My Lords, I support Amendment 66, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Warner, partly because I was a member of the pre-legislative scrutiny committee. The noble Baroness, Lady Cox, is right to say that there should be at least some reference to overseas: we should not be seen as looking at slavery exclusively within the United Kingdom.
How far that should go, through high commissions and embassies, is probably a matter for Government to look at, but I think there should be some reference. I shall also speak about Amendments 67ZC and 68ZA, both of which are in my name.
I went to the European Commission anti-slavery trafficking meeting this morning as the first speaker. One of other speakers, apart from the Minister in the Commons, Karen Bradley, was Kevin Hyland, so I took the opportunity to ask him how he sees his role. He has just sent me a long e-mail, which I shall summarise. He sees himself as exercising a very large degree of freedom. He sees himself as independent. He says that victims are at the forefront of his plans. He is very concerned about wrongful arrest, particularly of children. He is making a survivor of human trafficking one of the panel of the group that he is using. He is recruiting a policy lead externally, by advertisement, with the agreement of the Home Office; so the number 2 will come from outside, with experience of NGOs, experience on the NRM and experience of supporting victims.
The Bishop of Bath is advising Kevin Hyland on the ecumenical response, in relation to all faiths. He has a group of lawyers to look at issues and best practice. He has a group from the NHS working to look at health issues and he has asked business leaders to form another group, all of them being there to advise him. He sees his office as independent. I must say, regardless of what the words are, listening to Kevin Hyland today I was enormously heartened by what he had to say. This does not mean that we should not put the words to the deeds, but we actually have the deeds. I thought that the House would like to know that, and I thought that it was very good news.
I will add a few things to the duties of the commissioner. My Amendment 67ZC deals with the supply chain. It is splendid—the Government are to be congratulated on it; they talk about the necessity for companies to check right down the ladder and to write reports. However, nothing at the moment in that part of the Bill says who should monitor it. My amendment would allow the commissioner to have oversight and a monitoring role. I also suggested, perhaps slightly cheekily, that he should have the power to impose penalties. I am not sure whether the commissioner will have that power, but we have not yet heard from the Government who will impose penalties if companies are not prepared to obey Clause 51.
It is very important that the commissioner should receive copies of the statements required from commercial organisations so that he can check on what is going on. The commissioner seems to be the ideal person to know what commercial organisations are doing on the ground, which their reports will have to state. Of course, if they do not like doing the reports, he could be the person to pick up the phone to say, “Why haven’t you done it?”.
The other point, which is perhaps not of the most immediate importance but which is a crucial part of any commissioner’s job, is the collection of data. It is quite interesting that as far as I can see, so far in this Bill nobody has a duty to collect data. We know that the human trafficking organisation in Birmingham
does not consider itself to be the data collection organisation. Now that we have the NRM report from Jeremy Oppenheim, entirely new groups will deal with that, according to the Government, who I believe say that they accept the report on the NRM. However, there will be about eight of those panels, and at the moment there is nothing to show who will collate the data on whom the victims are, what is happening to them, where they come from, and so on, and the commissioner is the obvious person to do that. Therefore I would like to see those amendments in the Bill.