It is a great pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Cumbernauld, Kilsyth and Kirkintilloch East (Stuart C. McDonald). He supports new clause 74, which is the main thrust of what I want to talk about today.
Across the House, we have seen support for measures to fight modern-day slavery and human trafficking, but I think we should start at the beginning. Only a few years ago, this House did not even recognise human trafficking. I can remember when I came into the House and Tony Blair was Prime Minister, the great Anthony Steen tried every week from the Opposition Benches to persuade the Government that human trafficking existed. The Council of Europe brought forward proposals about human trafficking, and, to the great credit of former Prime Ministers David Cameron and my right hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May), we produced Europe’s leading anti-slavery legislation.
We should start by congratulating the Government on doing that, but we are here today to see how we can improve on that legislation. I will briefly mention my dissatisfaction with the way child victims of human trafficking are dealt with. As I have said on many occasions, we should follow the methods that we use for adults; we should not just put children into the care of local government, where they are routinely re-trafficked. That is not particularly to do with the clauses that we are debating today, but it is something that we need to look at.
My right hon. Friend the Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Sir Iain Duncan Smith) made the very fair point that we are not talking about asylum, and we are not talking about economic migrants. With economic migrants—people coming here who should not be—the victim is this country. Human trafficking victims are people who have been tricked or coerced into coming to this country, mainly with the thought that they will get a job or a career.
Let me give an example. Somebody from Hungary came into this country thinking they were going to get a job in Belfast. Instead, they were locked up in a terraced house in Belfast. The locks were on the outside of the bedroom and that girl was repeatedly raped. She was
rescued by the police and looked after. That is human trafficking, and it is completely different from people coming across the channel in small boats.
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I very much welcome the meetings I have had with the Minister on this issue and the tremendous work that my right hon. Friend the Member for Chingford and Woodford Green does. I also welcome the work of Justice and Care and, in particular, of Tatiana Gren-Jardan, who used to work for me when I was part of the all-party parliamentary group on human trafficking, and who has made this issue her passion and done so much to help the situation.