My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Cox, for introducing this amendment and speaking with such eloquence and acknowledge her expertise and campaigning work in this area. Holding anyone in modern slavery is totally unacceptable; I am sure that, around the Committee, we can all agree on that. Overseas domestic workers, like anyone else, deserve protection from modern slavery and support and help if abuse takes place. Noble Lords around the Committee have raised passionate concerns about some of the appalling situations that people find themselves in.
I shall set out why the main issue is not the nature of the visa that somebody has. Through both the Bill and wider policy changes, we will seek to provide protection to anyone who needs it, regardless of their employment type or any visa they may have. Obviously, we are focusing here on overseas domestic workers and seeking to strengthen their protections further.
The best way to prevent an abusive working relationship from being brought to the UK is to test its genuineness before a visa is issued. A number of noble Lords have raised these issues. Private household employers must prove to immigration officials that they have a pre-existing employment relationship of at least 12 months with their domestic worker, for example by providing pay slips or work records. All individuals applying to come to the UK on an overseas domestic worker visa must also provide evidence with their application that they
have agreed in writing the core terms and conditions of their employment in the UK. That helps to establish that the worker is employed under terms that they find acceptable and allows us to ensure that these are appropriate. The evidence is to be provided in the form of a prescribed template—although, of course, I hear from around the Committee the concerns that these documents will not be adequately and legally kept to. The requirement for a written statement of key terms and conditions has been in place only since April 2012 and we believe that it could be improved to reflect international best practice. Officials have been working on a revised template to try to ensure that both employers and employees have an opportunity to see what standards are expected on both sides before workers come here and that they are aware of rights and responsibilities, including, sections on passport retention, sleeping accommodation and all the other things that noble Lords have mentioned, which so often are open to abuse.
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As part of the visa issuing process, as has been mentioned, the Home Office has started a trial, through the Border Force, of handing personally to workers as they come in the form that tells them what their entitlements are. These forms are not just in English, which obviously would be of very little use to many of them. I agree that it is possible that they are snatched away by the employers and put in a passport, but this is the first step of making sure that workers will have in their hands documentation about what they are entitled to if they come to work in this country.
There are further protections in place for workers who are trafficked into the UK or exploited in the UK. If they are suspected to be victims of trafficking they can be reported to the national referral mechanism. There are mechanisms such as victim care contracts and, of course, they are entitled to legal aid if they are victims of trafficking. They will be granted a minimum of 45 days for reflection and recovery, which I think we discussed in our previous debates.
Let me be clear: if a domestic worker who is a victim of trafficking leaves their employment and seeks assistance, we do not consider that to be an abuse of their visa, nor will they be criminalised for doing so. All victims should feel confident that they can report any abuse they suffer to the authorities and that they will be believed, treated as a victim and supported. I was moved by the tale from the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy of The Shaws, about the worker who just happened to meet somebody in a park and found out about this. How we get these messages to the victims themselves is a very difficult issue and I acknowledge the concerns around the Committee.
I am aware also of the suggestions that the level of abuse of overseas domestic workers has risen sharply as a consequence of the changes made to the visa rules in April 2012. Much report has been made of the reports by Kalayaan, the NGO that supports domestic workers, and the figures that it has produced—albeit from a very low sample. Home Office internal management information suggests that between May 2009 and July 2014 there were 213 confirmed cases of trafficking for domestic servitude involving non-EU nationals. Of these, only 41 were linked to overseas
domestic worker visas—so we are talking about an average of 8 per year. If we look more closely at the figures, before we made the changes to the visa rules and added new protections, there were 16 confirmed domestic servitude cases linked to these visas. So, far from a rise in servitude linked to overseas domestic worker visas, the numbers fell after 2011 and have been stable since.
Of course, even one case of abuse is too many and should be tackled robustly by law enforcement. However, before we consider the specific needs of overseas domestic workers, it is important to see these statistics in some sort of context. The figures quoted by Kalayaan are based, as has been quoted, on 120 overseas domestic workers issued with visas after April 2012, who approached Kalayaan for help over a two-year period. During that period, we issued more than 32,000 visas, so the 120 workers who approached Kalayaan represent 0.4% of the total number of overseas domestic worker visas issued and only 0.2% of the total who were paid £50 or less. I go back to the point that even one case of abuse is too many, but it is important that we put these in the context of the number of overseas domestic workers for whom the systems appear to work.