Extract from report
stage (Lords) (day 3) of the Illegal Migration Bill
Amendment 168
Moved by
168: After Clause 61, insert the following new Clause—
“Organised immigration crime enforcement(1) The Crime and Courts
Act 2013 is amended as follows.(2) In section 1
(the National Crime
Agency , after subsection (10) insert—“(10A) The
NCA has a specific function to combat organised crime where the
purpose of that crime is to enable the illegal entry of a person
into the United Kingdom via the English Channel.(10B) The NCA
must maintain a unit (a “Cross-Border People Smuggling Unit”) to
coordinate the work undertaken in cooperation with international
partners in pursuit of the function mentioned in subsection
(10A).””Member's explanatory statement
This new Clause would give the National Crime
Agency a legal responsibility for tackling organised
immigration crime across the Channel, and to maintain a specific
unit to undertake work related to that responsibility.
(Lab)
My Lords, Amendment 168 would introduce a new clause, giving:
“the National Crime Agency a
legal responsibility for tackling organised immigration crime
across the Channel, and to maintain a specific unit to undertake
work related to that responsibility”.
I thank the National Crime
Agency for its briefing this morning, which was very
helpful, and Home Office Ministers for helping to facilitate
it.
Not for one moment am I suggesting in this amendment that any
Minister, the Government or any Member of this House does not
want to see the criminal gangs which exploit vulnerable people
tackled and these criminals prosecuted. I also say at the outset
that there will be many officials, officers and various agents
working hard to do just that, and we should commend them for
their work.
Apart from brief debates, the focus has been on deterring
migrants, detention and deportation. All of that has been the
subject of lively debate, disagreement and discussion. Clearly,
that is a huge area of work which, so far, I suggest—hence my
amendment—has not received the scrutiny it merits. This point was
forcefully and powerfully made by the noble Baroness, Lady
Meacher, in Committee.
There are many questions, some of which were raised in Committee.
If I highlight some, I hope noble Lords will see the importance
of this amendment and this short debate. One of the plan’s
objectives is to concentrate on disrupting the provision of
dinghies and equipment. How successful has that been in
disrupting the flow of migrants? Tackling the criminal gangs
requires international co-operation with countries across Europe
and beyond. How is this co-ordinated? Are there any problems with
such co-operation and agreement? How is the sharing of
intelligence working? How is the sharing of data and joint
policing working? Is that working effectively and do the
Government need to do more to ensure that we achieve our common
goal of disrupting these criminal gangs and deterring the flow of
boats and migrants across the channel?
Can the Minister give us a figure for prosecutions? I have not
seen the most recent and up-to-date figures; it would be useful
for your Lordships’ House to hear them. Are those arrested from
the boats and prosecuted the small fry, so to speak, or the big
figures who run these horrific operations? We read in our
newspapers that much of it is done and organised online—it is
almost advertised. How effective have the social media companies
been in taking such sites down? Do the law enforcement and
intelligence agencies require government help to inject some
urgency into what the social media companies do with these
sites?
All of this requires the NCA to be supported by the Government
here and across the continent more widely. My amendment, on which
I will seek to test the opinion of the House at the appropriate
time, asks whether one amendment within the whole range of
amendments we have debated around this Bill can demonstrate the
concern we all have regarding how we tackle these criminal gangs.
It would allow the NCA and others to highlight what they are
doing; it would allow us to shine a light on what is happening,
and to assess it and inject a focus that will let us all achieve
what we want.
We need to deal with the challenge that we face, but we need to
ensure, as much as we can, working with our own agencies and our
international partners, that the full weight of our state and
others will be brought to bear on those who run these criminal
gangs. They prey on the vulnerabilities of often desperate
people, including children, and exploit others’ misfortune. There
should be no hiding place for these modern-day smugglers.
Lord Swire (Con)
My Lords, Amendment 168AZA stands in my name. When I first tabled
this in Committee, it was supported by my noble and learned
friend Lord Garnier—who is his place and will, I hope, be saying
something about it shortly—and my noble friend . However, due to
my complete incompetence, they seem to have fallen off this time,
although I know that they are here—one physically and the other
in spirit.
6.30pm
I rise without any sense of optimism that my amendment will be
taken as part of the Bill, as I think it has failed to catch the
imagination of noble Lords on all sides of the House. I say
gently: it is up to them to explain why they do not think that it
has merit. I think it is uncontentious and that it is
impossible—just to repeat what I said in Committee, having said
that I would not—to have an informed and civilised debate about
illegal crossings or migratory figures unless we know the total
number of immigrants we already have in this country.
To put it into context, it is perhaps worth reminding ourselves
that, last year, 1.2 million people moved to the UK, giving a net
immigration figure of 606,000. Migration Watch calculates—the
noble Lord, Lord Green, is nodding—that, if the levels continue
along these same lines, the UK population will rise to between 83
million and 87 million by 2046. That is 15 to 18 new Birminghams
in terms of homes. Given the debates that we are having about the
pressure on the health service and the pressure for first-time
buyers, we really need to think about the sort of country this
would be if we had to face those pressures. I am sympathetic to
my noble friends and , who talked about this in an
honest and open way. I rather fear that my noble friend the
Minister will try to tell us that all these figures are available
to us. I will return to that in a minute because I contest that
point.
I repeat myself but, once we find out, and I believe we can find
out, the amount of people who are here already illegally—I have
no particular view about an amnesty or whether they should go
through some retrospective process—we need to find out where they
are. I fundamentally believe that the first duty of any
Government is to know who is living in their country, who is
coming into their country and, indeed, who is leaving their
country. Quite honestly, we simply do not have those figures.
In a humanitarian context, surely we should not do nothing in
terms of finding out where these people are and what they are
doing. By doing nothing, by ignoring this matter, we are surely
consigning them to the twilight of society. They are unable to
access services in the same way we do, they are not contributing
to society through NICs, we do not get the benefit and they do
not get the benefit. There is more that we can do in this
area.
As I said, my noble friend the Minister will, I suspect, reject
the idea of this amendment and will say that the information is
published and is available. Well, that is true, but only up to a
point. Not all the information is published, and the information
that is published is extremely hard to find and is not all
available in one single place where people can see it, understand
it and so better inform their views as to what levels of
migration they want to see in this country. The same applies to
foreign national offenders, who I have also included in this
amendment.
All my amendment seeks to do is to say that, on an annual basis,
the Secretary of State must lay before each House of Parliament a
report on illegal migration in the UK and the statistics as
required by this amendment. It is not a particularly contentious
or difficult amendment. To those who think, “If they are here
illegally, how can we possibly find out where they are?”, I say
that you can find that out—the supermarkets have a system and
there are other systems that I spoke about in Committee, which I
will not repeat this evening. It is a question of will to find
out how many people are in this country already and what the
total population of this country is. I believe that, once we have
that information, it will better inform people’s views about the
levels of migration they want to see in the years ahead.
(CB)
My Lords, I had not planned to speak in this debate, but I feel I
must rise to support the amendment moved by the noble Lord,
.
The Prime Minister repeatedly talks about “stopping the boats” as
one of his top five priorities—you often get the feeling that it
is in fact his top priority. If this Government really wanted to
tackle the villains, the traffickers and the modern slave owners
and, along with the French Government, round them up and put them
where they need to be, they would have done it. Instead of doing
that, however, the Government think, “No, we will leave those
guys alone; we will focus on removing the rights of the victims,
the trafficked people, the modern slaves, the unaccompanied
children, the people escaping persecution and appalling
treatment”.
This amendment is unusual. In all the debates we have had, the
focus has been on the victims and on removing the safeguards for
the victims. This amendment is appealing to the Government to
give a duty to the NCA to round up the traffickers, the modern
slave owners, and so on. It seems to me that the Government
cannot say, “Oh, sorry, we cannot do that, it is too difficult;
we just have to make life hell for the victims—that way we will
deter them from coming”. I really hope that everybody in this
Chamber will support the amendment in the name of the noble Lord,
, as being the single
attempt—throughout all these debates—to have the Government focus
their efforts where those efforts should be focused.
(Non-Afl)
My Lords, I rise in support of Amendment 168AZA. The noble Lord,
Lord Swire, has explained why it is a very modest but important
part of this discussion.
One reason why I think there is substantial public support for
the Bill, at least in terms of the headlines and broad brush
strokes, if not the detail—we have heard from the wide range of
amendments the potential problems when looking at the detail of
the Bill—is that people feel as though things are out of control.
That is viscerally expressed by people seeing the boats arriving.
The difficulty is that, in a discussion—even in this Chamber, but
certainly beyond this Chamber—about what is really going on, many
people feel as though they are confronting smoke and mirrors.
They do not know who is here and under what status they are
here.
I said at Second Reading—or at some stage, anyway—that many
people feel as though they are being gaslit. When they raise
concerns, they are told—as we have just heard a bit of—that these
are trafficked people and victims. One reason why I support the
amendment introduced by the noble Baroness, Lady Stroud, a moment
ago is that I feel that the terms “asylum seeker” and “refugee
status” are being sullied by being used in a way that is
unhelpfully broad and vague, often quite promiscuously and
illegitimately, in order to say to the British public, “What are
you worried about?” The problem is that the generosity of spirit
around refugees is being tested, to say the least.
Therefore, we need to have a sense of proportion and to know what
is going on. It is quite straightforward: we do not, which means
that people bandy around emotive headlines and accusations
against the British public—often unfairly—as though they are all
xenophobic, they do not care, and so on. Also, quite grand
statements are made. I think people want to know very clearly who
is here illegally and in what category they are here.
I commend the noble Lord, Lord Swire, for making the point that
it is the obligation of this Government—or a Labour Government or
any Government—to know who lives within our borders. If you do
not know, then you do not have national sovereignty. You cannot
run a country in which you say, “Oh, sorry, it is too difficult
to know”. Anyone who says, “Find out for yourself” has not tried.
We have all tried and we want to know that the people who run
this society do know and therefore have a handle on it.
(Con)
My Lords, before I speak in support of my noble friend’s
Amendment 168AZA, which I supported also in Committee, I want to
make two very quick points about Amendment 168 in the name of the
noble Lord, . I entirely sympathise with the
sentiments expressed by the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, but it
strikes me that there is already a responsibility on
the National Crime
Agency to tackle organised crime of all types, not just
immigration crime. I think we go a step too far if we legislate
the internal administration of a police authority. There can be a
debate and a disagreement about whether that is right; and
perhaps the supporters of Amendment 168 are making a rhetorical
point, and I can accept that; but I just caution against passing
legislation that imposes a duty on the National Crime
Agency that already exists.
Turning to Amendment 168AZA, I complained in Committee that,
absent this information, we had government by guesswork, and
government by guesswork is not a very attractive way of running
anything, let alone an immigration system. For some of the
reasons advanced by the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, a moment ago,
ignorance creates suspicion, and suspicion leads to poor
community relations and general dissatisfaction in the way in
which the governed look at the governors. So I urge my noble
friend on the Front Bench to provide us with a convincing
response, which I have not yet heard; nor have I been given any
information by any Minister since we last debated this in
Committee. It cannot be suggested that the Government do not like
annual reports. One has only to look at Clause 60(1):
“The Secretary of State must, before the end of the relevant
period … prepare and publish a report on safe and legal routes by
which persons may enter the United Kingdom”.
The detail of what that report is supposed to contain each year
is set out in Clause 60(2), and it has to appear within six
months of the Act being passed.
The information that we think should be made public and brought
together in a single annual report is set out in proposed new
subsections (a) to (e) of our amendment. Proposed new subsections
(b), (c), (d) and (e) cover information that is available
somewhere in the government system: some clever person can press
a button and the numbers will come spewing out—easy. I accept
that counting the number of illegal immigrants in the United
Kingdom presents one or two more problems, because not every
illegal immigrant is going to present himself at a counting
centre; however, they can make an intelligent estimate.
I ask the Government to condescend to move a little bit towards
us and provide the public with the information they feel they
need to see and which the Government must know in order to run a
sensible, humane and legitimate immigration system. That is all
this is about, so let us get on with it.
6.45pm
(CB)
My Lords, I very much support the amendment of the noble Lord,
Lord Swire. As has already been said so well by him and by the
noble and learned Lord, , this is an extremely sensible
idea. The public, as well as ourselves and the House of Commons,
are entitled to know where we stand and what is happening with
the numbers.
I share, to some extent, the concerns of the noble and learned
Lord, , about the amendment of the
noble Lord, , purely and simply because I
wonder to what extent the National Crime
Agency has actually been consulted on what its priorities
are. I quite see the importance of giving this priority, and I
totally support it, but I would be interested to know, before we
make this a part of primary legislation, whether
the National Crime Agency
which I happen to know has a large number of different duties and
works extremely well in many areas in this country, sees this
area as a priority.
(LD)
My Lords, first, I address the amendment in the name of the noble
Lord, Lord Swire. He wondered why the amendment had not captured
the imagination of the House. Speaking for those of us on these
Benches, the Bill is entirely focused on refugees and asylum
seekers, who form a very small proportion—a tiny fraction—of the
1.3 million people given leave to remain in the country last
year. So while I agree in principle with what the noble Lord
says—that we should have a much firmer grip on the number of
illegal immigrants in this country—his amendment is not germane
to the Bill.
(Non-Afl)
My Lords—
(LD)
I am very sorry, but on Report noble Lords are allowed to speak
only once.
As the noble Lord, , and the noble Baroness, Lady
Meacher, said, the Bill is focused entirely on criminalising the
victims of people smugglers and not on the people smugglers
themselves. We intend to support the amendment of the noble Lord,
: if his amendment is carried,
at least there will be one line, or a few lines, in the Bill that
will focus on the real problem, which is the criminal people
smugglers and those who are carrying out modern slavery and
trafficking, as the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, said.
The noble and learned Lord, , said, in effect, that this
amendment was not necessary because under Section 1(4) of the
Crime and Courts Act 2013, one reason for the National Crime
Agency to exist is:
“The NCA is to have the function … of securing that efficient and
effective activities to combat organised crime and serious crime
are carried out”.
People smuggling, people trafficking and so forth are clearly
organised and serious crime, but that then leads to the question
raised by the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss,
about priorities for the National Crime Agency
The strategic priorities for the National Crime
Agency are set out in Section 3 of the 2013 Act, which
says:
“The Secretary of the State must determine strategic priorities
for the NCA”.
I have looked at the current strategic priorities for
the National Crime Agency
as set by the Home Secretary, and people smuggling, trafficking
and people facilitating the sorts of things that the Bill is
supposed to combat are nowhere to be seen; there is nothing in
the strategic priorities about it. How can the Government say
that it is a priority of the Prime Minister to tackle small boats
coming across the channel when it is not a strategic priority set
by the Home Secretary for the National Crime
Agency The only way we can get the National Crime
Agency to focus on people smugglers is to support the
amendment in the name of the noble Lord, , which is what we on these
Benches will do.
The Advocate-General for Scotland ( of Dirleton) (Con)
My Lords, Amendment 168 moved by the noble Lord, , seeks to confer on
the National Crime Agency a
specific function in respect of tackling organised immigration
crime and to require it to maintain a cross-border
people-smuggling unit. The noble Lord opposite has spoken
powerfully today, as he did at previous stages of the Bill. I am
gratified to hear the powerful expressions of support from the
noble Lord and the Benches behind him for the Government’s
commitment to addressing these repugnant crimes.
I have sympathy for the underlying aim of this amendment, in that
we all agree on the need to tackle organised immigration crime,
but I put it to the noble Lord that his amendment is unnecessary.
As we have heard from noble Lords in the debate, the functions of
the National Crime
Agency are set out clearly in Section 1 of the Crime and
Courts Act 2013. I echo the noble Lord, , who quoted from Section 1(4)
of that Act:
“The NCA is to have the function … of securing that efficient and
effective activities to combat organised crime and serious crime
are carried out”.
At this point, I gratefully echo and adopt the points made by my
noble and learned friend . This function covers all
forms of organised crime, and therefore includes organised
immigration crime. Accordingly, adding the proposed new function
would add nothing to the NCA’s remit. One reads in the NCA’s
annual report of the range of activities in which it is already
engaged to help address the problem of cross-channel
people-smuggling gangs. That commitment also appears on the face
of its website, which looks at border vulnerabilities, modern
slavery and human trafficking.
As for the second limb of the amendment, which would require the
NCA to establish a bespoke cross-border people-smuggling unit, I
put to the noble Lord and to the House that this would undermine
the operational independence of the NCA—a point made by the noble
and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss. It is properly a matter
for the director-general of the National Crime
Agency to determine how best the agency is to be organised
to deliver its statutory functions. In saying that, I again
respectfully echo the point made by my noble and learned friend
from the Benches behind
me.
I say in answer to the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, that the
Government are committed to confronting serious organised crime
in and against the UK. To help achieve this outcome, we have made
significant progress in strengthening the National
Crime Agency The NCA’s budget has increased by at least 21%
in the last two years to more than £860 million, which will help
it continue to develop the critical capabilities it needs.
I will address a couple of specific points put by the noble Lord,
, in opening this section of the
debate. He asked about the manner in which the activities of
organised crime through social media are being addressed by the
NCA. The National Crime
Agency works closely with the major tech companies to take
down organised and information crime-related content where it
appears on social media. Between November 2021 and March 2023,
the NCA made more than 3,400 referrals to social media companies
regarding posts and accounts related to suspected organised
immigration crime. Some 97% of these referrals have been taken
down by the respective platforms. I hope that offers some grounds
for confidence to the noble Lord as he carefully addresses the
provisions of the Bill and his response.
The noble Lord also asked me about the number of prosecutions
arising from this. I will go on to touch upon that subject as I
move on to the manner in which the NCA’s work, along with that of
our partners abroad in other jurisdictions, is organised and
co-ordinated. The Government have a dedicated multiagency
organised immigration crime task force, to which the NCA
contributes and in which it participates. This task force is
committed to dismantling organised immigration crime groups
engaged in immigration crime internationally, including criminal
networks that facilitate people smuggling from source countries
to Europe and then to the UK, knowingly putting people in
life-threatening situations. If I may, I will rehearse a couple
of statistics that I gave to your Lordships’ House in Committee.
The task force is currently active in 17 countries worldwide,
working with its partners to build intelligence sharing as well
as investigative and prosecution capability.
I will now address the specific question regarding prosecutions
that the noble Lord, , put to me from the Front
Bench. Since 2015 and the inception of Project INVIGOR, the
United Kingdom’s organised immigration crime task force has been
involved in more than 1,400 arrests both in the United Kingdom
and overseas with, on conviction, sentences collectively
amounting to more than 1,300 years in prison being imposed.
Following the pledge made by the Prime Minister on 13 December to
stop the dangerous small boats crossings, the Government have
doubled funding for the next two financial years for this task
force. This increased funding has as its aim doubling the number
of disruptions and enforcement activity against organised
immigration crime and the criminal gangs that facilitate it.
As the noble Lord said from the Dispatch Box, he has had an
opportunity to discuss these matters with the NCA, and I am
grateful for his kind words in relation to Home Office Ministers
for assisting with facilitating that. I hope that, in light of
what he learned in that meeting and what I have been able to say
from the Dispatch Box concerning the activities of the NCA, the
desirability of maintaining its operational independence and the
increased funding under which it is operating, the noble Lord
will be content to withdraw his amendment.
I turn to Amendment 168AZA tabled by my noble friend Lord Swire,
which would place a duty on the Secretary of State to publish a
report on illegal migration, including statistics on the number
of illegal migrants in the United Kingdom. I understand that my
noble friend has also
discussed this amendment with my noble friend following
Committee. We recognise the importance of having clear and
coherent datasets, but I invite the House to reflect on this: by
the very nature of that body, it is not possible to know the
exact size of the illegal population or the number of people who
arrive illegally, so we do not seek to make any official
estimates of the illegal population. I hear what my noble friend
has to say about the way in which such figures might be gathered,
but they would remain estimates.
My noble friend bemoaned the fact that his amendment has not
caught the attention of your Lordships’ House and that the House
has not demonstrated affection for it. In my experience, your
Lordships’ House has demonstrated on many occasions its feeling
for the importance of statistical evidence as a guide to
policy-making. I hear very clearly what the noble Baroness, Lady
Fox of Buckley, my noble and learned friend and my noble friend Lord Swire
said about that. However, in circumstances where such figures
cannot be known exactly, I invite the House to reflect that it
would not be appropriate to pass my noble friend’s amendment in
its current form.
7.00pm
My noble friend knows that the Home Office publishes regularly
statistics on levels of migration in the United Kingdom,
including on irregular migrants who come to the United Kingdom,
on people arriving by small boat and on returns of foreign
national offenders. Official statistics published by the Home
Office are kept under review in line with the code of practice
for statistics, taking into account a number of factors,
including user needs. The noble Baroness and my noble friend Lord
Swire made this very point when talking about the accessibility
and ready comprehensibility of the statistics. Also kept under
review is the quality and availability of data. We hope to
include data on small boat arrivals who have been returned in a
future iteration of the quarterly Irregular Migration to the UK
release; no doubt during that exercise the Home Office will look
at how best statistics can be presented to assist the general
public interest in this important matter. I hope that provides an
answer to the points about accessibility raised by the noble and
learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, and my noble and learned
friend .
I hope that I have been able to provide some comfort to my noble
friend. He sought to pre-empt me by rehearsing the answers I
would give from the Dispatch Box, but I hope that I have none the
less been able to provide some comfort to him and that he will
not feel the need to press his amendment.
(Lab)
My Lords, I thank the Minister for his thoughtful and careful
response, which I appreciate. I also thank the noble Baroness,
Lady Meacher, and the noble Lord, , for their comments.
The Minister has put before us a whole range of facts and points
that, frankly, we have not considered in any great depth as the
Bill has gone through. That is the purpose of my Amendment 168. I
accept the point of the noble and learned Lord, , that it is not the most
brilliantly drafted amendment, scrutinised by high-calibre
lawyers to be put into the Bill. It does not seek to do that; it
attempts at least to allow this House and the other place, I
hope, to debate how we will tackle the scourge of criminal
gangs.
I have no political desire to say that the Government do not care
about tackling criminal gangs—of course they do—but there is a
real need for us to debate the most effective way of doing that.
As the noble Lord, , pointed out, it is not a
strategic priority under the 2013 legislation. Organised crime is
where the Government always go when someone says that they are
not giving enough priority to X crime—they say, “Of course we
are, because the National Crime
Agency has a responsibility to tackle any serious and
organised crime”. It is an umbrella term, used when the
Government are in trouble to say that they are dealing with
it.
On the point made by the noble and learned Baroness, Lady
Butler-Sloss, I spoke to the National Crime
Agency this morning and of course it is currently
prioritising this. However, I want that tested. I want a sense of
urgency. I want the Government to wake up and put all the efforts
of the state into tackling criminal gangs. What is going on is a
disgrace. If we were in Committee, I would ask the Government
about prosecutions. In drug arrests, often it is the small people
doing very limited things who get arrested and prosecuted; no
doubt many of the prosecutions and arrests the National Crime
Agency will bring forward will be of the people driving the
engine. Of course they should be arrested, but they are not the
barons in this criminal activity. They are not the people living
in great mansions and yachts, organising all this misery right
across the continent. That requires international
co-operation.
I do not know how much international co-operation is going on,
but this Parliament should be asking what pressure is being put
on the Government to tackle these international criminals. The
Government will say that they are doing this and that, but I want
to know what we are doing; it is by me banging on at the Dispatch
Box and the Minister having to ask his officials, “What shall I
say to Coaker when he gets up?”, that the Minister gets the
system to respond. The Minister will have been briefed by the
NCA, the intelligence agencies will have fed into that, and
people will be watching this debate. That injects something into
the system that causes it to react and work more effectively and
efficiently. That is why my amendment is so important.
I say to the noble and learned Lord, , that I know this is not the
most brilliant amendment in the world, but my putting it down has
meant that we are discussing an issue of real importance. If
passed by this Chamber, as I hope it will be, it will go to the
other place, which will be required—even if it rejects it—to
discuss it again, as we will when it comes back here. I will not
insist on a defective piece of legislation, in the end, going on
to the statute book and I have said that we will not block the
Bill. However, at one point during this Bill, I want all of us in
this Parliament to discuss how we will tackle the scourge of
criminal gangs, as well as concentrating on those fleeing
persecution. I beg to move.
[Division 4
Division on Amendment 168
Content
188
Not Content
158
Amendment 168 agreed.
To read the whole debate, OPEN HERE
Extract from
Westminster Hall debate on Ethnic Minority and Migrant Victims of
Violence Against Women and Girls
(Vauxhall)
(Lab/Co-op):...Sadly, in January 2019 the National Crime
Agency estimated that 91% of people associated with
county lines were men, but females were under-represented both as
offenders and victims of exploitation because the data is not
there. One of the issues I raised when I held a Westminster Hall
debate on this subject was the importance of ensuring that
violence reduction units, police and crime commissioners and
different policing agencies across the country hold data on how
many girls and young women come into their services. There is a
lot of data on boys and young men. The data on women and girls is
patchy at best. It is important that when the police stop and
search a car with a young girl in it, they do not assume that she
is the girlfriend of a gang member. She could be being held in
that car against her will. She could be being criminally or
sexually exploited. It is about asking her questions about her
safety...
For context, OPEN HERE
Extracts from Commons
consideration of the Draft Consumer Rights Act 2015 (Enforcement)
(Amendment) Order 2023
(Walthamstow)
(Lab/Co-op):...There is a final point on which I would like to
hear more from the Minister, which is the trade we are trying to
tackle. We know that 21% of cigarettes sold in the UK are
illicit. This is an international trade—gangs, funding and all
sorts of criminal activities in our communities. Putting trading
standards officers on the frontline of tackling that trade is a
bold move owing to the nature of the people with whom they might
be interacting. What conversations has the Minister had with the
National Crime
Agency...
(North West Hampshire) (Con): There is an unproven
statement that much of the trade is organised crime, but I know
from my time at the Home Office that this is a low-margin
business. I am not convinced that the volume is coming through
via organised crime; I think it is coming through in fast
parcels—small packages from overseas. That is why I am so keen to
see some kind of intervention at the border, and I worry slightly
that the more we talk about organised crime and gangs, the more
the effort gets put in that direction, whereas a huge volume is
coming through orders on the internet.
: We were so close to having
unanimity in this place about the nature of the challenge. I
think it is both. The right hon. Gentleman says that there are
small packages—I was going to ask the Minister to say a bit more
about what conversations he has had with Border Force—but the
Lords Justice and Home Affairs Committee investigation into the
matter set out that international gangs were involved. One
German-Russian gang made £50 million over several years by
importing cigarettes into the UK.
We are therefore potentially asking trading standards officers to
interact with very serious and dangerous people, and it is
important that this House does not ask trading standards to be
the blue line in our local communities. If we are to ask trading
standards officers to take on this serious trade—packages might
be one piece of investigation work—to enter properties and to
take on organised crime, they need support. Will the Minister say
more about the conversations that he has had with
the National Crime
Agency or Border Force about how to keep trading
standards officers safe? Everybody agrees that we want to tackle
this trade and everybody wants more investment in trading
standards. We will all support the draft order, but I hope that
the Minister understands that those of us who wrote the original
legislation have some concerns about what we are asking of a
service that has been stripped bare over the last 13 years...
The Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury ():...The hon. Lady quite
rightly asked how we are keeping trading standards officers safe.
We are in constant discussions with Border Force. We have not had
discussions with the National Crime
Agency but I will write to her on what discussions
have taken place across Government. The safety of trading
standards officers is not directly related or relevant to this
order, but the hon. Lady is right to raise it at any opportunity,
because we want those who are gathering information with a view
to prosecution and penalty execution to be as safe as possible. I
expect them to work closely with local police officers wherever
they deem a danger to exist...
To read the whole debate, OPEN HERE
