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Anti-Slavery Day Bill

I am grateful to the Minister for those remarks. Of course, the approach is not just cross-party, as he will be well aware. Hillingdon and Kent are the two local authorities most exposed to the problem of unaccompanied children. Indeed, one of the new centres for unaccompanied asylum-seeking children is in my constituency—I visited it recently—so wearing almost every hat that I have, I am deeply concerned about the issue. Those local authorities that have to grapple with the matter have serious problems funding and organising all the arrangements for unaccompanied children, and having international criminal gangs trying to exploit and take away those children is clearly an enormous difficulty. In this country, exploitation of labour is common in agriculture, construction, domestic cleaning, contract cleaning and the care sector. We all know the more tragic examples of what happens as a result of that kind of labour exploitation: there were the Chinese cockle pickers who died in Morecambe bay and the lorryful of Chinese workers who suffocated in Folkestone. We also know that something like 60 per cent. of illegal immigrants arrive in the UK by illegal means, the majority in the backs of lorries. Many of them will have paid huge sums of money to agents—up to £22,000—and many of them are forced into debt bondage, are kept in appalling conditions and are victims of organised criminal gangs. Terribly, even in those conditions, many of those people prefer to be here than in their home country, because their life in their country was even worse than the life that they are forced to live here. We have to accept that as an issue. Incredibly perversely, many of them prefer to be illegal workers. In an evidence session for a previous immigration Bill, Jack Dromey said that his union had found evidence of Portuguese workers—who could, of course, have come here perfectly legally—pretending to be Brazilians and operating under false Brazilian passports, because that way, they could work illegally, take jobs at below the minimum wage and allow themselves to be exploited. They thought that it was easier to get work that way. One can see the depths of the perverse effects. Many of these victims are unwittingly involved in organised crime. We know that there are many crimes associated with human trafficking, including the employment of illegal immigrants, drug crimes and money laundering, as well as prostitution and child abuse. I expect the Minister would agree that we need to ensure that campaigns such as the cross-borders Blue Blindfold campaign continue to help raise awareness of this despicable trade, as the Bill would do. We on the Conservative Benches have previously urged the Government to focus on the countries of origin. We were pleased to see a mention of that in the millennium goals. In introducing the Bill, my hon. Friend mentioned what happens in the countries of origin. It is clear that prevention work in such countries will be hugely valuable as part of the long-term package of measures that we need to take to combat human trafficking. We were pleased when the Government responded to pressure from us and others and signed up to the European convention on trafficking in human beings. We know that that is not just a UK problem. It is one for the whole of Europe, and we can learn a great deal from studying the work done in other countries, particularly Austria and Italy, which have shown some creative thought in this area. An important development that has not been mentioned was the formation of the United Kingdom Human Trafficking Centre. The existence of one central point of information on trafficking has clearly been valuable to police forces, the Crown Prosecution Service and other agencies. The existence of the UKHTC demonstrates the importance of specialisation when tackling new and growing types of crime. I hope that expertise does not disappear in the future.