My Lords, like all other noble Lords, I strongly support the Bill. It is wonderful that Bob Blackman MP should have got it through with all the amendments in the Commons. It is hugely to his credit and that of the Government that that happened. We are fortunate that the noble Lord, Lord Best, opened the debate today with an excellent speech. We need to congratulate the Government, as others have done, on supporting the Bill—and not only supporting it but supporting it with finance, which is probably the first time that that has happened in many generations.
I will draw the attention of the House to two vulnerable groups of people about whom nothing has been said so far this morning. They urgently need priority housing. I declare my interests as vice-chairman of the Human Trafficking Foundation and a co-chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Human Trafficking and Modern Slavery. The first group consists of overseas trafficked victims who come to this country and go through the national referral mechanism. They have 45 days plus of accommodation organised by the Salvation Army. They are looked after during that period. If they do not have conclusive grounds, they are rejected and after two days: after 48 hours they have to leave the secure accommodation. If they are found by the national referral mechanism to be conclusively victims of trafficking in this county, they have to leave after two weeks and absolutely nothing is done for them unless one or other of the charities comes in to help them.
They are to be contrasted with asylum seekers, who have a number of rights. Many of them are pushed into the asylum process, which does not offer the sort of help that they need and which they begin to get by going through the national referral mechanism. They have no status and no rights, and many of them go on the streets. That is why I am referring to them today.
On the streets they may well be re-trafficked, with the women, and some men, going into prostitution in order to survive. This is a scandal as a national referral mechanism set up by government has identified them as victims of trafficking and identified that they have been slaves. Then they go missing. Speaking as a
former lawyer, I say that this is a side-effect of some importance, because it is more difficult for the Crown Prosecution Service and the police to prosecute successfully to conviction because the victims do not have accommodation and the police cannot find them. That is the first group.
The second group consists of the British victims of slavery and trafficking. I do not know how many noble Lords know—I only learned recently—that soup kitchens are good places for traffickers to target those whom they wish to make slaves. In Westminster there is a soup kitchen which, as the Shadow City report of 2013 pointed out, has traffickers targeting it two or three times every night.
In 2008, the Swedish police sent seven dossiers on British people who were slaves in different parts of Sweden. This was particularly taken up in the Connors case. The Connors were a number of English Gypsies in Bedfordshire who I am glad to say are now serving long sentences of imprisonment. They picked up a number of English men at soup kitchens and took them to the north of Sweden. We are a source country, not just a country of destination or transit, for some reason particularly for workers on construction sites in Sweden. It was only because one of a group of Swedish slaves in northern Sweden managed to get to Stockholm and report this to the Swedish police that the police travelled 500 miles north, banged on the door of the caravan where a number of these men were locked in, got the door open and said to them, “Do you realise that you are slaves?”—because they did not. The reason I know about this incident is that I had been working with Frank Field MP and the then MP Sir John Randall on an inquiry for the then Home Secretary, Theresa May, and one of the victims from Sweden came and gave evidence to us. It is interesting to note that we are also a source country. We have homeless English people on the streets who are being targeted and find themselves becoming victims both in this country and abroad.
Hugely to his credit, the very active Independent Anti-Slavery Commissioner, Kevin Hyland, commissioned a report from an NGO, The Passage, which reported in January this year. It made a large number of important recommendations, one of which was about awareness. A great many social workers have absolutely no idea that the people they see on the streets can be the victims of trafficking and slavery. But the consensus of the report was how enormously important it is to provide support of all sorts, including housing of course, for the victims of trafficking who are found on our streets. So there is a clear need for priority housing and free advice for these two groups of very vulnerable people.
An example of what can go wrong is mothers with children who are moving from one form of temporary accommodation to another or are indeed homeless. I learned about one mother who had had to move house and so had two children in school in one London borough and one child in school in another borough. That is not a helpful situation for someone who is a trafficked victim from overseas.
The Bill should, could and, I hope, will do something about these two groups. I am acutely aware that the noble Lord, Lord Best, does not want any amendments,
much though I would like to put down an amendment to deal specifically with the victims of trafficking and modern slavery. But perhaps I may refer to Clause 2(2), which states:
“The service must be designed to meet the needs of persons in the authority’s district including, in particular, the needs of … any other group that the authority identify as being at particular risk of homelessness in the authority’s district”.
I hope and expect that the two groups about which I have spoken will be seen as coming under that provision.
It is interesting to note that in November last year, before the Bill came to this House, Bristol City Council recognised that there was a local authority responsibility to provide welfare support for the victims of trafficking and modern slavery in order to avoid breaching Articles 3 and 4 of the European Convention on Human Rights as well as, I am glad to say, the Council of Europe Convention on Action against Trafficking in Human Beings and the EU directive on human trafficking. I hope that the relevant national and local authorities will listen and that the Bill will help those two groups.
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