Modern Slavery Bill

Yvette Cooper Excerpts

Tuesday 8th July 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mrs May]

I recognise the point that the right hon. Gentleman makes. It is a point that has come up in some of the deliberations of the Committee that has been looking into the matter, and it is a point that I have looked at seriously. There is a judgment to be made here. By definition, if somebody is in slavery, the chance of their being able to get out of slavery to go to work for another employer is pretty limited, if not non-existent. In changing the way that the visa operated, one of the things we did was to try to ensure that there was a proper contract between the employer and the individual who was being employed, but I recognise that this is an issue. I suspect that it will be subject to greater debate and discussion as the Bill goes through the various stages in this House and another place.

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

As the Home Secretary knows, we strongly support the legislation, but on that point, I understand that in its research the charity Kalayaan found that since the visas were changed, 60% of those on the new domestic workers visa were paid no salary at all, compared with 14% on the original visa. That is a worrying increase since the visa change. Has the right hon. Lady looked at that research?

[Mrs May]

Yes, we have been looking in detail at the research that has been undertaken. We have taken the issue and the points that have been made seriously. I suspect that this aspect will be subject to further, more detailed discussion as the Bill goes through its various stages in this House and another place. The number of people who were identified by the charity—which, by definition, can only look at those who come to it—is fairly small. We need measures that will protect those who are being brought in as overseas workers and will not open up some other avenue for people to be brought in. We need to enable people to work properly for an employer, not effectively be placed in modern slavery.

We all have the same aim. The question is which regulatory track makes most sense. I continue to believe that the current arrangement is the right one. I am sure that it will be subject to considerable discussion as the Bill goes through its various stages.

--- Later in debate ---

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

I welcome the Bill and make clear the support of not only this side but both sides of the House for taking action against the horrific crime of modern day slavery and for the Bill’s passage through the House.

Last year, a 20-year-old woman was kidnapped from her rural home in Slovakia. She was trafficked out of the country and brought to the UK, to Bradford. She was kept captive for several weeks before being sold into a sham marriage. In her marriage, she was not allowed to leave her home and was raped repeatedly and beaten by five men, all of whom lived in the house. The barrister who prosecuted the case described her experience as like

“something from a 19th century novel by Dickens”,

and said that the victim

“was handled round the continent and this country like a commodity, a human slave.”

She was raped, beaten and enslaved and robbed of her most basic freedoms not in 19th-century Britain but in 21st-century Britain, which is why we need to act and why the Bill has such strong cross-party support and will be on the statute book soon.

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), my hon. Friends the Members for Slough (Fiona Mactaggart) and for Linlithgow and East Falkirk (Michael Connarty) and the right hon. Members for Uxbridge and South Ruislip (Sir John Randall), for Meriden (Mrs Spelman) and for Hazel Grove (Sir Andrew Stunell), who have worked so hard. I also pay tribute to the former Member for Totnes, Anthony Steen, who is the chairman of the Human Trafficking Foundation and has done so much work in this field.

The Bill builds on work carried out under the previous Government, including criminalising trafficking in the Sexual Offences Act 2003 and the Asylum and Immigration (Treatment of Claimants, etc.) Act 2004; the introduction in 2009 of the offence of forced labour, slavery or servitude, which recognised that slavery is not just about international forced travel; the national referral mechanism, which we introduced in 2009; and, of course, the creation of the UK Human Trafficking Centre.

[Andrew Selous]

The shadow Home Secretary is absolutely right to mention the horrific case from Slovakia, but does she recognise that many British citizens are being trafficked around the UK and, indeed, from the UK to other countries, and that we must capture that element of this horrific crime as well?

[Yvette Cooper]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. In fact, I was just mentioning the original introduction of the offence of forced labour in 2009, because it was introduced exactly for the purpose of recognising that the issue is not just about people trafficked across international borders, but about the appalling abuse and enslavement of British citizens or of people within their countries. That is rightly covered by part 1 of the Bill.

I commend the Home Secretary for her work, which has built on many years of cross-party work and support for action against the horrors of modern slavery. Because there is such strong support for the Bill and for action against slavery, I believe that there is strong support for going further. As the Home Secretary heard in hon. Members’ many points and questions, there is consensus on going further than the measures in the Bill. We want to debate such points and to point out areas where amendments could be tabled as the Bill goes through this House and the other place.

Let me begin with the measures in the Bill which we support. The Home Secretary has made a powerful case for consolidating and strengthening the law to make it easier to prosecute those committing this vile crime, as she is rightly doing in part 1. Many hon. Members will remember the shocking case of Craig Kinsella, who was held captive by a family in Sheffield and forced to work from 7.30 am to midnight for no pay. He slept in a garage and was starved, and he was beaten with a spade, a crowbar and a pickaxe. As the hon. Member for South West Bedfordshire (Andrew Selous) has mentioned, such a victim was not trafficked into the country; he was a British national. He had even moved in voluntarily with the family who enslaved him, but he was still in slavery.

That is why it is vital that UK legislation should recognise the different forms of human trafficking and slavery, and should make it possible to prosecute those who enslave, abuse and exploit. It should not only cover those who have been moved across international borders, but recognise that consent can be complex. In complicated cases, the offence should not rely on a simple lack of consent, because people can be deeply vulnerable and slavery is complex in such circumstances.

The Home Secretary is right that the law should be strengthened and that penalties should be increased. We strongly welcome clause 5, which will give trafficking offences the maximum of a life sentence. Traffickers steal people’s lives and their humanity. It is the very worst abuse, so it should carry the most severe sentences. We also welcome the work on asset seizures and reparation orders, for which my hon. Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull North (Diana Johnson) has called.

I commend the Home Office’s work to prevent enslavement and trafficking, including the work on prevention and risk orders. When there is evidence that someone is likely to commit an offence, we should be able to intervene in advance for the sake of the victims, rather than waiting until it is too late. We support the introduction of an anti-slavery commissioner to keep the pressure and focus on this dreadful crime. We welcome the statutory defence for victims, the concessions made so far by the Government on child guardians, and the duty to notify the National Crime Agency.

Measures on the presumption of age are extremely important, because we know of harrowing cases in which children end up being caught without the support they need simply because there is a dispute about their age. It is vital for the authorities to show some humanity in how they approach children in those cases. The Home Secretary is right that the Bill alone is not enough. It will of course need to be supported by much wider action in terms of training, co-ordinated action and leadership, and we support her determination to make sure that that happens.

I now want to set out the areas in which we hope the Home Secretary will go further. I know that she listened during the considerations of the Joint Committee, and I hope that she will now listen to the areas where we want to table amendments and to urge her to go further and take stronger action.

We want a stronger focus on victims. If we do not support the victims of human trafficking, we are leaving people to be abused and enslaved, and to be forced to work or forced into prostitution. Those who have been abused once by evil traffickers are at risk of being abused and betrayed again by authorities who either do not understand their experiences or simply ignore the abuse that they have experienced. That is why we need more work by border staff, the police, the criminal justice system, councils and voluntary organisations to identify the victims.

As part of that, the Bill should strengthen the national referral mechanism. In 2012, the UK Human Trafficking Centre identified 2,255 human trafficking victims, but the national referral mechanism identified only just over 1,000. At the moment, the national referral mechanism is an internal process of the Home Office—there is no transparency, and no appeal—but this is an opportunity to place it on a statutory footing to give it a greater ability and authority to support victims at the time they need it most.

[Steve McCabe (Birmingham, Selly Oak) (Lab)]

On strengthening the national referral mechanism and the whole question of the speed with which we must move to protect victims, particularly young victims, does my right hon. Friend think we should look again at the idea of a pilot joint immigration and family court to address such matters at a very early stage?

[Yvette Cooper]

I am very interested in looking further at that idea. My hon. Friend is right that the most complicated and difficult cases are sometimes hard for the legal system to address. It is obviously important to have clear frameworks of family law and of immigration law, but he is right that complex cases sometimes end up falling between the two systems and not getting the kind of recognition that they deserve.

We want the anti-slavery commissioner’s work to have more emphasis on supporting victims. The Bill talks of the anti-slavery commissioner’s obligation to identify victims, not of the need to support victims or to make recommendations to all Departments, not just the Home Office, on victim support, which would be helpful.

[Michael Connarty]

A matter that has puzzled me since I went to the launch of the Scottish report is a point made by the Justice Secretary there: when the Border Force changes people’s status from victim to criminal, those people very soon leave Scotland and end up in Yarl’s Wood, which is outwith Scotland’s jurisdiction. He told me that the problem is the Border Force, or what was called the UK Border Agency. How can we give some comfort to people in the devolved parts of the UK that they will be allowed to decide whether they are dealing with a victim or a criminal, and that they will not be overruled by the Bill and what is basically a UK authority, not a devolved authority?

[Yvette Cooper]

My hon. Friend makes an important point, which goes wider than devolution. Wherever across the United Kingdom trafficking victims are identified, we must make sure that they are properly supported as victims of trafficking throughout the system, and that they are not simply identified by one agency as needing support as victims because they have been abused and enslaved, but end up being treated by another agency as criminals or illegal migrants, with the abuse effectively being multiplied because their vulnerability and experiences are simply not identified within the system. Such a purpose is vital. The Home Secretary is right that this is not simply about legislation, but about the way in which organisations operate, the training given to staff and how staff respond. My hon. Friend’s point is therefore extremely important.

That is particularly important for children, about whom many hon. Members intervened on the Home Secretary to raise concerns. Trafficking is an evil trade, but it can exploit weak systems of child protection. Of the 2,000 potential victims of human trafficking identified in 2012, 550 were children, but that is likely to be the tip of the iceberg. Some 65% of those cases were not recorded on the national system, which would have increased the protection of those children. Too often, they are treated as immigration cases, not as trafficking victims. Several of my hon. Friends made important points about the way in which such children can, in practice, be abused, including by being told what to say by their traffickers.

Most appalling of all is the figure that shows that almost two thirds of rescued children go missing again. They have been found, rescued by the authorities, put into care and they simply disappear again, presumably picked up by the same or other trafficking gangs. Already abused, they are let down by a system that is supposed to keep them safe.

[Lisa Nandy]

As my right hon. Friend knows, many trafficked children also believe that the trafficker is their friend, their uncle or their boyfriend. It is not just that they have been frightened into saying that; they genuinely believe it. I therefore hope that she will press the Home Secretary on her call, which I support, for a statutory system of guardians, because somebody has to be able to instruct the lawyer in a case where a child believes that they have not been exploited to ensure that the relevant person is brought to justice.

[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.