Chris Murray

I pay tribute to the right hon. Member for Staffordshire Moorlands (Dame Karen Bradley), both for securing this debate and for her legacy in this field. As the Chair of the Home Affairs Committee, her ongoing commitment to the issue is palpable, and I look forward to working with her on it in the years ahead. We are 10 years on from the Modern Slavery Act. While I am not in the habit of praising the Home Office under the previous Conservative Government, I am not so nakedly partisan that I cannot break that habit on this occasion. It is true that the UK’s Modern Slavery Act was world leading. Its Scottish counterpart, the Human Trafficking and Exploitation (Scotland) Act 2015, which is also 10 years old this year, was equally groundbreaking. While we recognise that, we must also admit that although the Act took us two steps forward, we have undoubtedly gone one step back. The terms “modern slavery” and “human trafficking” strike fear into our hearts and capture our attention. They sound like the stuff of a TV drama, and frequently they do involve the most horrific, vivid crimes in society and the worst of humanity, but we must not let that fool us into thinking that modern slavery only happens at the extremes, or only in the big metropolitan city far from us—it happens everywhere, in every community and every constituency. As we have heard from several hon. Members today, it affects men as well as women; its victims are children as well as adults; it affects British people as much as foreign nationals, and indeed more than foreign nationals; and it is labour exploitation as much as it is sexual exploitation.