I am grateful for being called as early as this and I will try to be brief. I want to focus specifically on what my right hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May) has talked about, which is the modern slavery elements of the Bill, and keep to a reasonable amount of time. I want to draw attention to the reality of what we sometimes seem to get mixed up. There is a fundamental difference between people who are trafficked and people who pay traffickers to come here for reasons that are economic or whatever—I do not want to dwell on that; the important thing is that we mix these terms up. There is a clear definition of being trafficked. It involves people who do not want to be here and who are brought here against their will and are then used for various services that they should not be used for. They are slaves.
The Centre for Social Justice brought forward an important paper on this, and my right hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead, when she was Home Secretary, picked that up and turned it into legislation. We were the first country in the world to bring such legislation through, and although it may now be a little unfashionable to say it, I am very proud of that. I think that what we did is worth celebrating and protecting, and if there are faults in it, we need to correct them.
There is a problem in the Bill, and I know that the Minister for Immigration, my right hon. Friend the Member for Newark (Robert Jenrick), has been very accommodating and talked at length about this, and I thank him for that. I will make a few comments now about the problem and how we could possibly help, because we want to help to rectify this. I understand what the Government are trying to do, but I want to protect some of the modern slavery bits.
My first point relates to commencing the modern slavery clauses only after publishing an assessment of the problems and impacts. I understand that the Opposition have put down various tools to do this in their new clauses. The Government have argued that the Bill is needed to address illegal migration and that the modern slavery clauses are needed to address and prevent abuse of the modern slavery support system by false claims from people seeking to bypass removal. So the modern slavery clauses in the Bill should be targeted at the problem of false claims with a clear assessment made of the level of false claims and the impact on wider modern slavery policy.
The Government should therefore specify in the Bill that the modern slavery clauses—clauses 21 to 28—would be commenced only when a specific threshold of the false modern slavery claims and an increase in those claims is reached, demonstrated by evidence. I think that is fair. Alongside the false claims that would trigger the modern slavery clauses, the Government could commit to publishing evidence on the current level of false modern slavery claims and any increase or decrease in that level. Section 63 of the only recently passed Nationality and Borders Act 2022 would enable the collection of that data on bad faith claims since 30 January 2023.
The modern slavery clauses should not commence until an assessment has been published of the impact of the clauses disapplying modern slavery protections on the identification of victims, including their willingness to come forward, and on the prevention, detection, investigation and prosecution of slavery and human trafficking offences. This is important because, at the end of it all, we need to know whether there is evidence.
I understand the Government’s fear that this will somehow be used as an alternative vehicle to escape a claim and to avoid being sent back, but we do not see any evidence of that. Only 6% to 7% of those who have come over on the boats have made a modern day slavery claim. That is a tiny number. They will know by now that they can do that, but the reality is that it has not happened. I bring that to the attention of the Government: there is no real evidence of it at the moment. I understand that the Government think we need to protect ourselves against that potential, but we need to see the evidence that that trend is being broken.
3.15 pm