My Lords, I have added my name to those of noble Lords who oppose Clause 62 standing part of the Bill. I echo remarks made by noble colleagues.
As the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, just said, Clause 62 goes to an essential point of principle in the entire operation of how modern slavery protections ought to work. The proposal is that Clause 62 makes victimhood a conditional state. In fact, it sets up a division between worthy and unworthy victims, as the noble Baroness commented. This would be such a retrograde step. If we are serious about destroying the business model of modern slavery and identifying and prosecuting as many slavers as we can, we must find ways of incentivising and supporting all victims to come forwards. By excluding from support those who have acted in bad faith—a term for which I greatly welcome more clarity from the Minister on what it would mean—or those deemed a threat to public order, we are creating two categories of victim.
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Over the road in the General Synod of the Church of England debate yesterday, there was a plea not to be naive. As was said, traffickers and modern slavers are not stupid. They know how to use criminal exploitation to trap people into criminal activity, to scare them into not approaching the police. We know this from work on the ground. When speaking to support charities and victims in my role as lead bishop on modern slavery, I have heard often that one of the most effective ways to keep victims in fear is to force them to commit crimes so that they will be criminalised if they come forward to the authorities.
Life for legislators—indeed, for everyone—would be much easier if there were nice, clear binaries: blameless victims and evil enslavers. The reality, as anyone who has worked on the ground with those trafficked through county lines and many other forms of criminal exploitation can attest, is that things are not that easy. People who have done bad things can and often do become victims of slavery. People who have become victims of slavery find themselves compelled to do bad things.
In opposing Clause 62, I am not suggesting that people should not be held responsible for their actions. They should, but as a society we have responsibilities too and one of those is to break the way in which modern slavers operate. Creating a two-tier system of victimhood will, I fear, strengthen it.