My Lords, in moving Amendment 174, I will leave my noble friends Lord German and Lord Wallace to speak to their Amendments 181 and 183. I received a message asking me to pass on the apologies of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Bristol, who signed this amendment; she is in her place, but I suspect that she is going to make a hasty exit at some point fairly soon. She is of course the bishop with safeguarding responsibilities. I have her speech on my iPad; we are not allowed to read out other noble Lords’ speeches, which is a pity because it is much more neatly set out than the rather scrappy notes that I have.
The very unhappy position of some—too many—overseas domestic workers and the appalling situations that many of them are in were explained very powerfully to many of your Lordships during the passage of the Modern Slavery Act. One of the things that remains in my memory is the thanks that we received after the discussion on the Bill, even though we had not achieved the changes that we sought. A number of women who had been treated as slaves and prisoners but who had escaped and have connections with the charities working in the sector, particularly Kalayaan, were very keen to get us all together after those defeats to say thank you and of course to continue the campaign. They presented each of us with a single flower, which felt very significant.
It was a cross-party effort at that time. At the end of the day, we did not succeed in amending the Bill, but the Government commissioned an independent review into the terms of the overseas domestic worker visa to see whether it facilitated abuse and, as a result of that, made some changes to the visa regime in 2016. I am advised that these remain, in practice, ineffectual. The Government accepted in 2015-16 that workers need an escape route and should not be trapped working for abusive employers, so they reinstated the right of workers to change employers, but it is limited to the time remaining on the worker’s visa, which is kept at six months—so in practice a worker has weeks or, rarely, months, but very little time remaining to find new employment. Of course, most employers need the certainty of having someone working for a longer period. Many workers do not have their passports and they cannot demonstrate that they have valid leave, so automatically they fail work checks.
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The Government also committed to the implementation of mandatory information sessions for workers newly arrived in the UK, in recognition that many—I suspect almost all—workers did not know what rights they had here. These information sessions were also intended to help them to know where to find help, if they found themselves in abusive employment. The right reverend Prelate tabled a Parliamentary Question last year, which confirmed that the commitment has now been abandoned.
Given the barriers that such workers still face in the UK, this amendment would simply serve to reinstate rights which holders of this visa originally had under the terms of the overseas domestic worker visa in place from 1998 to 2012. Concern has been expressed by United Nations experts, who say that they firmly believe that migrant workers should be granted the right to change their employer—and I have explained the problems here. It sent out a communication in July last year to which the Government have responded, confirming that they are looking to understand the nature of exploitation and are developing proposals to reform the route from next year—that is, this year.
There is a lot of evidence that demonstrates that reported abuse is lower when migrant domestic workers—this does not apply only to domestic workers—have rights that enable them to challenge abuse. These rights are not some sort of Trojan horse enabling people to come into the UK on an overseas domestic
worker visa and then join the wider workforce. They could not, under this amendment, change work sector; they would have to register with the Home Office. They would have a right to renew but, provided that they were in employment and not dependent on benefits, a right to be joined by family and to be granted indefinite leave to remain after five years, provided that their employment at that time was secure.
Noble Lords will appreciate that this would provide stability and certainty, to which I have referred, to those who are forced to work in the teens of hours each day, every day, and to sleep in the corner of a kitchen, fed on nothing more than scraps from a family’s table. I am not suggesting, of course, that every overseas domestic worker is in this situation, but it seems that many are—and one in this situation would be too many.
The amendment also refers to the visas granted when a diplomatic family brings in a servant for the family. Again, this does not of course apply to all diplomats, but I remember that in 2015 we were told of examples of families from the Gulf with Filipino servants. It would make it practicable for them to find other employment.
As Callaghan put it, working conditions should not have to deteriorate to the point of slavery before workers can access redress and justice. I see that the right reverend Prelate has had to leave. She would have said that, by the standards of this Bill, this is a very modest amendment, merely restoring a model that worked well in the past. I beg to move.