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24 May 2007 : Column 543WH—continued
5.10 pm
Mr. Dismore: I shall not detain the House much longer. I thank hon. Members for their kind remarks about what I have done on the issue and, more importantly, what my Committee has done. When I was first appointed Chairman I was keen to refocus our work to show that there is much more to human rights than simply the rights of criminals and terrorists, although we are obviously interested in those. Human rights have a much wider application to causes that chime more with what the public are really interested in—decency and fair play, particularly to people in such disadvantaged cases as we have discussed today.
The report was the first of its kind that we did, and I am pleased that it has proved the purpose of what I was trying to achieve in trying to work in a slightly different way. It has vindicated the approach of a much broader consideration of human rights. The Minister said that the matter was thought of by the public as a fringe issue, but the report has been shown to be of its time, in that it has stimulated the debate that we have had not just today but in the country since we published it and before.
The hon. Member for Totnes (Mr. Steen) was right to highlight the issue of missing children, and the graphic way in which he did so illustrated the fact that there is a bit of an out of sight, out of mind attitude on migrant children generally, not just trafficked children, who sometimes face appalling circumstances. We can get very excited about one child, and quite rightly, but that prompts the question: what about all the others?
The hon. Member for Oxford, West and Abingdon (Dr. Harris), who is a distinguished member of my Committee and assiduous in his work on it, mentioned one of his pet subjects, to which we return from time to time—not just evidence-based policy making, which is important, but his particular hobby-horse of prostitution. It was interesting that he particularly mentioned our field visit to Italy, on which we thought an awful lot about good practice and what could be done. I was pleased to hear from my hon. Friend the Member for Llanelli (Nia Griffith), who is a relatively new member of our Committee. She did not take part in the inquiry but she has certainly picked up the issues in it and raised them effectively.
I was a little concerned by some of the comments from the Conservative Front Bench. I sympathise with the hon. and learned Member for Harborough (Mr. Garnier) for having been dropped into the debate at relatively short notice, but I am not sure whether he was on the same wavelength as the rest of us. He
focused particularly on immigration control and enforcement, whereas the tenor of the debate has been the importance of rebalancing towards the interests of victims.
I take issue with the hon. and learned Gentleman also on the timing of the debate. Although it would have been very nice to have had a debate straight away, and perhaps tried to put some pressure on the Government at that stage, his comments were rather oppositionist politics, if I may say so. A debate now, some time after we had the opportunity to see the Government’s response and not a draft action plan but the actual action plan, and after the signature of the convention, is a good time to take stock of what has happened since we produced the report, consider what remains to be done and push for further progress. If we had had the debate right at the beginning, the Government would have said, “Well, we’ve got all these things in train,” and that would have been it. Now we can actually see how far we have got.
I am pleased that the Government are considering the issue of visas for domestic workers, which is extremely important, and that we are going to get some new statistics soon. We shall return to the issue of the UN convention on the rights of the child and the reservation in relation to it. It is a theme that runs through not only this report but many others that we have done, most recently our report on the treatment of asylum seekers. The review of section 11 will be helpful, but there is no justification for not fully implementing the convention. That suggests that some children’s rights are worth less than others and that some children are not entitled to the same treatments as others. That cannot be right.
We look forward to Operation Pentameter 2, and I am pleased that the Government are starting to implement the requested reflection periods, although they are not quite as long as we would have preferred.
Mr. Steen: As the hon. Gentleman is clearly winding up, I wish to say how grateful we are both for his report and for the way in which the Minister answered the debate. It has been one of the best debates of its kind and, if the Minister does not remain in his present job, he deserves a promotion.
Mr. Dismore: I am sure that my hon. Friend the Minister has heard those remarks. As the hon. Gentleman said earlier, the fact that we have been able to conduct the debate in a non-politically partisan way has been important. We are all trying to sing from the same hymn sheet on where we are going, even if we have little differences on the timetable for arriving at our destination.
When we debated the UK Borders Bill—I think it was last week or the week before—I was given a commitment that although we cannot have a formal timetable, we will be given regular progress reports on the implementation of the action plan. That is very welcome. The Minister is right—I posed an awful lot of questions, and I did not expect all the answers today. It would be helpful if he could write to us about the ones to which we did not have answers today and keep us fully informed. I am grateful to him for his offer to come back to discuss the issues with us in the future.
There has been a bit of out of sight, out of mind about the issue, and I wish to conclude with two quotations from General MacArthur on the second world war. When surrender was signed, he said:
“These proceedings are now concluded.”
I do not think that we can say that. We will be saying his other famous quotation, after the Americans were thrown out of the Philippines: “We will return.” He did, and we will.
Mr. Dismore: He said “We will”, I think.
When we go home after our work tonight and nod off in front of “Newsnight” with a glass of wine, or
whatever we do, we need to reflect on the fact that while we are doing that in the safety of our own homes, thousands of trafficked women will be being raped. Trafficked domestic workers, locked away, will be slaving for abusive employers. Trafficked workers will be being forced to labour for excessive hours in illegal conditions, and trafficked children will be being subjected to all manner of abuse. That is why the debate is important and why we have pressed the Minister for urgent action. I understand his reservations, but we are doing that on behalf of all those people, not on our behalf.
Adjourned accordingly at sixteen minutes past Five o’clock.
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