Lord Hastings of Scarisbrick (CB)

My Lords, like all the rest of us in the Chamber, I thank my noble friend of over 40 years for his incredibly diligent work and for the work of his committee, which, as we have said, has shone a light on this very painful area: an entangled web of cheap and forced labour, modern slavery and migrant and asylum issues, all of which are in a mess. I do not wish to trivialise the issue in any way, but if your Lordships fancy a cinema trip, the current film “Mutiny”, available in cinemas now and featuring Jason Statham, is all about a conspiracy of international slavery proportions—and in fact, a great British actor exposes the best way to deal with the issue. It is quite violent, I have to say, but never mind; it is there to be seen. We are having this debate in the week in which we discover that 660 British companies have underpaid their workers—not even minimum wage, barely living wage and having to return £4 million to 27,000 people for trying to get them to do things on the cheap in the UK. This is the kind of disgrace we are focused on. I noted in particular that the report from the noble Lord’s brilliant committee states that state-imposed forced labour is an issue, and it is. When a state seeks to either criminalise, reduce or push people to the margins, it forces not just forced labour activity but wrong labour activity. This very week a young man, of British origin but of African parentage, was arrested on the streets of London and bunged behind bars again for a minor offence—nothing to do with violence or other people—simply because, as an asylum seeker trying to get the Home Office to do its job and because of its failure to do so, he found the only way to get some income to feed himself was to sell minor category B drugs. Now the taxpayer will shell out £120,000 over the next two years by simply saying that keeping him in prison is better than letting him work. That is a nonsense. That is state-imposed forced labour absence, and I hope the committee will consider in its brilliant future thinking how these minor aspects of our policy and failed government departments trap people rather than liberate and build them up.