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Human Trafficking

It is very gracious of the hon. Gentleman to say that, because I have not been able to attend all the meetings of the group, despite being an officer of it, but he knows that the group has my full support, as does the approach that he has taken. On the specifics of what we are discussing, it is appropriate for me to say a few words about the contributions that we have heard. The hon. Member for Hendon—without taking too much time, which I think we all appreciate and, perhaps, can luxuriate in now—covered the whole range of our inquiry and touched on the whole range of Government responses. He made the association, as we must, with the 200th anniversary of the abolition of slavery. It is important still to raise the profile of this issue as a modern form of slavery and what an evil, heinous business it is. He was right to draw attention to the scale of the matter and to how difficult it is to know its scale, given that so much of it is by definition underground and undetected, and given the range that exists between trafficking for the purposes of labour exploitation, sexual exploitation and child exploitation. I am pleased that the hon. Gentleman referred to the inability of categories of workers, who are coming into this country as migrants, to change their visas. I have nothing to add except my full support for the point that he rightly made about how that is unnecessary and inconsistent with the protection of victims. If we have faith in the ability of our immigration services to make determinations on the facts, blanket rules are the wrong way to proceed, because they themselves create victims. I shall say a few words about the UK action plan and where it falls short. The hon. Gentleman drew attention to the areas in which some content of the action plan was welcome. He was right to make the fundamental point that we make in our report: the response to the problem of trafficking must be at least as much a human rights and victim-based approach as an immigration-based one. In fact, I would go further, and I think that the tenor and content of our report went further, by saying that an enforcement approach—an immigration approach—is counter-productive in many ways, because it deters victims from seeking help and makes their plight much worse in many cases. The comparison with Italy, which I shall cover if I have time, is very important in that respect. The hon. Member for Totnes, in a speech that was a tour de force on just one area of this subject—child trafficking—has put on the record for all of us and for those outside this Chamber who will read his contribution in Hansard a very detailed exposition and analysis of the problem, the Government response and where the Government response falls short. I share all his views. Only a lack of time, and the recognition that it would be inappropriate to repeat in my own words many of his points, prevents me from saying more about that. He made a telling analogy by referring to the fact that there are tens of missing children, who are probably being exploited and treated very badly in many if not all cases, but that that has had so little attention compared with the very sad and tragic case of one little girl in Europe. The hon. Gentleman was right to keep coming back to the reservation in the convention. It is Liberal Democrat policy that that reservation should end, and we have made that point consistently in parliamentary questions and debates, usually in the House of Lords. I was delighted when, just before the Government agreed to sign the convention, the Conservatives agreed with our position that it was necessary, appropriate and beneficial to sign it—obviously with the intention of ratifying it and complying with its content. I look forward to hearing from the hon. and learned Member for Harborough (Mr. Garnier) whether his party’s position is that the reservation should be ended, because that would have a significant effect on Government policy. I do not want to get too party political, but one thing often follows another in that respect. The hon. Member for Llanelli (Nia Griffith) is a recent addition to the Joint Committee on Human Rights. She is also a welcome addition, because she is assiduous in her attendance and she has got stuck in to the issues that we have raised faster than anyone else did when they joined the Committee. She certainly keeps me on my toes when I ask questions and it is not obvious to her, or perhaps even to me, where they are going. I fear that she may well do the same now if I am not careful, given that she has now moved to sit behind the Minister. A problem with this issue is the profusion of documents that exist, starting with the Joint Committee’s report, although the problem did not start there. There is the Government’s response to that report, the Government’s consultation on their action plan, the Government’s publication of responses to that consultation and then the Government’s action plan, which was published in March. It is hard to cross-reference all those documents in an easy way. Today, I shall focus on some of our recommendations in the report and on the Government’s response to it, which was published in December 2006. I shall also look at what progress has been made on the UK action plan since then. I accept that, in doing so, I shall not cover all of the issues that ought to be raised, but I think it important that we consider matters logically. The Committee considered the scale and extent of the problem. In recommendation 2, we urged the Government to"““publish the research into organised crime markets currently being conducted by Home Office researchers, which may assist in providing a clearer picture of the scale and extent of human trafficking into the UK.””" We also argued that there should be more research, which the Government have accepted. They have also accepted that existing research should be published, with the obvious caveats regarding intelligence and so on. They said in their response that they would publish their research into organised crime markets early in 2007. Will the Minister tell us where the Government are up to with commissioning new research and with publishing existing research? He will know that I believe that evidence-based policy must be based on evidence that is published and peer reviewed or at least available for people to see, because, even if we believe a very honest Minister, as we do in this case, not everyone will necessarily agree that what he says is correct and underpinned. We also addressed demand management in the report. Recommendation 7 states:"““We commend the imaginative publicity techniques employed by Operation Pentameter to change the attitudes of men towards women and raise awareness of the phenomenon of trafficking. However, we recommend the authorities evaluate the effectiveness of these techniques.””" When money is being spent on something as important as this, independent, formal evaluation is needed. It is not enough to have the anecdotal opinions of the people who are running the scheme saying that they think that they are doing a good job and that they have seen a website on which someone said, ““Oh, there is an issue about trafficking.”” That is effectively all that there is. This matter is difficult to address, but it is essential that we understand the attitudes of people in this country who are involved in trafficking for the purposes of sexual exploitation. There are probably tens of thousands of men in this country, possibly even more, who use and abuse trafficked women. We need to understand their attitudes and what makes them do that before we can work out how to change their attitudes and behaviour. It is as simple as that. The fact that UK citizens take an active, possibly knowing, but perhaps unknowing, role in this crime and evil trade is a big, silent thing that not enough people talk about. One issue that the Committee was not able to get into, tempting though it may have been, is whether our approach to the criminalisation of all prostitution and all use of prostitutes is the right way forward. There is huge international debate on that. The Swedish feminist view is that men should always be prosecuted for using prostitutes, regardless of whether the prostitutes are victims of trafficking or obvious victims of coercion. They believe that prostitution can never be consented to, because it is exploitive by definition. In alliance with them, the Americans generally take the view that both the prostitute and the client are committing an offence. Whether that view is based on religious fervour or the American establishment’s outlook on life is unclear, but that is their position. Some European countries, such as the Netherlands and Germany, take the view that prostitution has always been with us and that having some form of regulated and decriminalised prostitution might produce less demand for prostitution that is even more exploitive than what currently exists. They believe that, if some form of prostitution is deemed more acceptable, users of prostitutes will not run the risk of not knowing where the women whom they go to see come from. These are complex issues, but there is evidence to suggest that demand for trafficked women is less in countries with some degree of decriminalisation, and I regret that the Government and Parliament have failed to explore these issues in an open-minded way. There is clearly an argument for doing something in this area, in the hope that it will diminish the problem. One way of looking at it is that, if men feel that they are breaking the law, they will be far less worried about the extent to which they are breaking it. On a similar and also difficult subject, our report highlighted an unfortunate contradiction in the Government’s policy. On the one hand, they rightly tell men, ““We want you to report instances when you think that you’ve come across women who are victims of trafficking for sexual exploitation.”” We know from Italy that the users of prostitutes and trafficked women are often a good source of such information and that women are rescued and traffickers prosecuted as a result of such reports to the authorities. On the other hand, the Government tell men that having sex with women who are victims of trafficking for sexual exploitation is a sexual offence, because it is sex without genuine consent, and that they will be prosecuted for it. One cannot fail to see the contradiction in saying, ““We will prosecute you for coming into contact with these women,”” while also saying, ““We want you to report what you have done.”” That simply is not realistic, and that contradiction fundamentally undermines the Government’s efforts. One of our recommendations that has not yet been mentioned is our call for a 24-hour telephone line on which to report users of women who are trafficked for sexual exploitation and to give information about victims. When we went to Italy, we were told that that has been extremely effective there. I think that the UK Government have set up a telephone line for authorities to get advice, but have not gone as far as we recommended. I should be grateful if the Minister told us whether he recognises that suggestion as a potential way forward. Our recommendations 11 and 12 deal with legislative change and whether the UK Borders Bill would be an appropriate place to make it clear in primary legislation, especially in respect of section 2 of the Asylum and Immigration (Treatment of Claimants, etc.) Act 2004, that victims of trafficking will not be prosecuted for criminal or immigration offences that they may have committed because they are victims of trafficking. That does not just relate to victims of trafficking for sexual exploitation, because there are other forms of victim, as the hon. Member for Totnes mentioned. The Government have not taken that approach. As the hon. Member for Hendon said, they have clearly said that the Crown Prosecution Service has discretion on whether or not to act to stop prosecutions where such things come to light. That is not good enough, and I do not believe that the Joint Committee would have thought that it was good enough when it made its recommendation. In this context, page 16 of the Joint Committee’s 13th report of this Session, on the UK Borders Bill, contains a section on human trafficking that states:"““We welcome the Bill’s extension of the scope of the existing trafficking offences, which implements one of the proposals in the…UK Action Plan on Trafficking of Human Beings. We are disappointed, however, that the opportunity has not been taken in this Bill to introduce more effective protection for the victims of trafficking. In our recent report…we concluded that the current level of protection provided to trafficking victims is far from adequate from a human rights perspective.””" Our report argued that we do not want our report on human trafficking to be cherry-picked, and we set out a number of specific things that we wish to happen. Page 17 states:"““where there are reasonable grounds to believe that a person is a victim of trafficking that person shall not be removed from the UK until the process for identifying whether they are such a victim is complete; a recovery and reflection period of 3 months should be granted to a person who has been identified as being a victim of trafficking, during which time no immigration enforcement measures shall be taken against them; and renewable residence permits of up to 6 months’ duration be granted to victims of trafficking.””" The greatest disappointment in the Government’s evidence about the pull factor is that, in their response to our report and in the UK action plan, there is no clear timetable or acceptance that that will be provided. That is necessary so that the convention can be ratified, and I want the Minister to set out whether he feels that the convention that he and his colleague have now signed can be ratified without those provisions being met and why we do not even have a clear timetable for the convention’s ratification. By July 2007, there will be an action plan for an action plan on how the convention can be ratified, but that is not good enough. In respect of the permits and the reflection periods, this is vital. Our report urged the Government to examine best practice in Europe. In Italy, we found that the fact that there would be adequate reflection periods and that there was the opportunity for renewable residence permits for victims to be granted meant that victims felt confident to come forward. It also meant that non-governmental organisations were able to engage directly with prostitutes on the streets of Rome, Venice and elsewhere; indeed, those NGOs were funded by the Government under their legislation. The hon. Member for Wakefield and I went out with representatives of one of those NGOs to meet prostitutes on the streets of Rome. In Rome, it is very much in your face on the streets; every 200 yards one sees a woman or a group of women, or, in some areas, transsexual men, who are prostitutes. Many of them come from other countries and many of them have undoubtedly been trafficked to Italy. However, they are clearly reachable, so although it is not pleasant to see, one of the plus sides of the system—if that is what it can be called—is that most of the women are not tucked away in massage parlours, as they are in this country, but are available. The NGOs can reach them and give them condoms and advice on sexual health, as we did. They are able to tell them that things do not have to be this way and that they can get residence permits, with or without co-operation, if they meet humanitarian grounds for renewable residence permits. We asked the Italian authorities how much abuse there is, and how many people have their residence permits removed on the basis of not staying within the system, let alone pretending to be victims of gang rape. Italian politics has a pretty active anti-immigration right wing, but the Italian authorities from the left or right could not tell us about a single case. If not unanimity, there was a broad consensus that that was the right approach. Indeed, the Bossi-Fini legislation, which toughened up immigration rules, left that policy well alone, because it is recognised as a success. My main questions for the Minister are: what can he say on this subject? What steps has he taken to identify the best practice in Europe? I am conscious that we have plenty of time, but I do not wish to exploit that fact because I know that the two Front Benchers will be keen to speak. I merely wish to raise a couple of more issues. I am conscious that, in so doing, I am concentrating mainly on the victims of trafficking for sexual exploitation. That is partly because the hon. Members for Hendon and for Totnes covered the other areas so clearly. The question of support for victims needs to be addressed. As has been said, it is not good enough for the Government to identify that there are organisations outside London, and organisations other than the POPPY project, that can provide support. Such organisations need to be nurtured and funded. That has not yet been done, according to my reading of the UK action plan. Given that this is such a huge humanitarian issue, I do not understand why Government funding cannot be provided in this way. Similarly, as the hon. Member for Hendon pointed out, the short-termism in funding that the POPPY project has always faced is not fair on the people working in this difficult area. It does not enable them to plan for the future. There would be enormous pressure on their places were the Government to implement some of the other recommendations in our report that would encourage victims to come forward and the so-called clients of victims to report them. It may well be that the Government know that, if they did more, they would have more people to support and they would therefore have to fund more. There is a weird consistency about the Government’s position of just keeping the heads of the support services above water from a financial and capacity point of view. This country has about 1 per cent. of the number of trafficking prosecutions—and, effectively, convictions— that Italy does and about 1 per cent. of the number of victims identified in any given period. I do not believe that 100 times more men use prostitutes in Italy than in this country, so the reason for the discrepancy is that we are failing to identify victims and traffickers. I urge the Minister to consider examining best practice worldwide. I do not want to be wholly negative about the Government’s response. As the hon. Member for Hendon has said, there is plenty to welcome in the action plan, and the Government are at least engaging. I urge them not to be to complacent about their position. Following a comment from the hon. Member for Totnes, the hon. Member for Llanelli said that perhaps the Government were felt to be in the lead on the basis of having signed the convention. I understand that the UK was 28th to sign out of the 29 countries that have done so, that we were followed swiftly by Ireland and that there have now been seven ratifications. The countries that signed well before us included Austria, Belgium, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal and Sweden in 2005, and France and Denmark in 2006. Few countries had yet to sign when we had yet to sign, and such countries included the likes of Lithuania, Turkey, Russia, Azerbaijan, Estonia and Hungary. I have nothing against those countries, but we would have been better placed to claim leadership in this area if we had been early movers. The issue now is ratification. What legislation is needed to ratify? The hon. Member for Ashford (Damian Green) raised the matter when discussing the UK Borders Bill, when he tabled a probing amendment that included some provisions from the convention. He asked how soon we would be in a position to ratify, and the Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, the hon. Member for Enfield, North (Joan Ryan) said something that I did not understand:"““He is right that his amendment provides for some key measures from the convention, but we could probably implement those sooner by signing the convention””—" that was a week or so before signing it—"““than by waiting for the Bill to be enacted, although, of course, we can implement some of those measures without legislation or the convention.””—[Official Report, Borders Public Bill Committee, 15 March 2007; c. 401.]" Clearly, something must be done to ratify, not least about renewable residence permits and reflection periods. Will the Minister make it clear what legislation is required and when that can happen, within the constraints of Government business, so that we have a clear idea of when we will ratify? I thank the Chairman and other members of the Joint Committee on Human Rights for their valuable service to the House in analysing these issues so carefully and for bringing to the House such a well-considered and well-evidenced report.