I welcome the Bill and make clear the support of not only this side but both sides of the House for taking action against the horrific crime of modern day slavery and for the Bill’s passage through the House.
Last year, a 20-year-old woman was kidnapped from her rural home in Slovakia. She was trafficked out of the country and brought to the UK, to Bradford. She was kept captive for several weeks before being sold into a sham marriage. In her marriage, she was not allowed to leave her home and was raped repeatedly and beaten by five men, all of whom lived in the house. The barrister who prosecuted the case described her experience as like
“something from a 19th century novel by Dickens”,
and said that the victim
“was handled round the continent and this country like a commodity, a human slave.”
She was raped, beaten and enslaved and robbed of her most basic freedoms not in 19th-century Britain but in 21st-century Britain, which is why we need to act and why the Bill has such strong cross-party support and will be on the statute book soon.
I pay tribute, as the Home Secretary has done, to the members of the cross-party Joint Committee, including my right hon. Friend the Member for Birkenhead (Mr Field), my hon. Friends the Members for Slough (Fiona Mactaggart) and for Linlithgow and East Falkirk (Michael Connarty) and the right hon. Members for Uxbridge and South Ruislip (Sir John Randall), for Meriden (Mrs Spelman) and for Hazel Grove (Sir Andrew Stunell), who have worked so hard. I also pay tribute to the former Member for Totnes, Anthony Steen, who is the chairman of the Human Trafficking Foundation and has done so much work in this field.
The Bill builds on work carried out under the previous Government, including criminalising trafficking in the Sexual Offences Act 2003 and the Asylum and Immigration (Treatment of Claimants, etc.) Act 2004; the introduction in 2009 of the offence of forced labour, slavery or servitude, which recognised that slavery is not just about international forced travel; the national referral mechanism, which we introduced in 2009; and, of course, the creation of the UK Human Trafficking Centre.