Contribution
My Lords, to follow on from what the noble Baroness has just said, my Amendments 29A and 31A would in fact reintroduce and commence the modern slavery clauses and provisions in the Illegal Migration Act 2023. The net effect of them would mean that individuals who have entered illegally would not be able to use modern slavery provisions as a route to frustrate removal, but it is important that we continue to support genuine victims at the same time. The reason I have tabled these amendments is that, while they were necessary back in 2023 when this Act was passed, the need for them has become even more pressing now.
I declare an interest as a former Home Office Minister who led on the modern slavery support system and has seen the challenges of operationalising this system and protecting victims of this awful crime, which is what we all want to do.
The world has changed. Since the Modern Slavery Act was passed, patterns of migration have shifted dramatically. The system that we built, for very good reasons, over a decade ago is now being stretched, and in some cases exploited in ways Parliament never intended. In particular, I can find no reference in the original debates that we intended to create a welfare and support system for victims of crime from all over the world, rather than for our own citizens who have been trafficked and abused. Yet that is exactly what is happening now.
In 2024, for the first time, 44% of referrals to the NRM reported exploitation overseas, overtaking those claiming exploitation within the UK, at 43%. This concern is shared across Parliament. I quote the Home Secretary who said, in response to the egregious situation that we saw connected to the one-in, one-out asylum-seeking individual who claimed that he was a victim of trafficking in France, that some asylum seekers were making “vexatious, last-minute claims” of being victims of modern slavery to block removal. The Home Secretary and the Government can simply use the measures already on the statute book. That is the fastest way to tackle this, if they can perhaps get over the “not invented here” objection.
When we have these debates, those who do the important work of supporting victims will claim and state, rightly, that it is impossible to provide definitive evidence that the system is being abused. I agree with that, which is why I have tabled amendments later on to address that point. But, whether we like it or not, there is a significant interaction between illegal arrivals and referrals into the NRM. Just this quarter, we have seen the highest number of referrals since the start of the NRM in 2009. The people who are being referred now are non-UK nationals: the largest groups being referred are Albanians, followed by Vietnamese. For context, in 2014, the entire system handled fewer than 2,500 referrals, yet last year it handled nearly 2,500 referrals just from Albania. This surge has placed immense strain on the system and on public confidence, and of course also on taxpayers and on the public purse, because the Government have committed to spending £379 million over five years on the modern slavery support system.
In the Lords debates on these clauses of the Illegal Migration Act that my amendment seeks to retain, my noble friend Lord Murray of Blidworth, speaking for the then Government, said:
“It is a central tenet of the Bill that a person who satisfies the conditions in Clause 2 will not have their asylum, human rights or modern slavery claims considered in the United Kingdom. It is a sad but incontrovertible fact that our modern slavery protections are susceptible to abuse by illegal migrants seeking to frustrate their removal from the United Kingdom. Whereas in 2019 just 6% of people arriving in the UK on a small boat and detained for return involved a modern slavery referral, the figure in 2021 was 73%”.”.—[Official Report, 10/5/23; col. 1784.]
Britain can be both compassionate and firm, but it cannot be naive. I follow my noble friend Lord Harper in asking this House to be honest that people will seek to lie about their experiences, especially when the incentives are so strong and the evidence threshold necessarily very low. These amendments would protect those exploited while removing incentives for illegal entry.