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Slavery

My Lords, the only advantage of being the thirteenth speaker of some 20 is that you do not have to prepare a speech, because if you do, it will be obsolete. The preceding speeches will have used most of your statistics, presented virtually all of your arguments, and done it in a rather more articulate way than you could do it yourself. I should declare an interest as director of the International Labour Organisation for the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland. Indeed I note that many of the statistics used were from a report published by the ILO a couple of months ago. Some other noble Lords and I are slightly at variance with the contribution of my noble friend Lord Giddens. We say, in what I think is an authentic estimate, though perhaps a conservative one, that the number of people in forced labour—we do not use the word ““slavery””—is 12.3 million. I understood the distinction my noble friend was making in his contribution, but I doubt whether it is one that any of those 12.3 million people would choose to make. They would consider their forced labour to be a form of slavery. Therefore I, along with other noble Lords, think that this is a timely debate. I am grateful to the noble Earl for his sponsorship of it, and in particular for the questions that he puts to the Government. Having participated in a number of debates of this sort in this House, however, I have to say that sometimes our debates are more about illuminating the problems than about providing the Government with encouragement to find the answers. On this occasion, in the form of this report, we have some of the answers. This is the second report to be published—the first was four years ago—in support of the ILO declaration of fundamental rights and principles at work, one of which is that there shall be no forced labour. There is such labour, and we know it. We have heard calls for legislation, and we have heard that India has an extremely good judicial system, although it must be said that justice grinds remarkably slowly in that country. What it does not have is adequate enforcement. The noble Earl made the point that Nepal ended bonded labour. The day after, the landlords literally booted bonded labourers off their land. These labourers were free, with no property to live in, never mind property to own. Therefore it is not enough just to have laws, or enforcement of those laws. There must be a number of other components that will rehabilitate the victims of the forced labour. This document, which is not just another dry report to be considered and ignored, calls for a global alliance against forced labour. That means that this debate is not just a contribution to the debates in this House and to Her Majesty’s Government, but part of a wider debate on how we have such a global alliance. We say in the report that there are basic goals and targets, such as the abolition of forced labour. We say we need a global alliance, by which we mean not only the international community, together with the lead UN agency on this matter, the ILO—which itself is tripartite: 50 per cent government, 25 per cent trade union and 25 per cent employers’ organisations—but also civil society and the NGO community, many of which have been mentioned in previous contributions, and play a vital part. This problem cannot be solved only by governments. It has to be solved by civil society as well. We then ask how it is to be done. The answer has to be a national approach. The multinational agencies and financial institutions can do much, but there has to be a national commitment, led by government, that has to include all those component parts of civil society. There have to be time-bound national programmes. If you do not define a timescale within which a problem is to be solved, you do not solve the problem. I appreciated the contribution of the noble Lord, Lord Joffe, but making poverty history and then ending slavery is getting it the wrong way around. We could probably end slavery a lot earlier than we could end poverty. That is why, in 1999, a new piece of international legislation called the Convention on Extreme Forms of Child Labour was brought in. We recognised that getting rid of extreme forms of child labour is itself a more possible target than simply trying to get rid of all child labour overnight. We have to look at poverty reduction strategies and programmes, the labour market and employment policies, migration policies and gender policies, and we have to create a national task force to get the political will to bring those things into place. There must be the right   legislation, and appropriate mechanisms for identification, release, protection and the rehabilitation of forced labour victims. In that capacity, you need the assistance of those rich countries that have some moral obligation, as so graphically and movingly put by those who recognise from personal experience that the damage done in the form of slavery over 200 years is not eradicated by simply changing the law, in this country or elsewhere. Therefore, I think that Her Majesty’s Government have done a tremendous amount. They play a large part in tackling this issue as a major supplier of overseas development assistance. I should like to see some of that development assistance targeted—perhaps in larger amounts—at the question of how to assist governments with time-bound programmes to end modern slavery within their own countries. We also have to look to the mote in our own eye. It is estimated that some 12.3 million people are enslaved in the developing world, along with an almost certain underestimate of 360,000 in the industrialised world. We know from the tragedy of the cockle pickers in Morecambe Bay that we have a problem in this country. Again, I congratulate Her Majesty’s Government on bringing forward an innovative piece of legislation on gangmasters. It will put an end to the exploitation of workers in one industry, but the truth is that it needs to be expanded. Major human rights abuses take place in the construction industry with the often coerced importation of labour from eastern and central Europe. I hope that the Government will take the earliest opportunity to expand their reach by annexing other industries to the good work that the Gangmasters Licensing Authority will undertake. We face one more problem. As a Government, on behalf of all the citizens of this country, we have a good policy of both looking to and welcoming legal migrants. We are less supportive of the victims known as illegal migrants. They arrive not by their own volition, but because they are trafficked in other ways. It is an area where the Government should put compassion at the centre of their policy. If they do that, then there are in the report—presented to the world last May and debated at the International Labour Conference last month—action plans that with financial support will enable the world’s rich nations help the world’s poor nations to bring an end to all modern forms of slavery.