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24 May 2007 : Column 524WH—continued
Dr. Evan Harris (Oxford, West and Abingdon) (LD):
It is a pleasure to take part in a debate under your chairmanship, Mr. Bercow. I think that this is the first time that I have done so. I do not know whether placing you in the Chair is an attempt by the powers that be to muzzle you, given the way that you have expressed opinions in the past. I certainly hope not, and knowing you as I do, I suspect that, other than at the times when you are in the Chair, when you will of course display the appropriate demeanour and act with appropriate neutrality,
your passion for putting your view across will be undiminished. I look forward to that.
I welcome the debate. I am pleased that we are here. I have two hats in a sense: I am speaking for the Liberal Democrats, but I am also a member of the Joint Committee on Human Rights. Indeed, I think that it was I who first suggested that the Committee conduct an inquiry in this area. I am pleased that we have reached the stage at which we have had the Government response to the inquiry and a whole lot besides, with regard to the action plan, and that we are debating that.
I put on the record my thanks to the Chairman of the Committee, the hon. Member for Hendon (Mr. Dismore), for his support in conducting the inquiry and the way in which the Committee, under his chairmanship, did a lot of work in gathering evidence from both written and oral submissions, both in this country and abroad. It is appropriate to pay tribute to the staff of the Committee, including the then Clerk and the then Committee specialist—who have moved on to other, possibly even greater things—for their efforts in producing what was a very difficult report to produce, because of the wide-ranging subject matter.
I pay tribute to other members of the Committee for the work that they did. I pay particular tribute both to the hon. Member for Wakefield (Mary Creagh), who cannot be here today but who applied a great deal of diligence and interest to the inquiry, and to Baroness Stern, who has always taken a huge interest in the position of victims in our society, whether in custody, which is her specialty, or in other areas.
While I am paying tributes, I ought to say that, although the Minister will soon find out that I am not happy with the actions that the Government have taken so far, or the absence of action taken by the Government, no one can doubt his willingness to engage in an extremely pleasant and open way, unlike some Ministers and perhaps some Opposition spokespeople, in both the other Opposition party and my own. The Minister’s willingness to engage has enabled us to make more progress on understanding where the Government are coming from, even if we do not agree with them, than we otherwise would have done. I thank him for that.
I shall talk in a moment about the speech made by the hon. Member for Totnes (Mr. Steen), but it is appropriate to pay tribute to him first for the efforts that he has made to raise the profile of this subject in Parliament outside the human rights report by setting up the all-party group on the trafficking of women and children and leading it so actively and with such obvious passion that there is a danger, when we walk through Portcullis House, of never reaching our destination because we are stopped by the hon. Gentleman to be told exactly how we can contribute further to the work of the group. Such enthusiasm is noted, valuable and appreciated, as is the work that he has done in other Adjournment debates and parliamentary questions, because he has applied to the issue assiduousness and tenacity and has developed the expertise that is required to deal with such a big and complex issue.
Mr. Steen: I thank the hon. Gentleman for his kind comments. He did accept becoming joint secretary of the all-party group—an appointment that allowed him to make much quicker progress around Portcullis House.
Dr. Harris: It is very gracious of the hon. Gentleman to say that, because I have not been able to attend all the meetings of the group, despite being an officer of it, but he knows that the group has my full support, as does the approach that he has taken.
On the specifics of what we are discussing, it is appropriate for me to say a few words about the contributions that we have heard. The hon. Member for Hendon—without taking too much time, which I think we all appreciate and, perhaps, can luxuriate in now—covered the whole range of our inquiry and touched on the whole range of Government responses. He made the association, as we must, with the 200th anniversary of the abolition of slavery. It is important still to raise the profile of this issue as a modern form of slavery and what an evil, heinous business it is. He was right to draw attention to the scale of the matter and to how difficult it is to know its scale, given that so much of it is by definition underground and undetected, and given the range that exists between trafficking for the purposes of labour exploitation, sexual exploitation and child exploitation.
I am pleased that the hon. Gentleman referred to the inability of categories of workers, who are coming into this country as migrants, to change their visas. I have nothing to add except my full support for the point that he rightly made about how that is unnecessary and inconsistent with the protection of victims. If we are to have faith in the ability of our immigration services to make determinations on the facts, blanket rules are the wrong way to proceed, because they themselves create victims.
I shall say a few words about the UK action plan and where it falls short. The hon. Gentleman drew attention to the areas in which some content of the action plan was welcome. He was right to make the fundamental point that we make in our report: the response to the problem of trafficking must be at least as much a human rights and victim-based approach as an immigration-based one. In fact, I would go further, and I think that the tenor and content of our report went further, by saying that an enforcement approach—an immigration approach—is counter-productive in many ways, because it deters victims from seeking help and makes their plight much worse in many cases. The comparison with Italy, which I shall cover if I have time, is very important in that respect.
The hon. Member for Totnes, in a speech that was a tour de force on just one area of this subject—child trafficking—has put on the record for all of us and for those outside this Chamber who will read his contribution in Hansard a very detailed exposition and analysis of the problem, the Government response and where the Government response falls short. I share all his views. Only a lack of time, and the recognition that it would be inappropriate to repeat in my own words many of his points, prevents me from saying more about that. He made a telling analogy by referring to the fact that there are tens of missing children, who are probably being exploited and treated very badly in many if not all cases, but that that has had so little attention compared with the very sad and tragic case of one little girl in Europe.
The hon. Gentleman was right to keep coming back to the reservation in the convention. It is Liberal Democrat policy that that reservation should end, and
we have made that point consistently in parliamentary questions and debates, usually in the House of Lords. I was delighted when, just before the Government agreed to sign the convention, the Conservatives agreed with our position that it was necessary, appropriate and beneficial to sign it—obviously with the intention of ratifying it and complying with its content. I look forward to hearing from the hon. and learned Member for Harborough (Mr. Garnier) whether his party’s position is that the reservation should be ended, because that would have a significant effect on Government policy. I do not want to get too party political, but one thing often follows another in that respect.
The hon. Member for Llanelli (Nia Griffith) is a recent addition to the Joint Committee on Human Rights. She is also a welcome addition, because she is assiduous in her attendance and she has got stuck in to the issues that we have raised faster than anyone else did when they joined the Committee. She certainly keeps me on my toes when I ask questions and it is not obvious to her, or perhaps even to me, where they are going. I fear that she may well do the same now if I am not careful, given that she has now moved to sit behind the Minister.
A problem with this issue is the profusion of documents that exist, starting with the Joint Committee’s report, although the problem did not start there. There is the Government’s response to that report, the Government’s consultation on their action plan, the Government’s publication of responses to that consultation and then the Government’s action plan, which was published in March. It is hard to cross-reference all those documents in an easy way.
Today, I shall focus on some of our recommendations in the report and on the Government’s response to it, which was published in December 2006. I shall also look at what progress has been made on the UK action plan since then. I accept that, in doing so, I shall not cover all of the issues that ought to be raised, but I think it important that we consider matters logically.
The Committee considered the scale and extent of the problem. In recommendation 2, we urged the Government to
“publish the research into organised crime markets currently being conducted by Home Office researchers, which may assist in providing a clearer picture of the scale and extent of human trafficking into the UK.”
We also argued that there should be more research, which the Government have accepted. They have also accepted that existing research should be published, with the obvious caveats regarding intelligence and so on. They said in their response that they would publish their research into organised crime markets early in 2007.
Will the Minister tell us where the Government are up to with commissioning new research and with publishing existing research? He will know that I believe that evidence-based policy must be based on evidence that is published and peer reviewed or at least available for people to see, because, even if we believe a very honest Minister, as we do in this case, not everyone will necessarily agree that what he says is correct and underpinned.
We also addressed demand management in the report. Recommendation 7 states:
“We commend the imaginative publicity techniques employed by Operation Pentameter to change the attitudes of men towards women and raise awareness of the phenomenon of trafficking. However, we recommend the authorities evaluate the effectiveness of these techniques.”
When money is being spent on something as important as this, independent, formal evaluation is needed. It is not enough to have the anecdotal opinions of the people who are running the scheme saying that they think that they are doing a good job and that they have seen a website on which someone said, “Oh, there is an issue about trafficking.” That is effectively all that there is.
This matter is difficult to address, but it is essential that we understand the attitudes of people in this country who are involved in trafficking for the purposes of sexual exploitation. There are probably tens of thousands of men in this country, possibly even more, who use and abuse trafficked women. We need to understand their attitudes and what makes them do that before we can work out how to change their attitudes and behaviour. It is as simple as that. The fact that UK citizens take an active, possibly knowing, but perhaps unknowing, role in this crime and evil trade is a big, silent thing that not enough people talk about.
One issue that the Committee was not able to get into, tempting though it may have been, is whether our approach to the criminalisation of all prostitution and all use of prostitutes is the right way forward. There is huge international debate on that. The Swedish feminist view is that men should always be prosecuted for using prostitutes, regardless of whether the prostitutes are victims of trafficking or obvious victims of coercion. They believe that prostitution can never be consented to, because it is exploitive by definition. In alliance with them, the Americans generally take the view that both the prostitute and the client are committing an offence. Whether that view is based on religious fervour or the American establishment’s outlook on life is unclear, but that is their position.
Some European countries, such as the Netherlands and Germany, take the view that prostitution has always been with us and that having some form of regulated and decriminalised prostitution might produce less demand for prostitution that is even more exploitive than what currently exists. They believe that, if some form of prostitution is deemed more acceptable, users of prostitutes will not run the risk of not knowing where the women whom they go to see come from.
These are complex issues, but there is evidence to suggest that demand for trafficked women is less in countries with some degree of decriminalisation, and I regret that the Government and Parliament have failed to explore these issues in an open-minded way. There is clearly an argument for doing something in this area, in the hope that it will diminish the problem. One way of looking at it is that, if men feel that they are breaking the law, they will be far less worried about the extent to which they are breaking it.
On a similar and also difficult subject, our report highlighted an unfortunate contradiction in the Government’s policy. On the one hand, they rightly tell men, “We want you to report instances when you think that you’ve come across women who are victims of trafficking for sexual exploitation.” We know from
Italy that the users of prostitutes and trafficked women are often a good source of such information and that women are rescued and traffickers prosecuted as a result of such reports to the authorities.
On the other hand, the Government tell men that having sex with women who are victims of trafficking for sexual exploitation is a sexual offence, because it is sex without genuine consent, and that they will be prosecuted for it. One cannot fail to see the contradiction in saying, “We will prosecute you for coming into contact with these women,” while also saying, “We want you to report what you have done.” That simply is not realistic, and that contradiction fundamentally undermines the Government’s efforts.
One of our recommendations that has not yet been mentioned is our call for a 24-hour telephone line on which to report users of women who are trafficked for sexual exploitation and to give information about victims. When we went to Italy, we were told that that has been extremely effective there. I think that the UK Government have set up a telephone line for authorities to get advice, but have not gone as far as we recommended. I should be grateful if the Minister could tell us whether he recognises that suggestion as a potential way forward.
Our recommendations 11 and 12 deal with legislative change and whether the UK Borders Bill would be an appropriate place to make it clear in primary legislation, especially in respect of section 2 of the Asylum and Immigration (Treatment of Claimants, etc.) Act 2004, that victims of trafficking will not be prosecuted for criminal or immigration offences that they may have committed because they are victims of trafficking. That does not just relate to victims of trafficking for sexual exploitation, because there are other forms of victim, as the hon. Member for Totnes mentioned.
The Government have not taken that approach. As the hon. Member for Hendon said, they have clearly said that the Crown Prosecution Service has discretion on whether or not to act to stop prosecutions where such things come to light. That is not good enough, and I do not believe that the Joint Committee would have thought that it was good enough when it made its recommendation.
In this context, page 16 of the Joint Committee’s 13th report of this Session, on the UK Borders Bill, contains a section on human trafficking that states:
“We welcome the Bill’s extension of the scope of the existing trafficking offences, which implements one of the proposals in the...UK Action Plan on Trafficking of Human Beings. We are disappointed, however, that the opportunity has not been taken in this Bill to introduce more effective protection for the victims of trafficking. In our recent report...we concluded that the current level of protection provided to trafficking victims is far from adequate from a human rights perspective.”
Our report argued that we do not want our report on human trafficking to be cherry-picked, and we set out a number of specific things that we wish to happen. Page 17 states that
“where there are reasonable grounds to believe that a person is a victim of trafficking that person shall not be removed from the UK until the process for identifying whether they are such a victim is complete; a recovery and reflection period of 3 months should be granted to a person who has been identified as being a victim of trafficking, during which time no immigration enforcement measures shall be taken against them; and renewable residence permits of up to 6 months’ duration be granted to victims of trafficking.”
The greatest disappointment in the Government’s evidence about the pull factor is that, in their response to our report and in the UK action plan, there is no clear timetable or acceptance that that will be provided. That is necessary so that the convention can be ratified, and I want the Minister to set out whether he feels that the convention that he and his colleague have now signed can be ratified without those provisions being met and why we do not even have a clear timetable for the convention’s ratification. By July 2007, there will be an action plan for an action plan on how the convention can be ratified, but that is not good enough. In respect of the permits and the reflection periods, this is vital.
Our report urged the Government to examine best practice in Europe. In Italy, we found that the fact that there would be adequate reflection periods and that there was the opportunity for renewable residence permits for victims to be granted meant that victims felt confident to come forward. It also meant that non-governmental organisations were able to engage directly with prostitutes on the streets of Rome, Venice and elsewhere; indeed, those NGOs were funded by the Government under their legislation.
The hon. Member for Wakefield and I went out with representatives of one of those NGOs to meet prostitutes on the streets of Rome. In Rome, it is very much in your face on the streets; every 200 yards one sees a woman or a group of women, or, in some areas, transsexual men, who are prostitutes. Many of them come from other countries and many of them have undoubtedly been trafficked to Italy. However, they are clearly reachable, so although it is not pleasant to see, one of the plus sides of the system—if that is what it can be called—is that most of the women are not tucked away in massage parlours, as they are in this country, but are available. The NGOs can reach them and give them condoms and advice on sexual health, as we did. They are able to tell them that things do not have to be this way and that they can get residence permits, with or without co-operation, if they meet humanitarian grounds for renewable residence permits.
We asked the Italian authorities how much abuse there is, and how many people have their residence permits removed on the basis of not staying within the system, let alone pretending to be victims of gang rape. Italian politics has a pretty active anti-immigration right wing, but the Italian authorities from the left or right could not tell us about a single case. If not unanimity, there was a broad consensus that that was the right approach. Indeed, the Bossi-Fini legislation, which toughened up immigration rules, left that policy well alone, because it is recognised as a success. My main questions for the Minister are: what can he say on this subject? What steps has he taken to identify the best practice in Europe?
I am conscious that we have plenty of time, but I do not wish to exploit that fact because I know that the two Front Benchers will be keen to speak. I merely wish to raise a couple of more issues. I am conscious that, in so doing, I am concentrating mainly on the victims of trafficking for sexual exploitation. That is partly because the hon. Members for Hendon and for Totnes covered the other areas so clearly.
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