I absolutely agree with the right hon. Gentleman about the need to ensure that victims feel able to come forward and give evidence against those who have trafficked them, but I still think that we need to get the offences right and ensure that the offences are fit for purpose—an argument that I shall develop.
The new clause in the name of my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield Central (Paul Blomfield) is designed to address some of the structural problems with the drafting of the trafficking offence, and I want to put it on record that we fully support it. The amendments tabled by the hon. Member for Enfield, Southgate (Mr Burrowes) are designed to clarify the law on slavery to enable more prosecutions. I am sure that he will speak eloquently to those amendments. Again, we support what he is trying to achieve in principle.
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What we are trying to establish is the principle that there should be separate offences for exploitation. The Opposition’s view is that this is the most effective way of overcoming the substantial barriers currently in place in getting convictions. I take into account as well what the right hon. Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip (Sir John Randall) said about victims and giving evidence.
To explain why our approach is needed, I want to turn to the evidence of Lord Judge, who was until recently the Lord Chief Justice and the most senior criminal judge in the country. He said of this Bill:
“We are making provisions for slavery, servitude and compulsory labour in clause 1 of the Bill. In Clause 2, trafficking is the offence. It becomes an offence because you do it with a view to exploitation. You could have an offence of trafficking, full stop, and a separate offence of exploitation. As it stands at the moment, you have a single offence with two parts—here is the trafficking and here it is with a view to exploitation. My own view is that trafficking in people is a dreadful thing to do, trafficking with a view to exploiting them is a more serious thing to do, but exploiting them is also serious. My concern reading Clause 2 and the various subclauses is ‘Is this really what we want?’—a single offence that has two ingredients, rather than two separate offences.”
Lord Judge is not the only senior lawyer to think this is needed, so let me turn to the evidence given to the Committee by Nadine Finch, a barrister specialising in children’s law. She said:
“In terms of child exploitation, in my view, as somebody who represents a lot of child victims, it is a real lacuna. Children are at a huge disadvantage in evidential terms. They very rarely understand they have been trafficked—what trafficking means—or what kind of evidence is needed. They particularly do not understand the movement part of being trafficked to the situation of exploitation; because they may well have been duped by their elders—by their parents. They may well have been too frightened, or not understood the movement. Therefore, children are more likely to be able to tell you about what happened to them when they were exploited than to be able to tell you about what happened to them when they were actually moved, or when travel was involved. That is a really important issue.”
She went on to say:
“Many of my child clients can tell me about what happened when they were exploited in domestic servitude, in a restaurant or in prostitution; but they actually did not understand enough about the links between people who brought them across England, Europe or the world, and therefore they are not able to assist the police or prosecutors in terms of a trafficking offence. They can assist in the matter of exploitation, and I have got quite a few children who have been able to take the police to a house where they have been kept in domestic servitude or sexual exploitation, but they are not able to explain who brought them to that house, and therefore no prosecution happens.”
So, two eminent lawyers, a whole coalition of children’s charities and the Joint Committee on the draft Bill all recommend specific adult and child exploitation offences.
I quoted Nadine Finch’s evidence at length because I think the House really should consider her experiences of these cases, and I think she encapsulates very well the problem with the current drafting. I also think we should consider this in the light of recent UK cases, particularly the sexual exploitation of girls in Rotherham, Rochdale, Oxford and elsewhere. We know that thousands of girls were exploited and abused, but little was done and few prosecutions were attempted. These girls were neither trafficked, nor held in slavery, but they were exploited, and putting specific offences in the Bill would move the legislative framework from one looking at individual sexual acts—who was present, was there consent and so forth—to one in which exerting control over a course of behaviour is more important. It is my view—and that of the charities and lawyers I work with—that this will enable more prosecutions, which we all want to see.
Given what we have learned recently about the scale of exploitation, and particularly in view of the report by my hon. Friend the Member for Stockport (Ann Coffey), I believe that we now have to look again and ask the Government to reconsider their approach to these offences.
New clause 4 is specifically about adults. There is a higher threshold in establishing exploitation but the principle is the same: exploitation should be a separate offence. That is illustrated best with a few case studies. Craig Kinsella was held captive by the Rooke family in Sheffield and forced to work from 7.30 in the morning until midnight for no pay. He slept in a garage. He was starved and beaten with a spade, a crowbar and a pickaxe. He was not trafficked into the country; he was a British national. He had even voluntarily moved in with the family, but was then subjected to appalling abuse and exploitation. There was extensive evidence of this abuse, including from the Rookes’ own CCTV system. The Rookes were convicted, but not of slavery or of trafficking; rather they were convicted of false imprisonment and other lesser offences.
Gheorge Ionas, 35, exploited fellow Romanian migrants. He forced them to live in unheated buildings without sanitation, paid them as little as £100 a week for full-time work and made them scavenge for food from supermarket bins. Mr Ionas was fined just £500 for operating as a gangmaster without a licence.
Police in Kent described a similar situation where they came across 29 Lithuanian chicken catchers. Seventeen of these people gave written evidence and statements, which included beatings, theft of their wages, living with anything up to 12 people in a two-bedroom house, bedbug-ridden mattresses, dogs being set on workers, being held in the back of a Transit van for up to five to six days at a time without any ablutions—no washing or toilet facilities—being driven from job to job and not being paid for their full hours. The police thought this was criminal conduct but the CPS said there was not enough evidence to prosecute. No action was taken.
Following this case the evidence from Detective Inspector Roberts of Kent police to the draft Bill Committee was clear:
“Certainly within Kent, we have had quite considerable difficulty in working out what is criminal exploitation, particularly labour exploitation, where people are working very, very long hours in
difficult circumstances. If you asked an average member of the British public whether that person was being exploited, they are, but because of their circumstances they are allowing themselves to be exploited and to remain within circumstances of exploitation.”
With the number of these cases growing, the evidence is now overwhelming that we need specific legislation to stop these people being exploited and to stop British workers being undercut.
In conclusion, the aim of the amendments is to prosecute those who traffick and exploit, but we must also recognise the amendment in this group that seeks to prevent those who have been trafficked from being prosecuted. That is an equally worthy cause and is particularly important in relation to children. It is quite frankly a disgrace that more trafficked children are being prosecuted than their traffickers. Labour welcomed the inclusion in the Bill of a statutory defence, though as was made clear both in evidence to the Committee and in discussion, this amendment does not do enough to protect children.
Therefore, we support the principle of amendment 138 tabled by the hon. Member for Foyle (Mark Durkan), which seeks to clarify that children can be trafficked without being compelled—something that is recognised in clause 2, but not in clause 41. Labour supported amendments to this end in Committee and does so again here. The drafting of amendment 138 is slightly broader than we think is appropriate, and we do not want to exempt children necessarily from either the reasonable person test or schedule 3. But the principle that children should be able to rely on the defence without proving compulsion is one we support and will seek to address in the other place.