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Human Trafficking

I am grateful for the support of my hon. Friends and other hon. Members. We know that the Government have been active on the legislative front, and I think that they have done a good job. However, I shall point out some of the things that they have not done, and I hope that that will be constructive. However, it is not only the Government who have been active; the Joint Committee on Human Rights has also been very helpful and active. I should also like to note that there have also been three debates on trafficking in the past year. Back-Bench Members of the House of Commons and of the House of Lords, of all parties, were particularly active in the establishment of the all-party group on trafficking of women and children—of which I am Chairman—on 9 July 2006. That group does not just meet the bigwigs; it has also got its hands dirty down at the rock face. It has met African child victims of trafficking, eastern Europeans, Vietnamese trafficked children involved with cannabis factories and, most recently, Roma children on the streets of London. That group has tabled more than 100 oral and written parliamentary questions, which have stimulated further Government action. My thanks go to all the officers involved. My hon. Friend the Member for Wellingborough (Mr. Bone) is the astute treasurer of the group, and it has other distinguished members here and in the other place. The Government's major problem is their inability to provide accurate figures on anything to do with human trafficking. The most reliable figures came from Operation Pentameter 1, which are very modest, and we have not had the results from Operation Pentameter 2 yet, so we have no idea of the scale of human trafficking. We talk with great emotion about it, but we have no idea of its scale. The Government are appallingly bad at providing information. In answer to a written question from the hon. Member for Luton, South (Margaret Moran), the Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, the hon. Member for Gedling (Mr. Coaker) said:"““Data on the numbers of children and unaccompanied minors trafficked into the UK for each year since 2000 are not centrally recorded.””—[Official Report, 12 December 2006; Vol. 454, c. 1053W.]" Nobody has any idea what the numbers are. Human trafficking has not only attracted a huge official infrastructure; it also has a huge vocabulary. The definition of ““human trafficking”” is not clear. Sex trafficking gets endless newspaper coverage in the tabloids, but confusion still exists between sex trafficking and prostitution. Human trafficking involves not only sexual exploitation but exploitation of labour such as domestic servitude, forced labour, begging and benefit fraud. It does not only involve women; it also involves men, including young men, and young children. Children under 10—which means they have no criminal liability—are being brought over to Britain by their extended family, having been trained in eastern Europe by people like Fagin in ““Oliver Twist””. They are forced to work in a range of criminal activities such as shoplifting, theft and automated teller machine—ATM—fraud. A talented under-10-year-old can earn between £50,000 and £100,000 a year for the gangs that they work for. The inability of this country to handle this problem is well illustrated by my experience on the beat on Oxford street as part of the police service parliamentary scheme. We apprehended a young Romanian girl at Marble Arch underground station. We believe that there were other children there, but they disappeared very quickly when we arrived. She refused to co-operate or to tell us who she was, where she lived or how old she was. The police officers took her to Marylebone police station as a place of safety. She had no money on her, only a return underground ticket. She refused to speak English, although she attended a school here and could speak the language. An interpreter was called for, at public expense. On searching her, she was found to have shoplifted goods on her, but their value was so small—under £20—that the police did not prosecute her. She had to be released from police custody and the social services in Haringey—which is where she said that she lived—said that they could not look after her. She is one of the many children from eastern Europe trafficked by gangs to work on the streets. Oxford street is full of such children. How are we going to deal with this? Will the Minister reconsider all the cases in the past few years in which children have been prosecuted and criminalised for theft or for cannabis cultivation, in the light of the new Crown Prosecution Service guidance, which states that they should be treated as victims of trafficking, not as criminals? Will he confirm that no such children who have been apprehended and prosecuted in this way are in prison? I believe that such children are being wrongly criminalised. A further problem with trafficked children is that they often go missing from social services care within 24 hours, and often within three hours. The ECPAT report ““Missing Out””, produced in 2007, revealed that in three local authority areas, of the 80 reported cases of known or suspected child victims of trafficking, 48 had gone missing from social services care. They go in one door and come out of the other. The Government report—I think that it was a Serious and Organised Crime Agency report—produced in June 2007 revealed that, of the 330 supposed victims of child trafficking, 183 had gone missing without trace. In answer to my question of 30 October 2007, the Home Secretary confirmed that in West Sussex, which covers the Gatwick airport complex, 50 children from abroad went missing from care between 2004 and 2006. In Hillingdon, which contains Heathrow, 74 children were reported missing in 2006 alone. The reason why children disappear from care is that their traffickers are the only people they know in this country—the children do not speak our language—and the only people they can rely on. They have been brainwashed not to trust anybody in authority, let alone the social services or the police. How can we start to help such children out of their miserable existence and to make them a priority? The problem is compounded by the diversionary activity of numerous officials who attend conferences and meetings all over the world—with upwards of 600 delegates, including lawyers, experts, officials and diplomats. Those conferences cost millions of pounds of public money, as the delegates travel first class, but those officials talk rather than focus on the real problems. Such money would be far better used to fund refuges, which often barely scrape by, to provide safe havens for trafficked children. Many refuges in the EU do not receive public funding. The POPPY project is the only refuge in the UK to receive a Government grant, while the position of east European countries' refuges is particularly dire. Why does the EU not help them? While diplomats munch in style, the people at the grass roots and the victims remain penniless. The Government must start to collect reliable data and statistics on trafficking in the UK. They keep promising, but they cannot deliver. With the police powerless to act against child trafficking of the under-10s and with human trafficking not being a police performance indicator, with social services losing children and with the immigration services having little expertise to identify victims and being unable to stop EU passport holders, the situation is now desperate. According to the former Minister for Women and Equality, the hon. Member for Sheffield, Heeley (Meg Munn):"““We are leading Europe on providing for victims and ensuring that people are recognised at ports.””""—[Official Report, 22 February 2007; Vol. 457, c. 404.]" That is just not true. As we conclude the 200th anniversary of the abolition of slavery, we have a new chapter and a new form of slavery right on our doorstep. History is repeating itself and we have not learned the lessons.