour Exploitation has been mentioned, because labour exploitation is at the heart of the issue—the use, as the Home Secretary has said, of human beings as commodities whereby people can get rich by putting them in a position where they have no rights and where they are available for exploitation at the cheapest cost.
Other organisations include the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, UNICEF UK and the POPPY Project, which, as has been said, has been doing such stalwart work in rescuing trafficked women—mainly, I have to say, from our immigration service, which tends to put them in Yarl’s Wood, treat them like criminals and try to send them back home, where the facts show that they are re-exploited and re-trafficked again and again. We would not be sending them back to safety even if we put £3,000 in their back pocket, as the hon. Member for Beckenham (Bob Stewart) has suggested we should do.
Before the Centre for Social Justice published its report, “It Happens Here”, Andrew Wallis of Unseen UK was a stalwart supporter of my supply chains Bill, and I think he also supported the ten-minute rule Bill proposed by my hon. Friend the Member for Slough.
Anti-Slavery International has been doing such a stalwart job, but with its hands tied behind its back, because we lack the proper legislation. Aidan McQuade, who leads it, still thinks that the supply chains amendment we want, which is stronger even than the one in the Joint Committee report, is not good enough. He wants to use an equivalent of the Bribery Act 2010 to make it a criminal offence for the chief executive of a company to be found using exploited labour in its supply chain, which would be pretty tough legislation.
Walk Free, which was mentioned earlier, was set up by Andrew Forrest, who owns a company called Fortescue and lives in Perth, Australia. He gave evidence to the Joint Committee by satellite, but I have spoken with him in London. He set up an organisation when he found that his own company was using trafficked children in, I think, Nepal. He wanted 1 million members; then it went up to 5 million members; and Walk Free now has 7 million members worldwide, who are in his network and are taking up cases.
David Arkless of ArkLight, the former world president of Manpower—the most audited company in the US, as well as the most ethical company in the US—has to be thanked for the amount of work that he has done to spread the word, including by offering training to any company that wishes to do things to stop exploitation.
My question is: when we are going up a mountain—we are going up a mountain, because the Bill will be hard but, I hope, effective—why would we stop three quarters of the way up? Why would the Home Secretary want to stop and plant her flag somewhere on the mountain, instead of going to the top? Only at the top of that climb will we take on the work done 200 years ago and take it forward.
Many things have been said, and it has been hinted that the Home Secretary is involved in a contest against some dark force in No. 10 Downing street that is trying to stop the Government moving all the way forward on the Bill, particularly on questions such as supply chains. I once asked the Prime Minister, when he appeared to be reluctant to sign up even to the directive on human trafficking, where he had lost his moral compass. I suggest that both the Prime Minister and the Home Secretary, if they are looking for a moral compass on this issue, should follow the direction of my hon. Friend the Member for Slough and her all-party group, which has been working for a long time. The all-party group was founded by Anthony Steen, and apart from giving him his knighthood, which he has long deserved, they should take a lesson from it and go the whole way.
The first thing that troubles me is the definition. The six-step definition in the report has been dismissed as somehow too complicated. We took evidence from Lord Judge, who used to be one of the most senior judges in the land. His advice was: “If you want to do something and have a court do something, say what it is you want them to do; don’t muddle it up with complicated phrases.” However, as my hon. Friend the Member for Slough has pointed out, the Bill has a lot of complicated phrases—drawn from other Bills into one Bill—which do not simplify it at all, but probably complicate it for people.
For the simple definition in the Bill, we recommended that it cover the slavery of children and others, and that child exploitation offences should simply say:
“It is an offence to exploit a child”,
and:
“It is an offence for one person to obtain a benefit through the use of a child for the purpose of exploitation.”
People recognise such a definition. We took evidence on the very simplest way to do it from barristers who have prosecuted and defended, and it seems to us that the Government have missed an opportunity to lay out a law that would be recognised and used properly. Those offences were part of what we called a hierarchy, all six parts of which built bit by bit into a clear definition of what we are trying to stop.
Another point is about the protection of victims, including when a victim is turned into a criminal. My hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh North and Leith (Mark Lazarowicz) may not realise it, but we need to change the attitude of police forces and of the Border Force.
We met a young woman when we visited POPPY, who said: “I was trafficked, I was brought here in a boat. I had never been outside Africa before. I ended up in Liverpool. I was put into prostitution and moved around the country. I ran away and I went to the police because I always had this idea that British justice would free me if I could reach the police station. They threw me in a cell. They treated me like a criminal. They said I’d done all this just to get into the country and they put me into Yarl’s Wood.” It was only when POPPY met that young woman that her life of exploitation could be pieced together and she could be rescued. She is now in college in London.
The police should not treat people who are trafficked as criminals, and that also applies to Scotland. It is one of those coincidences, but I had a cannabis factory in the house next door until about nine months ago. By a police blunder, they got away, although I had warned the police six weeks before they fled. If the person in the house—the farmer—had been caught, they would now be in Polmont young offenders institution. There are three young people in that institution at the moment who were trafficked from Vietnam and used as farmers. They were caught, but the big people who brought them here—the people who make the money—did not get caught.
Kenny MacAskill, the Justice Minister in Scotland, said to me when he launched the review—Baroness Kennedy sat on the inquiry—that the then UK Border Agency, now the Border Force, was the problem and that it criminalised people. I have to say to Kenny MacAskill that the Scottish police, for which he is responsible, criminalised those young men who are in Polmont for being farmers in cannabis factories. We need to change the police attitude and the Border Force’s attitude. That would affect Scotland massively, because it applies to the whole UK. The Border Force is not just for England, but for everyone.
Mark Lazarowicz
Surely my hon. Friend’s point emphasises my point that there needs to be effective co-operation and liaison between enforcement agencies throughout the UK, no matter that separate legislation will be introduced for Scotland. That is precisely why we need to work together, and I hope that the Minister will speak about that in her response.
Michael Connarty
I do not in any way try to diminish my hon. Friend’s point, which he made very well. When I was outside Dungavel, which is basically Yarl’s Wood in Scotland, campaigning to have people released, I was told that it does not hold people for a long time. However, it is a little piece of English territory in Scotland because it is effectively run by the Home Office, not by any institution in Scotland. The point is that if we change the police attitude to the victims in England through the Bill, we will change it in all the other jurisdictions.
I have a plea, which I will not read out in full, from Graham O’Neill from the Scottish Refugee Council, who helped draft the Scottish Bill for Jenny Marra, our friend and Member of the Scottish Parliament who introduced the measure in Scotland. He said that,
“the biggest priority for Jenny and I is to secure at least a statutory right to assistance for survivors of modern slavery.”
They want that to be in our Bill, which would then be copied by the Scottish measure and would change the lives of victims universally.
ECPAT has written at length about the victims in its submission on the Bill. I will quote from it because it is a distillation of many years of work and advice to us:
“ECPAT UK’s work with trafficked children over the past decade has seen us campaign tirelessly for a system of legal guardianship in order to protect the best interests of children and uphold their rights. The Modern Slavery Bill has made provision for ‘Child Trafficking Advocates’, which represents a move in the right direction, but falls far short of a system of independent, legal guardianship that can adequately support and protect children and is in line with best practice across Europe and is recommended by international bodies.”
Guardianship is part of the directive that we signed up to—it is clear in the EU directive, but we have not implemented it correctly. ECPAT should be listened to on that. Independence is important.
The hon. Member for Salisbury spoke about foster care. It is not necessarily about foster care, but the fact that most of the children who are trafficked have language problems and, as people who have worked in this field for a long time said, feel closer to the trafficker than to the authorities. We must find a system that gives people someone who looks after them and someone they feel confident in, so that they do not wish to go to someone else who will re-traffic or re-exploit them.
Another issue is the independence of the commissioner. The Home Secretary assured me that only matters of endangering or exposing an individual, interfering with a possible criminal prosecution or questions of public security will be edited out by her. As I have long said, however, the commissioner must be entirely independent. The Bill must say that the Home Secretary shall provide those resources, shall give the commissioner powers, shall set them up independently, and that the commissioner shall be given rules to work to rather than having to go through the Home Secretary every time they want to publish anything, as they will live by those rules.
I have to disagree with the right hon. Member for Meriden, having been in the Netherlands and Finland a number of times. We have asked the ombudsperson in the Netherlands several times whether they are controlled by any Member of Parliament or Minister. They say, “No. I write what I see and I publish what I need to, and the Government have to take it into account, even if I am criticising the Government.” Interestingly, in the Netherlands, the ombudsperson was given the job of looking after both trafficking and child sexual exploitation, because there is so much confidence in that person’s independence. The Dutch are on to their second ombudsperson, and that situation remains. Until we change that provision, we have a problem.
The third and last thing I want to talk about—people expect me to talk about it—is the transparency of UK supply chains, because it is missing from the Bill. I do not know whether there is a problem at No. 10 Downing street, but someone is giving the Prime Minister such bad advice. He is running into his last year before the Government go to the polls. People will look at the Bill and say, “What made the Prime Minister be dragged kicking and screaming by Marks & Spencer, Tesco and Sainsbury’s to put something in the Bill that wasn’t previously there?” We know—I take it that people have good intelligence on this—that the Home Secretary wants to do something in the Bill about supply chains. Everybody knows. Eighty-two per cent. of people surveyed have said that they want a clause dealing with the transparency of UK supply chains in the Bill.
What Government would not go with the rub of the green in that situation? Only a Government who have some misguided idea that any kind of statutory regulation will somehow offend the public or the business community would do so. I cannot find that. I could find it when I tried to get a private Member’s Bill through, but it is much more difficult to convince people of an idea when it has not been given the blessing of Government time. When I spoke to the Ethical Trading Initiative, it said, “We want to see this.” The logic has been put forward by so many Members. Why should bad companies get away with it? Why should companies that want to rip off the public and sell them goods they know are tainted by slavery get away with it? Good companies do not want that, so we should level the playing field. I think Churchill wanted a minimum wage for that reason. He said bad companies undermine good companies, and the worst of companies undermine everyone.
It is quite clear that a narrative and a logic are leading the business community in that direction, as my hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh North and Leith (Mark Lazarowicz) and others have said, and as I have said all along. There is a kitemark on offer to companies that says, “We have the right kind of auditing. We are reporting on that auditing and we are getting rid of any errors we find.” When I was doing business economics at university, I was told that to find a problem was to find the jewel, because it would help people to improve their company. That is what the supply chains proposal is about.
Andrew Wallis of Unseen UK was dealing with this issue long before the Centre for Social Justice ever decided that it should take it up. I commend the CSJ for taking it up—it has taken it up later than Anthony Steen, later than the Human Trafficking Foundation and later than Unseen UK, but it has taken it up. Why will the Government not take it up? I do not understand what is going on.
I am going to say a word about domestic servants. There is absolutely no doubt that the Government have done something immoral in abolishing the domestic servant visa, as it was, when we find that 62% of domestic servants who come with people from other countries do not get paid a wage. Somebody talked about contracts. How can there be a contract with somebody who brings servants in as baggage with their family to look after their children and cook their food, and treats them so appallingly? The Government have abolished their right to leave their employer. All they can do is go home or stay with that employer. They are usually so tied in to families that they do not have a world outside. The little stipend they receive gets sent back to their families, who live in abject poverty in other countries.
Why will the Government not realise that what they have done has soiled their hands, as there are people enslaved in this country, under our very noses, with their complicity? Please do something about that. At least give us some sense that the Government have not completely lost their moral marbles.
Financial Transaction Tax and Economic and Monetary Union
Debate between Mark Lazarowicz and Michael Connarty(10 years, 11 months ago)
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Michael Connarty (Linlithgow and East Falkirk) (Lab)
I have news for the hon. Member for North East Somerset (Jacob Rees-Mogg). Bill Gates was not an academic. Indeed, the hon. Gentleman might want to make a comparison with his own career, which his declaration of interest shows to have been in banking. He has defended that business strongly. Bill Gates is now doing something that a financial transaction tax would achieve universally, across the world. It would raise money from the speculative, gambling casino economy that the world has become and give it to those who are often mineral rich or agriculture rich but massively exploited by those of us who live on the fat of that speculation.
For me, a financial transaction tax is suitable only if it is a worldwide arrangement. It is certainly not suitable for the money-raising powers of the European Commission, yet that is what the Commission is proposing: just another mechanism for a fat, gorged organisation to take money from yet another sector of the economy. If it got rid of the common agricultural policy failures, 40% of the EU budget would be available for positive use, so perhaps the Commission should look at that, rather than at trying to get more money in from a transaction tax.
I was glad to hear my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham East (Chris Leslie) clarifying our position on this matter, because I was worried that the drafting of our amendment did not make it 100% clear that we opposed the introduction of a European transaction tax at any time. Only in the context of advancing development worldwide can we justify the imposition of such a tax. If it is not done on that basis, it will have an adverse effect.
The hon. Member for South Northamptonshire (Andrea Leadsom), who is no longer in her place, spoke against the introduction of any kind of financial transaction tax. She did not seem to realise that, according to her argument, stamp duty, which is basically a national levy for national spend, should theoretically also be abandoned. Her argument was that any kind of financial transaction tax prevents jobs from being created. However, as we use taxation for positive purposes in most cases, there are reasons why people should pay taxes—even those fat bankers with horns on their heads whom the hon. Member for North East Somerset described.
Mark Lazarowicz
Before my hon. Friend moves on, I want to ask a question related to an international financial transaction tax. It appears that progress has been made on getting the UK overseas territories to be more transparent on tax. Is this not a good opportunity to encourage them also to be part of an FTT system, because we all know that a lot of the dodgy transactions take place in bank speculation in some of the countries for which we have an indirect responsibility?
Michael Connarty
That is part of a separate debate, but I agree that all territories controlled by any of the world’s major economies should be not just transparent, but properly taxed. Just because someone sticks a name on a door in the Cayman Islands and pays a Cayman citizen theoretically to be the director, there is no reason why they should not pay taxation wherever they make their money in the world. That would certainly be helpful.
Turning to economic and monetary union, the hon. Member for Stone (Mr Cash) lauded me highly, but slightly falsely. My main concern with Olli Rehn’s paper on a blueprint for a deep and genuine EMU is that it strongly suggests that countries will have their primacy removed. That is even more the case with the van Rompuy paper, “Towards a Genuine Economic and Monetary Union”. It is clear that those documents take away, in the first place, from the weakest of the 17 any right to set their own budget or any budget that has not been agreed by the Commission, and the associated penalties would further damage the economies of those countries.
My great problem with the proposals is that they are a threat to the European Union. I believe that they have become obsessed with the euro. Their documents refer again and again not to the European Union, European citizens, European Governments or European projects, but to the euro. The countries that are not keeping in line with the stability and growth pact are a threat to the euro, which has become the raison d’être of the European project for many people at its centre. The hon. Member for North East Somerset has described it, correctly, as a token for them to control Europe through a single body, the European Commission, in partnership, as its documents keep saying, with the European Parliament. We have no real say in this. The European Parliament legitimises what is done by the European Union. The power of the Lisbon treaty has not just tipped over; it has fallen into the abyss of the Commission-controlled EMU.
There is a negation of primacy and countries are being forced to do things in their budgets that are bad for their citizens. We are supposed to be a co-operative European Union. I voted for it in 1975 and would do so again, but I would like more tools to fight against those centralising powers.
There is also a failing austerity plan in all these countries: Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain will be weaker economically and more impoverished and indebted at the end of this than they were at the beginning, but for what reason? What contribution will that make to the stability of a new economy? It means that the powerful countries in the north will become more powerful over the rest. I believe that when they are finished with the weaker countries, they will come for the rest of the 17 and start to control their budgets. If they had their way and if we were not outside the euro, they would be telling us that we could not do what we are doing to try to deal with our economy—not that it is being done very well in this country, because the austerity measures here parallel those demanded by the European Commission of the failing economies in the south of Europe.
I am worried that we will not have the ability in the future to ameliorate what will happen in the general European economy. That is what I mean by primacy. Not only will the primacy of those countries be destroyed; our ability to effect and do something positive for the economies of the European Union—through growth and sharing burdens, rather than through penalising and punishing countries—will be weakened.
Finally, when did the stability and growth pact not have any teeth or do anything? It was when Germany broke it again and again as it built investments in its own economy to make it what it is now: a strong, growing economy. I am worried that, as a result of the primacy that will be lost all over Europe, countries will lose the ability to reflate and build a proper economy.