My Lords, a powerful case has been made for the amendment, and I simply want to add my support. This is such an important issue, which goes to the heart of what the Bill is about. The Minister, in his letter to Peers after Second Reading, said that he shared noble Lords’ determination to stamp out all forms of modern slavery, including abuse of domestic workers. That is a welcome aspiration, which has been repeated in various forms in various places.
The centrality of this issue to the Bill is underlined by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. On the basis of studies that it has funded, it writes that,
“there is most risk of forced labour where an individual’s work visa is tied to a particular employer. The most commonly cited example is the situation of overseas domestic workers who, since 2012, are again no longer allowed to change employers within the same category and hence become trapped in abusive situations”.
Evidence of the effects of being so trapped is, as we have heard, provided by organisations such as Kalayaan, which works with overseas domestic workers. I pay tribute to its work. Kalayaan argues that all the available evidence suggests that the change in the visa,
“has facilitated their exploitation and abuse, including trafficking”.
As the noble Baroness, Lady Cox, has said, Kalayaan details numerous ways in which the abuse experienced by overseas domestic workers who register with them has worsened since the change in the rules.
In their response to the Joint Committee on the draft Bill, the Government suggested that the previous rules “potentially encouraged abuse” because they enabled employers to bring domestic workers to this country for longer periods. Do the Government have evidence of such abuse? Or is this a hypothetical potential, which needs to be set against the actual evidence of abuse that has happened since 2012? In that time, as we have heard, abuse and exploitation has got much worse. It should also be set against the fact that the pre-2012 regime was cited by both the ILO and the UN Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants as best practice. As the noble Baroness, Lady Cox, has observed, this was one reason why the Joint Committee on Human Rights, of which I am a member, regarded,
“the removal of the right of an Overseas Domestic Worker to change employer as a backward step in the protection of migrant domestic workers.
We recommended that the Bill should be amended to reinstate the pre-2012 position.
Given the clear evidence of how the removal of that protection has facilitated abuse, given the Government’s own commitment to stamp out abuse of overseas domestic workers, and given that I feel both Ministers are reasonable people, I hope that they will feel able to take this amendment away, think again, and bring forward their own amendment before Report.