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Human Trafficking

My hon. Friend is right and wholly uncontroversial. Common sense goes a long way in this world. We have had at least 60 Home Office Bills since 1997, and if they were all designed to rid the country of crime and had been successful this would be a crime-free society. In fact, our prisons are now fuller by 20,000 than in 1997, yet the Government proclaim that our crime rate is down. I do not know how they manage to marry up those two assertions. The convention has been signed, but as others have said, we want it ratified. That requires political will, leadership from the Government, and energy and verve. All they have to do is to get on with it. If we think that the convention is good enough to sign, surely it is good enough to ratify. We should not be one of the last countries to do so. The Conservatives have said—I am repeating others who have spoken on behalf of the party in other forums—that a UK border police force should be established with a specialist expertise, first, to ensure that those who come into the country are doing so legitimately, for reasons such as tourism or business or whatever, and, secondly, to ensure that those who may enter the country under duress can be humanely filtered. I do not mean to use ““filtered”” in an inhumane or derogatory sense, but people need to be assisted through careful handling at ports of entry. For example, minors who enter the country with adults who are not their parents or guardians should be interviewed as carefully as possible to ensure that they have some understanding of why they are travelling to this country. Non-related adults who accompany youngsters may not be their traffickers, but they may be the mules or cat’s paws of the traffickers, and they, again, should be interviewed separately so that their bona fide problems can be discovered at an early stage. We want to strengthen co-ordination between the relevant Departments; this is a matter not only for the Home Office or the Foreign Office. Other agencies such as domestic Departments, local government authorities, the police and our various security agencies will be involved. Those bodies would be required as a consequence of Government leadership to co-operate to ensure that, even if the convention is signed and ratified, and even if aspects of it are brought into domestic law, they are implemented, as my hon. Friend the Member for Totnes said, in a way that leads to positive results and reduces and deters the illegal trafficking of people. Such action cannot be beyond the wit of man. The Government have had any number of reviews, conferences and summits. It cannot be beyond the wit of even this Government, at this stage, as they draw towards the end of their tenure, to produce some form of strategy for all their agencies to ensure that the issue is dealt with coherently and sensibly. Those people who are in the country, who have succeeded, as it were, in getting under the wire, but who none the less find a way of seeking help, need to have reliable access to trustworthy people. It does not always have to be the state that provides such help. Other Members have mentioned non-state organisations and charitable bodies such as the POPPY project and the Eaves housing charity, which has done good work on the rescuing of trafficked people.