My Lords, I share the condemnation of domestic slavery, which I am sure is shared by all Members of this House, and I strongly support those organisations that seek to help such workers. In doing so, I speak with some experience on the ground. I was the consul in Abu Dhabi and the consul-general in Saudi Arabia, which is where 50% of these applications come from.
Let me start, then, by welcoming the Modern Slavery Act, which seeks to tackle the worst cases of abuse, providing advice and support for those who seek to escape. However, what is now proposed goes well beyond that. The independent reviewer seems to be suggesting that any domestic servant who is not satisfied with his or her conditions will be able to change employer and then remain in the UK working legally for, I think he says, two years—others say without time limit. At the end of that period, he supposes, I think, that they would simply pack up and go home to their impoverished home country. That seems a very unlikely outcome. It is far more likely that they will continue to work here—illegally, if necessary—so that they can continue to send money home. In many respects, that is understandable, but we must recognise that if that situation were to develop, word would spread very quickly among domestic workers in a number of source countries and it would not be very long before we had a significant loophole in the immigration system.
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I read the independent report rather carefully, because it is a difficult issue for all of us. Obviously, none of us wants a system that leaves domestic workers in the kind of difficult conditions to which the noble Lord, Lord Alton, referred. However, the reviewer claimed in paragraph 174 of his report that,
“this is not a migration issue, and should not be characterised as one”.
I do not agree with that. There is a balance to be struck here between what we can try to do to reduce the risk to domestic workers and, on the other hand, avoiding a very large loophole in our immigration system which would grow and grow.
Mr Ewins based his claim that it was not an immigration issue on the number of grants of indefinite leave to remain made in 2013 to those who had arrived in this country as domestic servants. That number is about 1,500, including dependants. That, he said, was trivial compared to the present scale of immigration. Well it is, but that is not the right number to look at. It says nothing whatever about how many of the 80,000 people who were admitted on domestic service visas over the past five years stayed on illegally. By definition, we do not know what that number is. We know that a balance must be struck between the need to reduce the scale of immigration, legal and otherwise, against concern about domestic workers.
While on the subject of numbers, the report referred to 33 cases of abuse. The noble Lord, Lord Alton, cited a much larger number—I am not sure on what
basis—but 33 was the number in the report. It was not clear whether they had all arrived in the same year, but let us assume that they did. Thirty-three in 17,000 is about two in every thousand. The author notes that that could be just the tip of an iceberg. Let us assume, therefore, that the number is 10 times larger than the 33 cases that he came across. Even then, we are only at 2%. The proposal in his report is significantly to increase the rate of overstaying by 17,000 people a year or more to improve conditions for domestic servants in the UK beyond what we now have under the Modern Slavery Act.
I am not sure that numbers are entirely the answer to this, but we need to keep an idea of proportion when we consider this quite difficult balance. We also need to consider the effect of the change proposed in the amendments on the rogue employers about whom we are concerned. Would not the knowledge that their servants were in effect being encouraged to escape cause them to tighten still further their grip on these unfortunate women and, sometimes, men? Could there be consequences for perfectly good employers? Such employers in the region frequently complain that when they come to the UK, they lose their servants, even under present conditions. Indeed, some servants choose employers who they know are coming to the UK in order that when they come here in the summer they can leave their employment. So the result might be—and we have to consider it as a possibility at least—that some of those employers will go to other destinations where the risk of losing their servants is much lower. If that were to happen, it would negate the whole purpose of these domestic servant visas.
In conclusion, the report itself has been quoted by a number of noble Lords. In paragraph 20, it acknowledges the,
“distinct lack of cogent or robust data and evidence as to the extent of such abuse”.
It also acknowledges, in paragraph 14, that there is,
“no empirical … data available to show whether the rate of abuse … has increased or decreased since the imposition of the visa tie in 2012”.
Mr Ewins also goes on, rightly, to acknowledge that there will shortly be data from exit controls, which will cast light on whether there is a serious problem here. It will cast light on whether there is a problem of overstaying; of course, it will not cast light on how individuals are treated. So I put it to noble Lords that surely the obvious solution is to wait until we have such evidence before taking a view on whether there is a valid case for changing the visa regime.