Modern Slavery Bill

Steve Barclay Excerpts

Tuesday 8th July 2014 Commons Chamber

[Yvette Cooper]

I will do that and I agree with my hon. Friend. We would like the law and the Bill to be strengthened on child guardians and child offences. Let me make a few points about that.

My hon. Friend is right that the situation for children can be complex, and often the adult who is abusing them is the only adult they know: the only adult with whom they have contact and who speaks their language, if they have been trafficked across borders.

Charities describe finding children who do not even know which country they are in. Some are sexually exploited in brothels or tend cannabis factories, like Deng, who was trafficked from Vietnam to work as a gardener in a cannabis factory. When police raided the house, Deng was arrested and spent almost a year in prison. On release, he fell back into the hands of traffickers, who regularly beat him so badly that he was hospitalised. Passed from local authority to local authority, his case was eventually assessed and an independent age assessment concluded that he was only 16 or 17. He had already experienced years of abuse, including a year of imprisonment at the hands of the British authorities. Children like Deng have their childhood taken by the traffickers. By 17, they have often been held by the traffickers for several years, moved through several countries and forced to grow up very fast, but they are still children in desperate need of care.

If those children know no other life and nothing of the UK, they can often return voluntarily to their traffickers because they feel that they have no choice. There is a real problem with the idea that a child could ever consent to their exploitation. That is why we believe that we should pursue a separate offence of child exploitation. I listened carefully to the Home Secretary’s points and, clearly, we do not want to make it more difficult to prosecute. I think that we have the same objectives, but I did not find her answers very convincing or clear on why creating such an offence would make it harder to prosecute. Of course, there will be cases where the age may be difficult to identify at the margins, but surely it is possible to draw up the law in a way that allows the prosecutor to decide whether the case is clear cut and can be prosecuted as a child offence or whether it is not clear cut and therefore should be prosecuted under the wider legislation on the basis that somebody is vulnerable.

If the Home Secretary has any overwhelming objections to that, she needs to explain them much more clearly. The Opposition simply cannot see why we should not pursue the Joint Committee’s proposals for a separate offence of child exploitation and why that would not help us all in our objective of tackling slavery, particularly the awful and extreme abuse of children.

We would also like a system of independent guardians to be introduced. They are a requirement of the EU directive that the Government eventually signed up to, and the system has been implemented elsewhere in Europe and shown to work well. After three years of campaigning, we welcome the Government’s pilots for child advocates and the enabling provisions, but we do not believe that they go far enough. The position is unclear, but the advocates do not appear to be the same as the child guardians for which a huge coalition of charities, including Barnardo’s, UNICEF and the Children’s Society, have called. During the Bill’s passage, we will seek to strengthen the powers given to child advocates, thereby establishing guardians who can act independently of local authorities and in the best interests of the child.

I raised those who are in domestic work conditions and are particularly at risk in an intervention on the Home Secretary. I urge her to look again at the domestic worker visa and the risks to those forced into domestic slavery, unable to escape. Earlier, I cited the evidence from the charity Kalayaan. The Home Secretary knows that when the tied visa was introduced, many, including Kalayaan, warned her that it would increase the risk of servitude and domestic abuse.

In addition to the figures that I cited earlier, Kalayaan also found that 92% of those on the new visa were unable to leave the House unaccompanied. That is slavery. The Home Secretary seemed to suggest that that was just a small number of people, but that is not the point. One of the examples that Kalayaan gave was the case of Rupa, who arrived in the UK with her employers. She had worked for them in India and had little choice about coming to the UK. Once here, she worked long hours and got no proper breaks. Looking after a baby, she was on call all the time. Like 85% of those interviewed by Kalayaan, Rupa did not have her own room, so she slept on the floor, next to the cot. For all that, she was paid just £26 a week and had her passport confiscated. Eventually, Rupa ran away and a stranger helped her find her way to Kalayaan.

However, because of the changes that the Home Secretary introduced to the visas, Kalayaan could do nothing. Under the old system, the charity would have contacted the police, had Rupa’s passport returned to her and helped her find other work. Now Rupa’s options were limited: to return to her employer or be deported. With a sick family to support in India, Rupa decided to return to her employer and a life of servitude. That is slavery. It is what the Bill should abolish. The Opposition will table amendments on the matter, but I hope that, if the Home Secretary has an alternative remedy, she will come forward with it during the Bill’s passage. We cannot have a situation whereby all the work that the House is trying to do to tackle modern slavery is undermined by visa changes elsewhere in the system.

We also need more action in the world of work. The Home Secretary talked about the importance of tackling the supply chain, and we agree, but again, we would like to go further. The Bill provides a great opportunity to build on the work of the Gangmasters Licensing Authority. We would like to consider how that can be extended to cover exploitation in hospitality, care and construction, and also how the law on exploitation in the workplace can be strengthened.

Slavery in the UK is only a small part of the problem. The Joint Committee was clear in its recommendations for stronger action on supply chains. Other countries are legislating on that, and there is a growing consensus that legislation that requires large companies to report on their actions to eradicate slavery in their supply chains will make a difference.

In the past few months, all hon. Members will have been shocked by, for example, the details of the investigation by The Guardian into the fishing industry. There were stories of men trafficked from Burma and Cambodia, forced to work 20 hours a day for no pay fishing for prawns for shops in the US and Europe, and also for British supermarkets. One rescued worker, Vuthy, a former Cambodian monk, said:

“I thought I was going to die. They kept me chained up, they didn’t care about me or give me any food… They sold us like animals, but we are not animals—we are human beings.”

Another said that he had seen as many as 20 fellow slaves killed in front of him, one of whom was tied limb by limb to the bows of four boats and pulled apart at sea. All Members will be horrified by such stories, but it is even more horrifying if that slavery, abuse and murder could be linked in any way with the goods that end up on shelves in our supermarkets. That is why we believe that the Bill should go further.

According to polls, 82% of the UK public want legislation on the matter. The charity sector is equally clear and the Joint Committee supported action. So, too, did the businesses that gave evidence to the Committee. Marks and Spencer said that legislation could play an important role. Amazon, IKEA, Primark, Tesco and Sainsbury all gave evidence and said that they could support legislation. Many businesses have said that they do not want to be undercut by unscrupulous employers.

That is why the idea of a voluntary agreement simply does not go far enough. The Ethical Trading Initiative and its 80 corporate members that are campaigning for legislative measures in the Bill are right to do so. Perhaps the Home Secretary will let the Prime Minister know that the Opposition will table amendments on that. I hope she can persuade him that the House should be able to support that action, which so many businesses support. It will allow them and all of us to be ethical, and to recognise how far the problem stretches—it stretches not just across this country, but across the world.

[Stephen Barclay (North East Cambridgeshire) (Con)]

There will be support from Government Members for the supply chain proposal. Those of us who defend a free market do not want the competitive distortion of those who are undercutting legitimate businesses through the abuse of their employees.

[Yvette Cooper]

The hon. Gentleman is exactly right on that. That is why so many businesses and major retailers are supporting that proposal. They recognise not only that it is morally right, but that it is very hard for them to identify abuse among their competitors, and to identify when they are being undercut by something that is so immoral and criminal throughout the world.

I believe we can build a consensus in the country and in Parliament. We have rarely seen a Bill that has such overwhelming support from Members on both sides of the House. Let us be clear that we will work with the Government to ensure that the Bill passes within the limited parliamentary time available, but we will also push for it to go further, so that we can make a real difference in wiping out the horrendous practice of trafficking and enslaving men, women and children in this country.

Almost 230 years ago, a milkmaid from Bristol, Ann Yearsley, had her poem on slavery published. It tells of the anguish and woe of a woman taken away from her home country and sold into slavery. It talks of debasement and degradation. Parliament was slow to respond, and it was another 45 years after Ann’s poem was published before Parliament introduced the Slavery Abolition Act 1833. The Home Secretary rightly spoke of the rare moment of consensus. We need to seize that. We have legislation before us, and we need to build on it. We need to seize the moment with the legislation and make it go as far as we possibly can. Let us push to get those further improvements and safeguards, because we know that, in the end, it is about stopping evil people committing terrible crimes; ending the enslavement, abuse and degradation of modern-day slavery; and giving everybody the liberty and freedom that they should have a right to.

--- Later in debate ---

[Stephen Barclay (North East Cambridgeshire) (Con)]

The hon. Member for Wigan (Lisa Nandy) speaks with both experience and passion, and highlights a number of harrowing cases involving children. I welcome this Bill because it consolidates the legislation, addressing a number of the cases she mentions. But it does more than that: it sends a powerful signal from the Home Secretary and the Prime Minister of the importance of this issue to the Government, and today’s debate shows the importance that Parliament attaches to it on a cross -party basis. May I take the opportunity to join other Members in paying tribute to the work of the right hon. Member for Birkenhead (Mr Field), who chaired the Joint Committee, and of others on that Committee? They produced a good report, and I hope that the passage of the Bill will provide an opportunity for some of its recommendations, particularly those relating to the supply chain, to be given further consideration.

I wish to pick up on a point highlighted by my hon. Friend the Member for Chatham and Aylesford (Tracey Crouch) about the remit of the anti-slavery commissioner. The appointment will be a welcome one, and one understands the logic behind the narrow focus given to the post. I believe the Minister said that the Government were hoping that the appointment would put a rocket up the role of the law enforcement agencies. In part 3 of the Bill, clauses 35 and 36, the remit of the anti-slavery commissioner is defined quite narrowly when it comes to working with law enforcement agencies and I wish to highlight a number of practical areas where that remit might impose restrictions that I doubt would be the will of the House.

Housing legislation often requires private prosecutions to be brought against a landlord. It is well known that those who are trafficked are often trafficked into squalid accommodation—often houses in multiple occupation. It is beyond reason to expect the victims of trafficking, who often do not speak English, do not have financial means and do not understand the English court process, to initiate private prosecutions against their landlord. Instead, we need to have a vehicle whereby referrals can be made by the police to a statutory body in order to take forward those prosecutions on behalf of the victims. It strikes me that the commissioner would be well placed to be the repository for such referrals, so that if you become aware of victims in squalid housing in your constituency, Madam Deputy Speaker, the anti-slavery commissioner has a remit to take up those cases, which would often currently fall outside the express powers of law enforcement agencies.

There is a second area where there are gaps in the existing powers of law enforcement agencies and where the commissioner would be working with them. Although a new commissioner will redefine the role—I am sure that if the commissioner were someone of the calibre of Baroness Butler-Sloss, they would redefine it more broadly —we must remember that bodies such as the Gangmasters Licensing Authority are resource restrained and do not have many of the powers they should have. In Westminster Hall debates in June 2012 and 2013, I highlighted the fact that the GLA has no powers to issue civil fines—civil penalties. I was particularly pleased that the Migration Advisory Committee report earlier this year stated that there are insufficient resources devoted to key regulatory bodies such as the GLA. So this issue has been around for some time and it remains unclear, within the narrow definition in clauses 35 and 36, the extent to which the commissioner will proactively be able to champion the addressing of some of those deficiencies, which have been known to Ministers for some time but have still not been fixed.

Clause 37 allows the commissioner to

“request a specified public authority to co-operate”.

That is a very welcome addition to the Bill, but it is silent on the interaction between the commissioner and companies. Let me give just a few examples. I am reliably informed that in my constituency there are agencies where multiple payments to workers are paid into the same bank account. That would be a relatively easy issue for a bank to address, as it could easily conduct checks that would pick up such payments, but at the moment no such pilots are doing so. I would expect the commissioner to be proactive in that space, working with the banks.

Likewise, letting agencies will often let multiple properties to the same individual. The commissioner should be collecting data on that from letting agencies and should have the power to compel letting agencies to collect such data. Yet letting agencies are clearly not public authorities and so public authorities will not have those data, which should alert law enforcement agencies to where the HMOs are and where the high-risk houses are. We also know that many vulnerable people are paid in cash, and so existing minimum wage legislation is not being complied with because automatic deductions are made at source. Again, the commissioner’s role in ensuring that, across government, other Departments are enforcing legislation extends beyond the narrow remit set out in clauses 35 and 36.

All that speaks to a wider point. Although I am sure it is the Government’s intention for the commissioner to have a wider remit in terms of other Departments, at the moment there is a gap in knowledge. Let me give an example from my local schools. When a child is absent from school and the school becomes aware of difficulties, its natural first response is to go to social services, and that puts pressure on the parents. The first response of schools is not to think that the parents have been trafficked and need support, or that that those children are in a HMO. They do not think about the need to address the trafficking as opposed to addressing the fact that the parents are failing. Likewise general practitioners have access to information that should be alerting the law enforcement authorities, but many GPs are not trained to recognise the warning signs they should be picking up when it comes to getting those data and sharing them with the police.

Let me provide an example from my constituency. Cambridgeshire police had great difficulty getting any information on people with injuries as a result of violence from accident and emergency in King’s Lynn. Such information could have alerted them to problems in areas such as Wisbech, but issues of data protection and patient confidentiality were quoted at them. It became difficult for them to act on behalf of victims because of the silos in which the Government were operating. The commissioner’s role in looking at that data and at working with the Department for Education and the Department of Health is extremely important.

We should also extend our consideration to the practice in our courts. A number of Members have focused on how we support victims once they have been identified. At the moment a gap exists from the end of the 40 days in which people are protected through the national referral mechanism and the date of the trial. During that gap period people often find that they face intimidation, which puts the trials at risk. They are also subject to the risk of further exploitation. I am keen to hear what we can do, in conjunction with the Ministry of Justice, to fast-track the trials so that we reduce the risk of the trial being prejudiced. There will be those who will naturally be fearful of giving evidence, fearful of the language difficulties and fearful of the different court system. We must consider how we speed up the process to reduce the risk of the prosecution being thwarted.

Finally, the international remit of the ombudsman is flagged up in the very good report from the Joint Committee. Let me explain why that international remit matters. People come to the Cambridgeshire fens to work in the agricultural sector and they are often promised jobs that simply do not exist. We can go on the internet and see adverts for jobs with recruitment agencies that have already been closed down. The Gangmasters Licensing Authority closed down those recruitment agencies and removed their licences, but jobs with those firms are still being advertised in countries such as Latvia. That is creating a pipeline of victims who are being brought into the country on false promises of a job that does not exist and of good accommodation that turns out to be squalid. They then quickly get into debt, which triggers the exploitation. The international remit of the commissioner is particularly important in addressing these fake adverts, which is why I hope that that recommendation will be taken forward.

This is an excellent Bill. It shows the Government’s commitment to tackling the problems of the most vulnerable in our society. I hope that, with the help of the right hon. Member for Birkenhead, some of the recommendations from the report will be taken on board as the Bill progresses through the House.