Modern Slavery Bill

Debate between Yvette Cooper and Lisa Nandy

Tuesday 8th July 2014 Commons Chamber

[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.