UK Borders Bill

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Judd, will recall that at the end of June a debate on this subject was initiated by the noble Lord, Lord Sheikh, and there was another debate on it in Grand Committee a month later. We also talked about trafficking on Tuesday, so there is no lack of attention from Parliament to the massive problem of human trafficking. As I said last Tuesday, the consensus seems to be that the national action plan on tackling human trafficking maps out the right strategy and that although there has been some criticism of the delay in signing up to the Council of Europe convention—we heard it again today from the noble Lord, Lord Judd—we signed it on the day that the UK Human Trafficking Centre was established. As the Minister said in his response to the debate initiated by the noble Lord, Lord Sheikh, we are now working on the action plan to enable us to ratify the convention at the earliest possible date. In that debate, I suggested that the Government should report periodically to Parliament on progress on the implementation of the action plan, particularly on the ratification of the convention, but that was one of the points that the Minister did not have time to cover in his response. He promised to write to those who took part, but we still have to hear from him on that. This debate is not a substitute for my proposal because it would be far more useful if, in the normal course of parliamentary business, we had written reports in advance so that we could take advice from the agencies on what the Government said in their progress report before we came to debate it on the Floor of the House. In the June debate, the Minister made a useful comment on the international dimensions of trafficking. He outlined various measures being taken by the FCO and DfID with a view to reducing trafficking at source, and he particularly mentioned the work of the UKHTC in complementing the activities of the Serious Organised Crime Agency. It will be better if we can fight trafficking in the countries of origin rather than waiting until the victims arrive here to land up in brothels or as domestic slaves. But since the money to be made out of human trafficking is commonly agreed to be vast, there have to be protective measures for the victims who are rescued here as well. According to unpublished Home Office research mentioned by the JCHR, there may have been 4,000 victims of trafficking for prostitution in 2003—I wonder if that research is going to be published. Being able to give even a rough number would seem to imply that the police know where the brothels are, and I wonder if the police consider that they have adequate powers to close them down and give foreign involuntary prostitutes the chance of freedom? If there is a more vigorous approach to the problem, it could well be that the 25 safe house places offered by the Poppy Project would all be needed and the extra capacity it is now being funded to provide would soon be filled. One of the ingredients necessary to ratification of the convention is that we offer sufficient accommodation in safe houses and accompanying support to deal with the victim population. The JCHR reported that since the Poppy Project is centred in London and operates on what they described as tightly focused criteria, the scale of the problem is not reflected in the number of its clients. The expansion of the Poppy Project and the agreement with NASS, mentioned in the Government’s response to the JCHR report, may have solved the problem of accommodation, but not of the specialist support services which they agreed were necessary. Presumably there would have to be regional centres of support and accommodation for trafficked women before we could ratify the convention, and with the advice of the UKHTC, I hope the Government are now able to make a full assessment of the need.