My Lords, Amendment 47 is in my name and those of the noble Lord, Lord Patel, and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Derby. The amendment is an amalgam of the amendments that I and my noble friend Lord Rosser moved in Committee. In essence, the amendment requires the Secretary of State to bring forward regulations to put the national referral mechanism on a proper statutory basis as soon as it is practicable to do so. I recognise that the Home Secretary needs time to redesign the NRM system following Jeremy Oppenheim’s excellent review report on it. I accept that that work needs to be completed, and possibly road tested, before regulations are made. There is nothing in my amendment to stop the Home Secretary giving proper consideration to the Oppenheim report and making sure that a redesigned NRM system is indeed fit for purpose.
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I also welcome the Government’s movement in the direction I had hoped for in Committee with their Amendment 82. Where I slightly part company with the Government is over the fact that the amendment is a bit too unspecific for my taste about what areas will be covered in the regulations. When those regulations come forward to Parliament, Parliament has only two choices: acceptance or rejection. It cannot move amendments to the regulations. That is why in my earlier amendment I set out the topics to be covered in the regulations, which were drawn from the Oppenheim review’s report, so I assumed that they were reasonably comprehensive. However, after Committee a number of people suggested to me that the terms of my amendment needed to be more specific, otherwise there would be doubts over what Parliament considered should be included in regulations, and that Parliament should have had an opportunity to debate and consider the coverage of the regulations. That seemed quite an important point.
There are four very specific key items in my amendment that do not seem to be specifically provided for by the government amendment. These are: first, clarity about the duration of what I might describe as the care and support for a victim; secondly, ensuring that the provisions in the regulations meet the requirements of the trafficking convention and the trafficking directive; thirdly, that there is some kind of provision in the primary legislation to require the regulations to guarantee a right of appeal against a decision in the NRM process; and, fourthly, the right to a renewable one-year residence permit for a victim of trafficking, enslavement or exploitation. Some of these, I would suggest, are very much in the territory of potential disputes between government departments and the wider world about whether these provisions are adequately covered and funded. I cannot see that the Government’s amendment gives anything like the guarantees I was looking for, and they do not seem to be provided for at all in Amendment 48.
Is the Minister willing to at least give an assurance to the House that any regulations made under the Government’s amendment would indeed cover the topics I have identified? Even better, before Third Reading will he consider making the Government’s amendment more specific as to what the regulations
will cover, along the lines I have suggested? I hope that the Minister, having moved some way along this road in his journey, would like to take another few steps in this particular area. I beg to move.