That this House has considered the independent review of the Modern Slavery Act.
It is a real pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Main. I thank the secretariat of our inquiry, who were superb. I want to make a brief comment about the importance of this topic to me—it is terrific that so many Members want to intervene or make a speech, because that shows a growing interest in the issue in the House of Commons, which is good.
Two things over my parliamentary lifetime have knocked me sideways: one has been the extent of hunger and destitution in my constituency; the other was the beginning of the work on modern slavery. I find it impossible to describe the horrors that people try to convey to us about the experience of being enslaved in this country, in this year and at this time. That is partly because one does not want to break down speaking in this debate. I know everyone will bear in mind the background of those individuals.
My Pauline conversion came when I was sent off and told to do a press conference for the Centre for Social Justice report on modern slavery, “It Happens Here”. I was horrified and amazed by the information—the data and case studies—that the CSJ brought together. There was a huge gathering of organisations for the launch of the report. We agreed at that meeting that we should lobby hard for a modern slavery Act. It was after a summer’s work of lobbying that the then Home Secretary, now Prime Minister, decided we would have a Bill. She thought we should have a scoping exercise about what that Bill should contain. She then used her influence to allow us to have a Joint Committee of both Houses to consider the draft Bill. We then had a Bill.
For all that we now want to move on from the legislation, that initiative was a real success for the Prime Minister. This was the first modern slavery Act in the world. It included supply chains, although the measures to act on them were pretty feeble. However, once something is in legislation, the requirements can always be pushed up. There was also some help for victims, and I am sure many Members will talk about the adequacies.
I congratulate the right hon. Gentleman on securing this debate. Does he welcome the work of Northern College in Barnsley, which has set up the “Free Thinking” programme, the first of its kind to provide education opportunities specifically for survivors of modern slavery? Does he agree that the Government should look at ways in which we can roll that out across the country?
I do indeed. I had the real pleasure of meeting, with my hon. Friend, a delegation that came down from the college, and I saw the work it is doing. Clearly, if we are to get a breakthrough on the lack of knowledge about what is happening in this country, courses like that will and should play a crucial part. The Modern Slavery Act 2015 signified a breakthrough.
I congratulate my right hon. Friend on securing this debate. We can never have such debates too often, and we certainly welcome any initiatives that deal with modern-day slavery. I am sure he will remember the gangmaster issue in Morecambe, probably 10 or 15 years ago, when Chinese people were being used in a form of modern-day slavery. We are getting more and more instances where individuals are being locked in property—
Order. I know this is a hugely interesting debate in which lots of people will want to take part, but I ask for interventions to be brief, because Mr Field has a lot of colleagues to bring in.
I do agree with my hon. Friend. The scope and work of the Gangmasters and Labour Abuse Authority are clearly important, as he said, in countering modern slavery.
The 2015 Act was a breakthrough, and there have been successes from it. The number of police investigations moved from 188 in 2016 to 1,370 in April 2019. There has been a doubling in the number of people thought to be victims—up to now, it is 7,000. The composition of that total has also changed; the proportion of children and UK nationals has increased.
We can talk, quite properly, about those things being successes, but, despite that, the Prime Minister was not satisfied we had got the 2015 Act right. She therefore asked the right hon. Member for Basingstoke (Mrs Miller), Lady Elizabeth Butler-Sloss and me to undertake a review. As always, when the Government act, they want a review by Christmas, although we were not much in session before the summer break. We picked up four themes that we would look at: the anti-slavery commissioner; giving greater importance to supply chains; the role of advocates for children involved in trafficking; and the legal working of the Act.
We made an innovation in how we would undertake our work. It would have been impossible to do a detailed inquiry without the work of the separate commissions that we established, which reported to the right hon. Lady, Elizabeth Butler-Sloss and me. I put on record our thanks to them. My hon. Friend the Member for Gedling (Vernon Coaker) co-ordinated the parliamentary front and looked at what Parliament thought about the Act. Bishop Redfern looked at what the faith groups saw their role as. Baroness Young and John Studzinski looked at business. Anthony Steen led the discussions on civil society with the very large number of voluntary organisations that are concerned with slavery. Christian Guy looked at the Commonwealth and the international scene. Professor Ravi Kohli looked at child trafficking. Peter Carter QC and Caroline Haughey QC looked at the criminal justice system. They all went away and did that work, and then came back to the three of us who were in charge of the inquiry. Without their work, we could not have achieved what we did in submitting the report to the Home Secretary on time.
Thank you, Mrs Main; it is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship. I will raise the situation of modern slavery in Nigeria, which the team should look at as an example of how the Modern Slavery Act is working. The attack on modern slavery is an international phenomenon, and we lead the world in setting the standards.
I mention Nigeria because I am the Prime Minister’s trade envoy to Nigeria, so I happen to know the country and what is going on there very well. As a bit of background, Nigeria is the most populous country in Africa. By the middle of the decade, it will have in the region of 400 million people. It also has the largest number of people in modern slavery in Africa. Examples include women who are tricked into migrating for non-existent jobs and then left to work in brothels or forced to work for no wages and with no legal immigration status whatever.
It is not just women who are affected; the number of children affected is enormous. Some are forced to work as street vendors or beggars. Boys are forced to work in mines, stone quarries and domestic service. Nigeria has just under 1 million people who are trapped in modern slavery. It is an enormous number, which accounts for around 17% of the people trapped in modern slavery in Africa, where the total figure comes to around 7 million or 8 million people. That is an enormous number; we are not even the tip of the iceberg in this country.
The Nigerian Government like what they see in what we do. We are helping to tackle the problem of modern slavery by using the Department for International Development budget in a number of ways. For example, the work with non-governmental organisations uses victims who have been rescued from modern slavery as good examples. Those victims talk to people about how evil it is and about how they can avoid getting trapped in it. That is such a powerful way of getting the message across, because those victims have actually suffered as a result of modern slavery, and such outreach goes down extremely well.
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Main. I declare my interest in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Birkenhead (Frank Field) on securing the debate, and on his report with the right hon. Member for Basingstoke (Mrs Miller) and Baroness Butler-Sloss in the Lords.
I know that the Minister is committed to doing all that she can on this issue, so my remarks are really a challenge to us as an institution, and as a Parliament, rather than a criticism. We all want to end slavery and trafficking; that goes without saying. However, we have an opportunity to ask how we can wake the system up a bit, and make it go a bit faster. I was in Government, and it is a great source of frustration for me that some of the sensible amendments that the Government have started to accept were tabled in 2015. They should have been adopted then, and the Government are now adopting them four years later.
We all understand why people outside sometimes get frustrated. In a sense, that fuels populism, because people ask, “Why doesn’t the system get a move on?” Everybody knows that it is a problem. I say to the Minister that this is a real opportunity to get hold of this issue, and say that not only will we be outraged, frustrated and angered by it, but we will drive the system much more quickly than at present to work in a way that makes a real difference.
A difference has been made, of course, but let us look at what the report says. In the limited time that I have, I will make a couple of points in each area. Businesses are still not really conforming to the transparency arrangements, which I know the Prime Minister has made a statement about. I say to the businesses of this country that surely every managing director or board of directors deplores slavery, and I challenge them to put their own houses in order—to use their massive purchasing power to invest in companies, businesses and supply chains that conform to the requirements of the Modern Slavery Act.
My hon. Friend is making a passionate and well-informed speech. Will he join me in paying tribute to the brilliant businesses around the country who understand the agenda and are trying to do their best about it, such as the Co-operative Group, which has brought in a project called Bright Future that guarantees a job placement for anyone who is a victim of modern slavery?
Yet again, the co-op movement shows the rest of us what can be done. I use this debate to challenge businesses to get their act together—to stop just talking and to show the rest of the country in their investment decisions that they mean what they say. One of the suggestions in the report is more transparency. I know the Minister will address that, and the Prime Minister has already started to address that, which is good.
We come to independent child trafficking advocates. That has to be rolled out much more quickly and has to include not only trafficked children, but unaccompanied children, which is a demand of many of the non-governmental bodies. People would be shocked—I know the Minister is—that we save children, and then we lose them. How can that be right? How can it be right that we take children from the traffickers and put them into the care of the state, and then we lose them, and not just for a short period of time? According to the 2017 report from Every Child Protected Against Trafficking and Missing People, 190 of them have gone and we have no idea where they are. That simply is not acceptable. We have to do better.
The report laid out that the role of the commissioner is a challenge for the Government. The commissioner has to be independent. Governments hate that—I know that from my time in Government. They say they love it, but they hate it, because as soon as the commissioner brings out a report that says the Government need to be doing better, the Government usually row back—although I know the Minister will not do this—and say, “If only the commissioner understood the parameters in which we operate.” That is why the suggestion in the report that the commissioner should be moved into the Cabinet Office rather than the host Department might be a way forward.
It is really important that some of the legal applications are clarified, particularly in terms of what we mean by trafficking and modern slavery, and the relevance to the Palermo protocols and so on. There is a job of work to be done there.
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Main. It is also a great pleasure to speak in this debate, after having the privilege of working with the right hon. Member for Birkenhead (Frank Field) and Baroness Elizabeth Butler-Sloss from the other place. I am a newcomer to the issue of modern-day slavery and I have learned so much from the right hon. Gentleman. The report will add much to the work that needs to be done, which the hon. Member for Gedling (Vernon Coaker) has talked about.
Modern-day slavery is a human tragedy that is still happening in our communities today—we have to acknowledge that if we are going to move forward. My right hon. Friend the Prime Minister has done more than anybody in raising this issue in the last decade, in this place and outside, but there is still so much more to be done. She made a very powerful speech at the International Labour Organisation just a few days ago, reminding us of the progress that has been made. The UK has led on this issue over the last decade, and that work has led to 90 Governments endorsing the call to action on modern slavery, which the Prime Minister launched in 2017.
Although we have done more than almost any other country in the world, and have some of the best legislation, it is important that we recognise that more needs to be done. In her speech, the Prime Minister recognised that, and in my remarks, I want to pick up that theme of raising awareness. The Prime Minister said—this is very important—that “ordinary shoppers” can
“vote with their wallets, to shun those companies that do not make the ethical grade.”
I was delighted to see in her speech that the Prime Minister is committing to one of the things that our report called for—a new registry of modern-day slavery transparency statements, to make it easier for the people we represent to be aware of what companies are doing and how they are taking the need to stamp out this appalling abuse seriously.
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There were 80 recommendations, and the Chamber will understand that I will not dwell on those, although I want to emphasise a couple. One is on the lack of data. It is appalling that we collect no data whatever on what happens to those who enter the national referral mechanism for safety—they are mainly women, but some are men—once that period of safety ends. Most of our forebears would have been scandalised if they had allowed an Act to continue with that lack of data collection.
We had views about the independent slavery commissioner, which the Government, for their own reasons, disregarded. However, we thought it was important to realise that, all the time, there is this great conflict in the Department between its wish to bear down as effectively as possible on those merchants of evil—the slave owners—and its responsibility for immigration. We therefore thought that the Home Office’s modern slavery unit—happily, a unit was established—should actually go to the Cabinet Office. We also have views about the supply chains, and we are anxious that some of the money that we should get off these undesirable individuals under the proposals in the Act actually goes to the victims. That is therefore part of the agenda for today’s debate.
We have parliamentary groups, and the right hon. Member for Basingstoke will talk about other ways in which our report will be followed up. I hope that the Home Office, Parliament, the slave owners and those we wish to rescue from slavery will be convinced that today is another example of our wish to be more effective in countering this wickedness that we see in this country and abroad.
The British Government have taken a stance, putting about £16 million into Nigeria to help with this issue. That provides a number of bits of background. It is particularly concentrated in a place called Edo State, which sits at the crossroads of the people traffickers. I could go on and on about the people traffickers, but I will not.
On my last visit to Nigeria, I took a brief to tackle modern slavery with the Nigerian Government, and one of the companies I went to see was Unilever. Unilever acts in a number of sectors where one would expect modern slavery to exist—broadly, in the agricultural sector. I had a long chat with its representatives and saw the NGOs they were working with. It was a fantastic experience, because Unilever in Nigeria has eliminated modern slavery from not just its own activities but its entire supply chain. That has taken a big effort, so it is worth looking at that as an example of how to go about things.
One of the great joys for me was talking to the NGOs that work in this area and that have helped to eradicate modern slavery. They, too, used people who had suffered to get the message across, which is a brilliant thing to have done. When I go back, I hope I will be able to capitalise on that. I hope Unilever’s example has spread, because the company found not only that eradicating modern slavery was a great thing to do, but that being able to tell people that it no longer carried on in that way gave it an enormous competitive advantage in the marketplace.
I want to labour one point with the Minister, which completely and utterly bedevils the system, and it bedevils me—I find it intolerable. The Government must reconcile the needs of victims with the immigration system. Somebody can be found to have conclusive grounds for claiming to be a victim of modern slavery or trafficking, and yet they end up with no immigration status at all. The Home Office even looks to send home some of the people in that situation. I know the Home Office will say that it will look at this, and that the processes will all be done very carefully, and so on and so forth. I say again to the Minister, all power to her elbow when she points out to the immigration department of the Home Office that these people are victims of the most heinous crimes and should be guaranteed some security of residence in this country, over and above what they are given at present. It simply is not good enough.
I finish where I started. This is a real opportunity. It is a positive report that reflects the good work that the Government and the whole of the House of Commons have done, and it says to the British people that we know more needs to be done, and we are going to do it.
We need to go further than that, and awareness is of paramount importance. The hon. Member for Gedling says that everyone knows this is a problem, and we do here, but I am not sure whether it is quite as salient out in the communities as he and I would want it to be. I urge the Minister to consider the work of individuals such as Dr Rosie Riley, who has set up VITA—Victim Identification and Trafficking Awareness—which works in the NHS to ensure that victims and survivors get the help they need at the frontline from people working in emergency departments. The Minister needs to go even further and make sure that we are doing everything we can to make our constituents aware of modern-day slavery. I pay tribute to the work of the Church, which has developed an amazing app on car washes.
We need to go further, and that has to be an important focus of the new commissioner. I will come to that in a moment. It is important that businesses will be under more pressure to publish statements of compliance, but we need to make sure that those statements are properly scrutinised. Our report recommends that that role is taken on by the commissioner, so that the statements do not just become lip service.
I believe that the commissioner’s role needs to have at its core raising awareness of the issue of modern-day slavery in our communities, up and down the country. We must also make sure that the role is independent from the Government. The Minister will be aware of the comments of the Joint Committee on the Draft Domestic Abuse Bill, which I chaired, about the slightly haphazard way in which commissioners are being set up. I hope the Minister will listen to the comments in this report and from that Committee, and make sure that we have some proper consistency in the way commissioner roles are dealt with in the future.
I want to raise one thing that is not in the report—I hope that is allowable, Mrs Main. One of the things we wanted to look at, but were not able to because of the terms of reference, was the issue of prostitution. There is strong evidence—much of which was brought forward by the hon. Member for Rotherham (Sarah Champion)—of the very close relationship between modern-day slavery and prostitution. We in the UK need to look carefully at our laws, which are potentially acting as a magnet for those who want an easier place to operate as traffickers of people who they want to sexually exploit. I hope the Minister will be able to comment on that.
In the foreword to our report, we talked about setting up an implementation group to hold the Government to account. The Minister knows me and the right hon. Member for Birkenhead well enough to know that we will do exactly that, and that her feet will be firmly held to the fire—not only on implementing the things to which I know the Government are committed, but on ensuring they look very carefully at all the recommendations in the report. Modern-day slavery is a human tragedy, and we cannot allow it to continue or get worse on our watch.