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People Trafficking

My Lords, I, too, am grateful to my noble friend Lord Sheikh for giving us the chance to debate this important subject. I shall echo much of the excellent speeches of my noble friend and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Liverpool in my brief contribution today. During a debate to celebrate National Women’s Day in March, I highlighted the horrific plight of women and children who are trafficked. This is a vile trade, made worse because many of those who are brought to the UK have such high hopes for a better life, with promises of good, honest work and the chance to make something of themselves and to help support their families. We know how cruelly they are deceived. Once here, their documents are confiscated and they are forced into bonded labour, including prostitution. They find it hard to escape because the people who betrayed them control and frighten them with threats. Then there are those who are exploited by the drug barons and forced to smuggle drugs into the country, often at great risk to their health as well as to their freedom; and the children who come here because they have been sold by their families or snatched and trafficked. Thanks to a Home Office-commissioned survey, we now know that there are some 330 cases of suspected or confirmed victims of child trafficking, and yet a recent article in the Guardian reports that the true scale of child trafficking is believed to be far higher, with highly sophisticated, organised criminal syndicates profiting from trafficking into this country children as young as nine months. There cannot be a single person in this country, and in many others across the world, who have not been moved by the plight of Madeleine McCann and the complete anguish of her parents. I cannot begin to understand what the parents of children who disappear must go through. They can hope only that everything that can be done will be done to find their children and that agencies at home and abroad will co-operate as much as possible. I am pleased that we now have the UK Trafficking Centre in Sheffield, under the excellent leadership of Nick Kinsella and run on a multi-agency model. My main purpose for speaking today is to highlight the plight of a group of young people who are often overlooked. It is a misconception that trafficking is just international; it can also take place within national borders. I refer to the scandal much closer to home whereby children who leave the care of the state are being trafficked internally, often drawn into sexual exploitation. These are vulnerable young people and those who violate them in this way are despicable. These children just disappear and, sadly, they do not have a devoted family to highlight their plight. In a debate in the other place, my honourable friend Anthony Steen, who chairs the All-Party Group on the Trafficking of Women and Children, said that there were as many as 48 victims of child trafficking who went missing from the care of three local authorities last year. That is a truly shocking figure and one that we cannot ignore. There are now as many people trafficked throughout the world as there were slaves. We must do all that we can to help these vulnerable and exploited people and children, and we must do all that we can to put the peddlers of such misery out of business.