Serious Crime Bill [HL]

There can be no doubt at all that trafficking is a great social evil. I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Dholakia, for bringing this matter forward in a separate amendment which highlights its importance. Research reveals that between 700,000 and 2 million women and children are trafficked across international borders every year; 60 per cent of illegal immigrants resident in this country arrived here illegally and the majority in the back of a lorry. The noble Baroness has already referred to the difficulty about investigating that and the fact that some lorries are built specifically to accommodate such human cargo. There were an estimated 4,000 victims of trafficking for prostitution in the United Kingdom during 2003 and we know that there were 30 convictions for trafficking offences between 2004 and 2006. To date, as the noble Lord, Lord Dholakia, has said, as far as we are aware, no convictions have been achieved for trafficking for labour exploitation. This is a serious matter and one to which the House will return tomorrow during a debate on International Women's Day. My noble friend Lady Morris of Bolton will lead for us on that day. I know that she intends to look very carefully at these issues. We are very glad that, after some hesitation, the Government agreed to sign up to the convention on trafficking—the European Convention—and we hope that ratification will take place as soon as humanly possible. I would be grateful if the noble Baroness were able to give us some updated information on that. What progress has been made towards ratification? Perhaps she could comment on the results of her 2006 consultation paper, Tackling Human Trafficking, and the work undertaken by the Human Trafficking Centre, opened in Sheffield last October. I have a reason for asking those questions within the context of this very helpful amendment. This morning, I heard on the radio a news item which said that in this year of commemorating—I hate to think of it as celebrating—the abolition of slavery—slavery should never have happened in this country—the Metropolitan Police are launching a specialist trafficking team. I thought that sounded very helpful. I was already aware of Operation Maxim, which is the Metropolitan Police Service’s partnership with the UK Immigration Service, the Identity and Passport Service and the Crown Prosecution Service, targeting organised immigration crime across London. They specifically target human trafficking. I knew about that, but this appeared to be a new initiative. Afterwards, I tried to find out the details and I went on the Metropolitan Police website and found nothing; I went on to the BBC information website—the BBC had put out the story—and found nothing; so I was becoming more and more confused. The story was repeated, so I knew the confusion was not in my head, thank goodness. I would be grateful to know whether the Minister has any information to assist the Committee on the remit of that trafficking team and how it might interact with SOCA. That will be important against the background of the briefing given to noble Lords last night. How would the roles of the team and SOCA differ or complement each other? Will the focus of the Metropolitan police team be on seeking criminal prosecutions or on identifying those cases where it might be more appropriate to seek a serious crime prevention order? I now do my elliptical loop and come back to my first comments about the scale of the trafficking problems in this country particularly and worldwide, and the comparative lack of success of prosecutions in the criminal courts and therefore the potential for the use of a serious crime prevention order in resolving some of the problems. The noble Baroness has argued that we should accept this new ““tool””, as she calls it, because it could solve problems that we do not seem able to solve at the moment. There may be an argument in the case of trafficking that an order could be a useful tool. I still need to be persuaded but it is one of the areas where there could be a valid argument. It is important that we know the status of the Government’s work with regard to trafficking and the ratification of the convention, and also the status of the new trafficking team and how that is going to relate to SOCA. Is its main focus going to be on criminal prosecution or is it going to be moved away so that in the future it will focus on applying for a serious crime prevention order?