UK Borders Bill

My Lords, I, too, support the amendment. First, I pass on the apologies of my friend the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Ripon and Leeds, who has had to set off back to Yorkshire but who would have liked to be here for this amendment. We have seen this situation in Southampton in recent months. I understand that increasing evidence shows that it is difficult for some of those trafficked—in particular women, either into prostitution or into the kind of domestic service that lays them open to physical ill treatment and probably rape—to return to their own countries. That may be because they fear the same gangsters who brought them into this country or because they have been forced into prostitution and subjected to rape. Significant numbers of people are here, helpless because they have been trafficked into this country and their position is increasingly akin to that of asylum seekers. They are certainly not economic migrants because they have not come under their own steam. It is a really serious matter. In the past 18 months, we in Winchester have celebrated the centenary of the death of Josephine Butler, that remarkable campaigner in these matters during the last 30 years of the 19th century. She spent quite a bit of the 1880s and 1890s resident in the Close in Winchester because her husband was a canon. We have been reminded that there is a long tradition in this country of our failure to look with the greatest care at the victims of prostitution and similar hardships. There is a good book about her called Beating the Traffic, which links her own history through the years to the present realities and to the activities of CHASE and a number of other organisations. It is most important that this serious and still developing problem—women in particular, but also children and men, who are trafficked for use in agriculture—is taken seriously in this way.