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Anti-Slavery Day Bill

My hon. Friend has just broken the covenant whereby he was not going to ask for more public spending—[Interruption.] He says from a sedentary position, "Get rid of the UK Human Trafficking Centre." I do not agree. The UKHTC does good work and it would be short-sighted to shut it. I take his point that some of the NGOs are clearly doing valuable work as well. I have some concerns about the current action plan because there appear to be problems with the national referral mechanism at a local level. I hope the Minister would agree that better information needs to be provided to local authorities and police forces so that they are aware of the problem, better able to identify victims and confident in using the mechanism. The figures show the scale of the problem. In October 2008 the Government published an assessment stating that 360 children were trafficked into and within the UK each year, but only 57 under-18s were referred to the national referral mechanism as suspected victims of human trafficking last year, out of a total of 527 referrals. In the five years to 2009, 452 people were arrested for human trafficking offences, but fewer than a quarter, only 110, were convicted. Those figures are worrying. One important area that is often neglected is trafficking for forced labour. In 2008 there were only four convictions for trafficking for the purpose of forced labour, despite the problems that we know about in relation to organised immigration crime. As a country, we could do much better at cracking down on rogue employers. That is why we differ from the Government on a series of proposals about better border policing. We have made a number of suggestions: instructing immigration officials to check the date of the return ticket of the adult accompanying minors and look for discrepancies; better work with countries of origin to help reintegrate victims, prevent the re-trafficking that my hon. Friend mentioned and educate potential victims; more robust law enforcement to bring to justice more traffickers and employers of forced labour; and better co-operation with the national authorities of other countries within Europol and Eurojust. All those measures would be useful, but our most important defence against human trafficking is our own borders, and we suggest replacing ad hoc police operations by mainstreaming trafficking as a police priority through a national border police force. The Government's failure to tackle the problems at our borders has resulted in a disastrous rise in organised immigration crime, and the Conservative party believes that we cannot tackle crime in the UK effectively without addressing the problems at our borders. They could be better policed, and we could prevent significant illegal immigration while cracking down on the trafficking of people and, indeed, weapons and drugs. We believe that the specialisation of police services is most effective in fighting those new crimes, and that is why we commissioned Lord Stevens to conduct a review of our border security. We conclude, with him, that only a unified force can best protect our borders, so an incoming Conservative Government would make setting up a national border police force one of their priorities. We want to replace the current system, which, as we have seen over the past few years, lacks a comprehensive, joined-up strategy. That significant practical measure would improve the protection of our borders generally, and give us a better weapon in the fight against human trafficking, specifically. Many measures can be taken, however, and my hon. Friend's Bill, which would significantly improve public awareness of the problem, would be another significant and welcome step forward. I am therefore very happy to support it, because we need to ensure that Britain once again leads the way in fighting slavery. We need to continue Wilberforce's work, so that this new slavery is eradicated as soon as possible.