I beg to move,

That this House believes that human trafficking is the modern equivalent of the slave trade, and, while welcoming the Government’s commitment to ratify the Council of Europe Convention on Action against Trafficking in Human Beings, regrets that this commitment has been delayed for more than a year since the Conservative Party first asked the Government to take this step, and will not come into effect during 2008; welcomes the forthcoming United Nations forum to fight human trafficking and urges the Government to take further immediate steps to help the victims of trafficking, including new measures to intercept traffickers and victims at our borders, better provision of refuge places, the use of telephone helplines, and a drive for better cooperation among national authorities within Europol and Eurojust, so that the United Kingdom can become one of the leading countries fighting human trafficking.

It is good for a number of reasons that we are having this debate 48 hours after the Home Secretary made the significant announcement that in the next 12 months the United Kingdom would ratify the European convention on action against trafficking in human beings. The first is that it was a cause of some national shame that 12 other countries had ratified the convention and we had failed to do so. The second and most important is that it may mean that the Government will stop merely talking a good game on action against trafficking, and will actually live up to their rhetoric. The third is that it shows that parliamentary opposition can have some effect in shaming a Government into doing what they know they ought to do.

It was in January 2007 that we first urged the Government to sign the convention and to take a number of other actions against the appalling trade in human beings. In March they signed the convention, and made some other efforts against trafficking which we welcomed. By January this year, we thought that the process had become alarmingly slow, so two weeks ago we returned to our call for action, this time for ratification of the convention, and last week we decided to hold this debate. Two days ago, the Home Secretary said what we wanted to hear and we welcomed it, as we do in the motion. Better late than never is the appropriate phrase to describe the Government’s performance on the matter.

Before the hon. Gentleman goes too far down that road, may I ask whether he is aware of the article that I wrote in January 2006 calling for such action? It took a full year for the Opposition Front-Bench team to support my proposal, and the outcome was achieved thanks to the help of Back-Bench colleagues in his party, who raised the matter again and again at Question Time. He should stop being so smug, because it is Members behind him who did it, not his absent colleague the shadow Home Secretary.

Being accused of being smug by the right hon. Gentleman is one of the more arresting parliamentary events of the day. Nevertheless, I pay tribute to his work in this regard. I am glad that he has brought it to our attention.

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I should warn the House that I shall not give way too many times because there is a time limit on Back-Bench speeches.

It is members of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe who have taken the lead on this issue on a cross-party basis. My hon. Friend is right, and I congratulate him on securing the debate, but will he ensure that we concentrate not just on the trafficking of human beings for the sex trade, which is appalling, but on the trafficking of children and of people in boats from north Africa? Those boats have nothing else to do, because all the fish have been taken away. We should do something about stopping them in the first place.

I will come in a moment to the specific point about the interaction between the sex trade and the wider trafficking problem.

Speaking in the same vein as that in which my right hon. Friend the Member for Rotherham (Mr. MacShane) made his intervention, may I remind the hon. Gentleman that the Joint Committee on Human Rights first recommended ratification in October 2006? I hope that he is not going to turn this debate into a party political bun fight, because so far we have worked very well across parties on the issue. I see the chairman of the all-party group on the trafficking of women and children, the hon. Member for Totnes (Mr. Steen), is nodding vigorously. We have had extensive and full debates on the issue. We have reached a huge degree of consensus and I hope that the hon. Member for Ashford (Damian Green) is not going to spoil that today.

A later part of my speech includes a tribute to the hon. Gentleman’s work and that of the Joint Committee. I will bring it forward to this part, because that Committee has indeed done valuable work. In the absence of anyone else wishing to point out how much they are in favour of getting rid of human trafficking, which we all are, I think that we would all agree that this is the year for action. We need to see the British Government take a lead.

In that regard, to return to the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Ryedale (Mr. Greenway), I hope that the debate on trafficking, which is a tough enough topic to deal with in itself, does not become absorbed into the wider debate about how to deal with prostitution. Not all prostitution involves trafficking, and not all trafficking involves prostitution. The debate about how to combat prostitution is important. I know that the Minister has been visiting Sweden to see how its policy is working. He will have heard views on both sides of the argument about the effects of criminalising all men who use prostitutes. Over the coming months, however, the debate, not least within Government, about the way forward on prostitution must not be allowed to delay further action on trafficking. Let us not delay action against one evil because Ministers cannot yet agree on how to tackle a related but different one.

Sadly, it would be easy to fill this speech, and indeed the whole debate, with terrible, haunting stories of women and children who have been brutalised by people traffickers, duped, sold into slavery and repeatedly raped or violently exploited in other ways. As we all know, it is a disgusting scar on the modern world and it is getting bigger. Human trafficking is the fastest growing international crime. In terms of the money that it generates, it is up there with drugs and guns as the biggest international criminal activity. It is a global problem. According to the US State Department, up to 800,000 people are trafficked every year and trafficking generates about $9.5 billion in annual revenue, according to the FBI’s calculations.

The United Kingdom is sadly classified by the United Nations as a high-level destination. We are a desirable destination for people traffickers. A 2003 Home Office estimate is that the economic and social costs of trafficking in this country alone are about £1 billion, of which about £275 million constitutes the market for sexual exploitation—as it puts it. Inevitably, all such figures are fairly rough and ready.

Many Members have rightly been exercised about the increasing number of women and girls being trafficked into this country, not only from eastern Europe, but from Africa and the far east. Again, the latest official figures are from 2003, when the Home Office thought that there were 4,000 victims of trafficking who had been brought to this country for prostitution. The most stark and horrifying statistic in this regard is that 10 years ago 15 per cent. of women working as prostitutes in this country were foreign, but that proportion has now completely reversed: it is 85 per cent. and only 15 per cent. are domestic. The Minister might have slightly more up-to-date figures, but those are the latest ones I have seen published. That is a terrible statistic.

This issue is not only about prostitution; it is also about forced labour. We know that 60 per cent. of the victims of trafficking who have arrived here illegally are used in forced labour. A distinction is often made between people-smuggling and people-trafficking. Terrifyingly, it is a fact that many people who think they are in the former category end up in the latter category: they think they are being brought here because they want to get here illegally, but actually they are going to be exploited. Many of them pay £20,000 and more to agents to bring them here, and when they are here they are forced into debt bondage: they simply cannot earn enough money ever to pay off their debts, so they are free to be exploited by criminal gangs. That trade is every bit as terrible as the trade for prostitution.

As well as acknowledging the good work of the Joint Committee on Human Rights, it is worth paying tribute to the various organisations that are involved in trying both directly to prevent the trade and to encourage our Government and Governments around the world to take effective action on it, notably the Stop the Traffik coalition, from which I imagine many Members of all parties who are attending this debate have received information. It is doing an extremely good job, and it has made the point that next month there will be a United Nations forum on this subject in Vienna and that that is an important international conference where the global action that is clearly required to crack down on this global problem will be brought together.

Instead of going through some of the dreadful horror stories, it will be constructive if I set out what we want the Government to do in the coming months and ask the Minister to explain why some of it has not been done already. I shall start with the ratification itself. I asked a question on 5 December about what changes to legislation were needed. The Minister replied that

“we have identified a need for limited amendments to legislation and procedures, including the mechanisms for the support of victims of trafficking. The detail of the legislative changes is still subject to discussion within government”.—[Official Report, 5 December 2007; Vol. 468, c. 1220-21W.]

As he has the House’s attention today, perhaps he will tell us whether there is any need for primary legislative changes, or are simply secondary legislative changes required? If primary legislation is needed, why has the Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill been allowed to go through? It became a Christmas tree set of measures in itself, with important additions at the last moment. Why was it not used as a vehicle for bringing in the changes that are needed? That would certainly have been welcomed in all parts of the House.

I am genuinely bemused that these discussions are still going on inside Government. The Government signed the convention last March; we are now in January. When they signed it, they must have known what steps they needed to take to ratify it. It is extraordinary that these discussions are still going on inside Government some 10 months later. Clearly and rightly the Government have no objections to it in principle. They might have been reluctant to sign it if they thought it would in any way weaken our immigration controls. I imagine that, like me, the Minister has come to the conclusion that signing it would not weaken our very important immigration controls, so I hope to receive some explanation.

The hon. Gentleman has made the point that it is necessary to have the measures in place in order to ratify. He criticised the Government for not having ratified when 12 other states have done so. Is he confident that those states have the necessary mechanisms on their statute books to be able to implement the convention?

The hon. Gentleman and I can sensibly assume only that those countries’ Governments know what they are doing and that they have done as he suggests. As he knows, once we hit the figure of 10, the convention came into force, and I hope that he shares my regret that the UK was not one of the 10 countries that allowed that to happen; it would have been better if we had been. I hope to hear from the Minister about why we are where we are on ratification.

Am I right in thinking that if we are not among the first 15 countries to ratify, we will have little or no influence on how the ratification takes place and on the steps whereby the member states that have ratified decide what to do? In such circumstances, we would have no influence on what will happen in the ratification process.

I should, of course, add my hon. Friend to the list of those to whom I pay tribute, because the all-party group on trafficking of women and children, which he chairs, has done important work on this matter. I hope that the Government take his warning well.

As well as ratification, the Conservatives want to see action on policing, prosecutions and the protection of victims. One year on, the Government have set up what they call a border service, but it is not a border police force. Various specific police operations, such as Pentameter 1 and Pentameter 2, have taken place, but there has been underlying confusion about the overlapping role of the various police departments that deal with trafficking. Amid the plethora of Government targets for which the police must have regard, there has been an absence of one on this matter.

On Monday, my hon. Friend the Member for Totnes (Mr. Steen) asked

“why human trafficking is not core police business”.

The Minister for Security, Counter-Terrorism, Crime and Policing replied:

“It is.”—[Official Report, 14 January 2007; Vol. 470, c. 640.]

This depends on how one defines core police business, because police forces are in no way rewarded for any work they do in this field. We know that because the chief superintendent of Peterborough police, Mr. Phillipson, has said:

“There are no Home Office targets for this kind of police work”.

He continued:

“This is rape and sexual abuse, happening on a daily basis, but it is unreported crime. I won’t achieve any reduction in crime statistics by closing brothels…But, quite frankly, I don’t care. As far as I’m concerned this is what police work is about and I know that it’s the right thing to do.”

I am inclined to believe the policeman on the front line more perhaps than the Minister for Security, Counter-Terrorism, Crime and Policing—

I asked the question in the House about whether tackling human trafficking is core police business, and the Government answered that it is, but is my hon. Friend aware that there was no statement in the House saying that it was core business? The action plan said that it would become core business, but gave no indication of when that would happen, and nobody knew anything about it until the Minister for Security, Counter-Terrorism, Crime and Policing said the day before yesterday that it was now core police business. The significance is that if tackling human trafficking is core business, the police get money for doing that, but if it is not core business, they do not get that money. There is quite a lot of confusion in police forces as to whether or not it is core business, and whether they are getting any money for it.

My hon. Friend is right, and that is why the situation causes a problem.

The Conservatives believe that we should have a proper integrated border police force, which integrates the immigration and customs services with the police, and that such a force should have the necessary powers to stop, search, investigate and prosecute. Instead of having a succession of ad-hoc operations, this type of operation should be a permanent priority. There should also be specific measures on border controls that would address trafficking, including separate interviews at all airports of women and children travelling alone with an adult who is not a parent, guardian or husband. That is a practice implemented successfully by the US, and it will help to identify potential victims.

We believe that better police measures could be taken, and we also believe that they would lead to more robust law enforcement and more prosecutions. The Government say that law enforcement in this area is a priority, but in the last year prosecutions have fallen by 40 per cent., so the facts before us suggest that that is not the reality. We need more focus on prosecutions to tackle both supply and demand.

As a country, we could do better on protection. I imagine that everyone who participates in this debate knows about the good work of the POPPY project, but while that should be seen as an acceptable pilot, it is not the whole answer, not least because it is based entirely in London. We need to increase the number of places in safe houses and we need to do better for under-18s who are trafficked. For current legal reasons, anyone under 18 who has been trafficked has to remain in the care of the local authority social services and cannot be moved to the POPPY project or any similar service. The problem is that far too high a percentage of those in local authority care have simply disappeared, and it is believed that many have been repossessed by the traffickers.

Does the hon. Gentleman agree that another aspect that we must pursue is passing on some of the expertise that people working in the POPPY project and others have developed in helping women and children who have been trafficked to deal with the trauma? In that way, when they returned to their home countries they would get the help and support that they needed. Many of those countries are the poorest in the world and may have less expertise in the matter, and it is therefore our responsibility to share it.

I absolutely agree with the hon. Lady. Expertise has been developed in this country, and the more we spread that expertise and best practice the better.

As a non-London MP, I just wanted to mention that there are now service-level agreements between the POPPY project and organisations such as Women’s Aid, which supply the same services outside London as POPPY supplies in London.

That is indeed welcome, but I am sure that the Solicitor-General would agree that we need that to happen more, because the problem is now a national problem. Even the idea that it is a big-city problem is now out of date, because it occurs in small towns and even villages.

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

I am sorry, but I know that many hon. Members wish to speak. I can feel that waves of hostility will come from both behind and in front of me if I take up too much time, so I do not want to do so.

One of the other specifics that I wish to recommend to Ministers is setting up a helpline for victims of trafficking. I am sure that the Minister will have considered that. The Stop the Traffik coalition has suggested the use of a common helpline number across Europe. People who are trafficked inevitably travel through many countries and may not even know which country they are in. If there were one emergency number—obviously it could be effective only if it routed to an in-country national service—across Europe, it could be most effective.

Apart from the signing of the convention, we need better co-operation between Europol and Eurojust on this issue. The Government should also encourage British companies to do what they can. My hon. Friend the Member for Ryedale mentioned some of the problems of African countries, and the Minister will be aware of one particular problem with the confectionery industry. Côte d’Ivoire produces 40 per cent. of the world’s cocoa crop and there is a lot of evidence of children as young as 12 being trafficked from even poorer African countries, such as Mali, into Côte d’Ivoire. The effective way to stop that is for the big international confectionery companies, many of which are based in this country or have significant operations here, to insist on proper standards throughout their supply chain. That would be the best approach, and while it is not direct Government action, I hope that Ministers will encourage it.

The Opposition are pleased that the Home Secretary made her announcement on Monday. We will monitor the Government’s progress on ratification. I have sought to set out a number of practical suggestions for action that the Government can take immediately that would help to reduce trafficking into this country and in other parts of the world. Obviously, there is complete unanimity that human trafficking is a disgusting crime and a growing problem. For once, I can stand at the Dispatch Box and say sincerely to Ministers working on the problem that I hope that they are effective and successful. My simple message to them is: please get on with it.

I beg to move, To leave out from “House” to the end of the Question and to add instead thereof:

“condemns the trafficking of human beings as one of the most vile crimes to threaten our society; welcomes the Government’s commitment to make the necessary legislative and procedural changes required to ratify the Council of Europe Convention on Action Against Trafficking in Human Beings before the end of 2008; believes that ratification is an important milestone in the Government’s concerted strategy to protect the victims of trafficking and bring to justice those who exploit them; notes that the UK Action Plan on Trafficking, published in March 2007 on the same day as the UK signed the Convention, comprehensively pulls together the work already under way across Government to tackle trafficking and creates a platform for future work; praises the work of the UK Human Trafficking Centre, established in March 2006 as the central point of expertise and operational co-ordination in tackling human trafficking; supports the valuable work done as part of nationwide police-led anti-trafficking operations, including Pentameter 1 and 2; and notes the £4.5 million of government funding provided over the last five years for victim protection under the POPPY scheme, which supports adult women trafficked into the UK for sexual exploitation.”.

I compliment the hon. Member for Ashford (Damian Green) on the vast majority of what he said and, apart from the first couple of sentences, the constructive way in which he engaged with the subject—I thank him for that. I also thank all hon. Members who are present for the debate, particularly the significant number of parliamentarians who have had a huge input in taking the agenda forward. I thank not only my ministerial colleagues, and some members of my party who are in the Chamber—my hon. Friend the Member for Hendon (Mr. Dismore), who is Chairman of the Joint Committee on Human Rights, my right hon. Friend the Member for Rotherham (Mr. MacShane), my hon. Friend the Member for Slough (Fiona Mactaggart), my right hon. Friend the Member for Leicester, East (Keith Vaz), the Chairman of the Select Committee on Home Affairs, and many others—but, in particular, I thank the hon. Member for Ryedale (Mr. Greenway), who has taken a particular interest in labour exploitation, and the hon. Member for Totnes (Mr. Steen), who has done a fantastic job with the all-party group on trafficking of women and children and through all his other work to take the agenda forward. Of course, I also thank hon. Members from the Liberal Democrat Benches.

There will be differences between the parties about some of the things that I shall say and about some of the Government’s policy decisions. However, we can and should be proud of the way in which we have tried to lead the debate as a Government and as a country. Regardless of the party politics, some hon. Members present today have been at conferences where representatives of other European countries have come to talk to us about how we are tackling the problem and to try to learn from us as we try to learn from them.

As well as thanking Members of the House, I want to thank the stakeholders across the county: Amnesty International, ECPAT—or End Child Prostitution, Child Pornography And the Trafficking of children for sexual purposes—Stop the Traffik and all the other non-governmental and voluntary organisations. They, too, deserve a huge degree of credit for the way in which the debate has been taken forward.

Trafficking is one of the vilest forms of crime and one of the vilest harms that threaten our society. It is unbelievable that 200 years after the abolition of slavery by the House of Commons, we are yet again debating slavery in 2008. Members from all parties have said that our Government should take the matter forward. That is what the people out there would not only expect of us but demand from us.

The whole House agrees that it is right that the Government should take the matter forward. As that is the case, does the Minister agree that as trafficking will now be a core subject for the police the necessary funds will be made available? That is particularly important because those elements of organised crime involved in guns and drugs are increasingly moving into sex trafficking.

I shall deal with some of that later in my speech. The then Home Secretary, my right hon. Friend the Member for Norwich, South (Mr. Clarke), wrote to all chief constables to point out that whereas drugs were the first priority, the second was organised immigration crime, of which human trafficking was a significant part. That is important in trying to clarify some of the points made by the hon. Member for Totnes. The debate is difficult because the question is not only about money for police forces but about expertise, knowledge and intelligence. If we simply make money available without taking account of other factors, we will not get the results that we want. The operations Pentameter 1 and 2 were in part about developing that knowledge and expertise so that the police service can reduce the level of harm to which people are exposed, and free them from the slavery that we all oppose.

The Minister will know that we in Scotland have particular problems with human trafficking. The police say that the number of incidents seems to be rising more quickly in Scotland than in the rest of the UK, with the result that it now accounts for 13 per cent. of the total trade. Responsibility for the police is a devolved matter for the Scottish Government, but all the initiatives are UK-wide. Can he reassure me that he is working hand in glove with the Scottish Government to ensure that this pernicious trade is tackled effectively in Scotland?

I can reassure the hon. Gentleman on that point. Home Office officials are in contact with their counterparts in Scotland, and I have spoken to Kenny McAskill, the Scottish Justice Secretary, asking for a meeting at the earliest possible opportunity to discuss how we can take this whole agenda forward.

Recently, I visited Albania as part of a delegation from this House. One thing that became clear was that the British police had worked in partnership with that country and given guidance and advice about dealing with drugs, guns and people trafficking. Does my hon. Friend agree that we need police and border forces in the countries of origin to work with us and to contribute the same level of expertise in the fight against those crimes?

I do agree, and my hon. Friend’s excellent question helps me respond to what the hon. Member for Ashford said about the importance of Europol, Eurojust and the cross-border work that we have to undertake. In a few weeks I hope to visit Romania, Bulgaria and Albania, where I will talk to police forces and Ministers about how we can work together to deal with what is a common problem. Unless we deal with it at an international level, in Europe and across the globe, we will find, for all our efforts, that it is difficult to make the progress that we want to make.

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I shall take a couple more interventions, and then I need to make progress.

Does my hon. Friend agree that it is very important that we look beyond Europe and the accession states? Last year I visited Ukraine, where I met representatives from both statutory and voluntary organisations. Even more than police forces, the latter are the key to tackling the problem of human trafficking. Does he agree that we need to work with the British Council and the voluntary organisations in those countries that, like Ukraine, are being used as the entry point for human trafficking in the EU?

I agree absolutely with my hon. Friend. As I said earlier, there is a global dimension to a problem that affects countries all over the world. That is what makes tackling trafficking so difficult, but my hon. Friend makes a valuable point that deserves consideration.

I am grateful to the Minister for giving way to me, and may I first of all reciprocate his kind words and good wishes? It has always been a pleasure to work with him and his Department.

When he goes to Albania, Bulgaria or other eastern European countries, the Minister might like to look at the problem that police forces have with Europol. That is the fact that every country uses different types of records. For instance, records can be based on fingerprints, DNA, psychological profiles or gun crime, but the categories vary from country to country. Europol is not effective as a result, because the necessary information is not being exchanged. Another problem is that most of the women recorded as being trafficked into Britain from Lithuania do not come from that country. The women involved come from other eastern European countries that do not belong to the EU, but the Lithuanian passport is used for them because that is the easiest to forge. Is he aware of that?

I am aware of the issues that the hon. Gentleman raises, and we need to discuss how we can tackle them.

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I shall take two more interventions, but then I shall make progress with my speech as I want to leave enough time for as many contributions to the debate as possible. I give way first to the hon. Member for Ryedale.

I am most grateful to the Minister. This is a home affairs debate, but he was right to say that the problem demands international action and that that action should be focused on the EU’s borders. It is interesting that Bulgaria and Romania, to which my hon. Friend the Member for Totnes (Mr. Steen) referred, both ratified the convention on trafficking some time ago, whereas I understand that Lithuania is not even a signatory to it. As a result of this debate, will he speak to his colleagues in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and ensure that they too are engaged in the fight against human trafficking?

I hear what the hon. Gentleman says. We talk not only to our European colleagues but to colleagues outside the EU. Indeed, I shall be speaking at a United Nations conference in a few weeks’ time. The problem throws up a range of issues, not least of which is the need to ensure joined-up government in this country. An inter-ministerial group has oversight of taking the agenda forward. I take his point.

Does my hon. Friend regard forced marriage as part of the problem? It is a form of trafficking, yet it is not regarded as a criminal offence, despite the fact that many girls are taken from this country to the Indian subcontinent and forced to consummate so-called marriages. It is a form of rape.

To be honest, I do not know the whole answer to that question. If anybody is trafficked for any reason, it is obviously a crime, but I shall look into my hon. Friend’s point. If I get some inspiration before the end of my speech, I shall come back to it.

If the House will allow me, I shall make some further points. The Government are totally committed to eradicating the abhorrent crime of trafficking in all its forms. On Monday, the Home Secretary demonstrated that commitment by announcing the Government’s intention to accelerate plans to ratify the Council of Europe convention against trafficking, and to review the Government’s reservation to the UN convention on the rights of the child. I want to highlight that, because it is of huge significance to many organisations outside the House as well as to Members.

We have worked hard and consulted widely since signing the Council of Europe convention. For example, we piloted a model of victim identification within Operation Pentameter 2, identified gaps in compliance and developed victim support models. There is much to do, but thanks to the progress that we have made, we now believe that we can make the necessary legislative and procedural changes to achieve ratification later this year. Ratification will be a significant milestone in the fight against this horrendous crime.

To answer the hon. Member for Ashford, we need to make four or five pages of legislative changes if we are to ratify the convention. Many of them will involve secondary legislation. There are four or five issues to do with article 10 of the convention, four or five to do with article 14, and four or five to do with article 23, as well as others. I shall talk to him later and perhaps share some of that information with him. We are taking the ratification agenda forward, but many of the changes can be made through secondary legislation. I hope that if we need to proceed through primary legislation, he will help us to do so as quickly as possible.

One of the legislative changes being considered involves a measure to allow victims of trafficking who were brought here illegally and who help in prosecutions to stay here permanently. Is that being considered seriously?

We are considering it.

As I said, ratification will be a significant milestone in the fight against the horrendous crime of trafficking, but it is only one stage in the ongoing battle against human trafficking. The Government have launched a series of offensives on different fronts as part of our wider anti-trafficking strategy. On 23 March 2007, the same day that we signed the convention, we signed the UK action plan on tackling human trafficking, which set out our national strategy and pulled together all the work under way across Government to combat the trafficking of adults and children domestically and internationally.

The measure covers four key areas: enforcement, prevention, victim support and child trafficking. It also applies to trafficking for forced labour as well as other forms of human trafficking. The Government’s commitment to enforcement is exemplified by the introduction of anti-trafficking laws that have resulted in a number of successful prosecutions. For example, since the commencement of the Sexual Offences Act 2003 on 1 May 2004, there have been 70 convictions for trafficking for the purpose of sexual exploitation. However, those convictions do not represent the full extent of prosecution of traffickers, who are often charged with other serious offences, including rape, false imprisonment and serious assault.

In April 2006 we launched the Serious Organised Crime Agency, one of whose top priorities is the fight against human trafficking. To complement that work, we established in October 2006 the UK Human Trafficking Centre, which is tackling all forms of human trafficking as part of its remit. The police-led multi-agency centre was instrumental recently in the success of Operation Glover, which rescued 33 female victims aged between 12 and 15 who are believed to have been trafficked internally within the UK, and prosecuted and convicted a number of individuals. The case highlights the fact that human trafficking is not always about the movement of victims across international borders, but can involve the movement of UK nationals within the UK.

In 2006 the first major national anti-trafficking operation took place. Operation Pentameter 1 was a great success, resulting in the rescue of 88 victims, 12 of whom were children. As a result, 232 arrests were made and 134 people were charged with a variety of offences. Following this operation the UK Human Trafficking Centre was set up.

Pentameter 2, launched by the Home Secretary in October 2007, is another catalyst designed to assist police forces in developing their response in this area. Back in June 2005, the then Home Secretary, my right hon. Friend the Member for Norwich, South, wrote to chief constables setting out what forces’ priorities should be in relation to organised crime. Organised immigration crime, including human trafficking, was the second priority after drugs. It will interest all hon. Members to know that we are discussing performance indicators as part of the new performance assessment framework for policing and community safety from April 2008. One of those indicators could relate to human trafficking.

Work is under way with the Association of Chief Police Officers to improve the capability of the police and their partners to deliver effective protective services. The UK Human Trafficking Centre will assist in the development of law enforcement expertise and operational co-ordination, which will improve the proactive policing response.

Intelligence from Pentameter 2 is already furthering our understanding of the nature and scale of trafficking across the UK. I do not want to spark a huge debate as I am trying to complete my speech within the next few minutes, but it may interest hon. Members to know that as part of Pentameter 2—for operational reasons which I understand, the police are reluctant to give too much information to us at present—according to Chief Constable Tim Brain who has done a fantastic job in this area, along with Chief Constable Grahame Maxwell, over 542 premises have so far been visited, a large percentage of which were residential, demonstrating the hidden nature of the crime. That is a significant change from some of what was happening in Pentameter 1. The number of arrests has already exceeded the number under Pentameter 1.

Following the conclusion of Pentameter 2, the UKHTC in conjunction with SOCA will produce an updated strategic assessment—the hon. Member for Ashford asked about this—of the scale of human trafficking of adults and children in the UK. That will help us to improve on our previous research which, as he pointed out, indicated that there were 4,000 victims of trafficking for sexual exploitation in the UK in 2003, and it will help us to respond more accurately to the reality rather than the perception of the crime, and ensure that the counter-measures that we put in place are targeted and effective.

Ratifying the Council of Europe convention will build on existing arrangements to provide a framework for minimum standards of support for all victims of trafficking. We are already doing considerable work. We have worked in partnership with the POPPY project to support adult women trafficked into the UK for sexual exploitation since 2003. We know that trafficking can have a devastating impact on a victim, and it is not enough simply to provide accommodation. That is why our UK action plan includes a range of measures to help identify and support victims and to try to prevent re-victimisation, which is crucial.

A comprehensive victim strategy has been developed for Pentameter 2, in consultation with a range of stakeholders to ensure a consistent end-to-end approach. The campaign also provides an opportunity to develop local measures on trafficking. This includes scoping suitable service providers for victim support. The POPPY project, and the TARA project in Scotland, have been working with the UK Human Trafficking Centre and others to develop the capacity and expertise of other providers during the campaign.

Following last year’s campaign, the Salvation Army and the Medaille Trust established projects for victims. This year, partnerships are in place with a number of women’s aid projects that cover areas such as Birmingham, Bradford, Sheffield, Leeds, Kirklees, Keele, Huddersfield and Harrogate. Is that enough? No, it is not. Is it an improvement on where we were? Yes it is, and we will make considerable progress. I think that the hon. Member for Ashford would agree that we have made a start and a move forward and have a positive statement to make to the House.

The Government have also directed efforts towards combating child trafficking, one of the most abhorrent crimes of all. We have worked with the NSPCC.

rose—

rose—

I shall give way first to the hon. Gentleman and then to my hon. Friend. Then I shall need to finish.

Can the Minister report any progress in negotiations with the UK newspaper industry to persuade local papers in particular to stop taking advertisements for massage parlours and similar organisations, which encourage trafficking? That is something that we can deal with quickly in our own country.

The hon. Gentleman will know that the Solicitor-General, the Leader of the House and the Minister for Equality met representatives of the Newspaper Society, the Advertising Association and others. We are trying to take that agenda forward and hope to say something on the issue in due course.

The Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre, or CEOP, estimates that about 50 per cent. of trafficking involves children. Will the Minister join me in congratulating the work of the university of Bedfordshire, which is working with the NSPCC on that issue? Is he aware that it has found that children who are trafficked into this country are likely to go missing within 72 hours of being taken into social services care? There are traditional trafficking routes, so we need much greater monitoring and support for children in particular.

My hon. Friend has made a hugely important point. A number of children whom we believe have been trafficked come into the care of the state and then go missing. That is unacceptable for all of us, and it gives us a policy dilemma in respect of what we should do. The hon. Member for Ashford legitimately and fairly said that we needed more safe houses. The hon. Member for Totnes and others will know that safe houses are sometimes a magnet for the traffickers. What seems a really good idea can have an unintended consequence.

We are considering what we can do about the safety of children—particularly trafficked children—who come into the care of the state. We have issued and updated guidance to local authorities. However, let me be clear: if there was one thing that I knew would definitely work, I would do it now—but there is not an easy policy solution.

The point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Luton, South (Margaret Moran) is hugely important and we are considering what we can do about it and trying to take that forward. We are asking for the views and advice of stakeholders such as the NSPCC and ECPAT.

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This is the last question that I shall take.

I am grateful to the Minister for giving way and I congratulate him on how much work he has done to enable the Government to move forward on this issue. However, when they are found as victims, children trafficked for sexual exploitation are treated worse than their adult equivalents. Will he consider the situation in Holland, where secure safe houses are provided?

We will learn from anywhere that can provide appropriate examples of how to deal with the problem. However, an awful lot of work is going on with children; I do not necessarily accept the hon. Gentleman’s argument that in this country such children are treated worse than the adults.

We have worked with the NSPCC to develop an advice and information line for social care and other professionals, to help them identify and support trafficked children. The advice line went live in October last year and in December multi-agency guidance was published to provide comprehensive information for all front-line professionals on the identification of victims and the actions required.

As well as that work on the four main strands of the action plan, we have continued to work with international partners in bilateral and multilateral projects to share expertise and improve information sharing in this area. In particular, we are jointly leading an initiative on human trafficking, under the auspices of the G6, with Poland. We are also committed to strengthening our approach to tackling the demand for prostitution, which can contribute to the demand for human trafficking for the purposes of sexual exploitation. As Members know, last week I led a ministerial visit to Sweden to look in more detail at the implementation of the legislation that criminalises the purchase or attempted purchase of sexual services. The information that we gathered will contribute to a six-month review of what more we can do on this issue, which will consider legislative and non-legislative options and look at the range of experiences in other jurisdictions.

I have covered some of the current areas of activity. I believe that we have made significant progress in the battle against human trafficking but, as I have explained, trafficking is multifaceted and needs to be fought on many fronts. The key to a successful response is effective collaboration and partnership working, and we have embraced that approach. Alongside an inter-ministerial group, we, the Government, have sought to involve stakeholders through our ministerial non-governmental organisation group, which next meets on 28 February, and through participatory meetings such as the international seminar on the Council of Europe convention that we hosted in December.

In its report of 13 October 2006, the Joint Committee on Human Rights commented that it was encouraged by its belief that

“the Government is also committed to achieving the best possible balance in its overall policy to combat trafficking, grounding that policy in human rights standards, and has an open mind about how this can best be achieved.”

There is still much more to do, but I assure the House that the Government’s commitment and determination to combat this horrendous crime is absolute, and we will continue to fight against this form of modern-day slavery. There cannot be many more important priorities for a Government. It is simply unacceptable that 200 years after the House of Commons abolished slavery it once again falls to us to tackle those who would use other human beings as property to be profited from. We must not allow it, nor will we. I commend the amendment to the House.

Liberal Democrats greatly welcome the debate and are pleased that the hon. Member for Ashford (Damian Green) and his colleagues have secured it. I also pay tribute to the evident passion and conviction with which the Under-Secretary addressed the subject. There is clearly a substantial measure of agreement across the House on this issue.

Human trafficking is a shocking and scandalous crime that is now estimated to be the third most lucrative activity for organised crime globally. It mainly involves the sex industry, but also agricultural work and, horrifyingly, trafficking of people who are used in the removal of organs. The trade begins in desperation in the developing world—Vietnam, China, Romania, central Asia—where the victims are often offered the vision of a better life and are then committed to pay back the cost of their travel. In effect, as the Under-Secretary pointed out, they are introduced into debt bondage. They are given only the most meagre amount of work to pay back the sums that they owe. They are isolated, lonely, afraid, unable to communicate because of their language, and unable even to assess their own predicament.

Inevitably, there is enormous difficulty in terms of measurement—it is rather like the black economy—and we do not know how extensive the problem is. However, experts certainly believe that it is growing. The US Secretary of State’s adviser, Dr. Laura Lederer, says that we are now on a par with the numbers enslaved in the 16th and 17th centuries. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime puts the figure slightly higher than the US estimates cited by the hon. Member for Ashford—it says that 1 million people a year are involved, and possibly $32 billion in revenue. This is very big business.

We therefore very much welcome the Government’s commitment to ratify the convention. According to the Council of Europe’s website, 10 countries have ratified so far, so the convention will enter into force on 1 February this year. So far, however, I regret to say that the signatories are mainly poor countries. Although we will be the seventh European Union country to sign up and ratify, we will be only the third developed country to do so after Austria and Denmark. I very much hope that the Government will maintain the pressure on other EU member states to stop displacement; the Under-Secretary has already talked about the G6 group, including Poland. I also note that the European Union can, as a whole, ratify the convention. Given the Government’s decision to do so and their interest in preventing activity in this country from being displaced elsewhere, and assuming and hoping that our measures will be effective, will Ministers commit to pressing the EU, as a bloc, to ratify the convention?

The Government were clearly right, too, to criminalise trafficking in prostitution in 2003, but limited resources have been given to Operation Parameter, and perhaps there should be a clearer focus, internationally, on the big guys. Will the Minister tell us whether the Serious Organised Crime Agency has been effective, and what its role has been in pursuing this matter? There have been successful prosecutions, which is good news, but there are still big gaps. The gangmaster of the Morecambe bay cockle pickers was not prosecuted for trafficking, although he was quite rightly prosecuted for manslaughter. No successful prosecution has yet been brought for trafficking in forced labour.

I suggest to the hon. Gentleman that there is a distinction to be drawn between prosecution and conviction. According to an answer to a recent parliamentary question, only 30 traffickers of human beings for sexual purposes had actually been convicted. Everyone constantly talks about prosecution; I suggest that the hon. Gentleman ask the Minister about convictions.

The hon. Gentleman makes a good point; the distinction between prosecution and conviction is crucial. The point that I was attempting to make was that there had been no successful convictions at all for trafficking in forced labour, and we must attempt to address that.

I am also concerned about joined-up government. The police quite rightly treat trafficked sex workers as victims of crime, and as potential witnesses, while the immigration service is more likely to treat them as illegal entrants and potential deportees. How do Ministers intend to resolve the inherent conflicts in agencies’ approach to this problem? There is another example of potential conflict. The 1998 rule giving visas to migrant domestic workers and allowing them the right to change employer was key. The employer had to moderate their behaviour to stop the potential loss of their employee—to prevent them from fleeing to another job. There was at least some incentive to moderate what would otherwise be autocratic and unacceptable behaviour. Indeed, the Minister’s colleague Baroness Scotland noted on 26 March last year that the Government were

“conscious that the change we brought in greatly benefited domestic workers in this situation.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 26 March 2007; Vol. 690, c. 1436.]

It seems to me that the changes limiting the ability of such visa applicants to work with only one employer are retrogressive.

We particularly need a framework for dealing with children. Article 10 of the convention states:

“As soon as an unaccompanied child is identified as a victim, each party”—

signatory to the convention—

“shall…provide for representation of the child by a legal guardian, organisation or authority which shall act in the best interests of the child.”

That is very much the point raised by the hon. Member for Luton, South (Margaret Moran). The reality is that the current care system is creaking when dealing with such problems; it simply is not adequate. Child exploitation is on the rise. The figures that came out of the study that was commissioned in part by the Home Office show that children in 183 of the 330 identified cases went missing from the establishments where they were in care. The majority were over 16, but clearly some may have been abducted by the people who trafficked them, as someone said earlier, and others may have been afraid and simply fled. We need to do much more work on that front if we are to be sure of providing adequate care for those children who have been so brutalised and traumatised by their experience.

Perhaps we should examine the Dutch system, which is holistic. I take on board the Under-Secretary’s comments about potential problems with, for example, houses, but we need to be sure that we are providing security. The hon. Member for Wellingborough (Mr. Bone) also made that point. Security, whether in care homes or provided in another way, is essential.

We must take care when placing responsibilities on local authorities—a favourite game of central Government, not least the Home Office—that resources are made available to ensure that responsibilities can be exercised properly. I hope that the pattern for other Home Office schemes, such as extending police community support officers and the subsequent reduction in funding, will not be followed.

It is welcome that the Government intend to ratify the convention. I am sure that Ministers realise that it is a beginning, not an end to trying to tackle the problem seriously. Since the Under-Secretary has clearly done the work on the necessary changes in primary legislation, as he informed the House earlier, I hope that he can make a commitment to introducing those changes through amendments in the Lords to the Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill. It was regrettable that they could not be tabled in the Commons, where some of my hon. Friends made that very point, but it is not too late to make the changes, assuming that the legal work has been done.

The hard graft of finding practical ways to alleviate the suffering and protect the victims of trafficking is only beginning. We are considering an abhorrent crime, which is a scar on any civilised society. We must—I trust from the tenor of today’s debate that we will—do all we can to end it as soon as is practically possible.

The Joint Committee on Human Rights, which I chair, has taken a keen interest in the subject. That is shown by the number of our reports that are tagged for today’s debate. We have achieved a great deal of consensus not only in the Committee but across parties on the vital subject. We greatly value our informal and regular contact with the Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, my hon. Friend the Member for Gedling (Mr. Coaker), and I freely acknowledge his personal commitment to pushing for progress in his Department and across Government. His efforts have borne considerable fruit, although, as always, much remains to be done.

Since our first report in October 2006, considerable progress has been made through the UK Human Trafficking Centre, the Government’s action plan and their signing the convention last March, the start of Pentameter 2 last autumn and, of course, the additional support for victims, especially of sex trafficking—an appalling crime, whereby women are conned, coerced or kidnapped to face repeated rape and extreme violence.

However, evidence for the scale of the problem remains woefully inadequate. In our first report, we recommended that research should be undertaken and published. We reiterated that in our report last autumn. The most up-to-date figures for sex trafficking date back to 2003, and they were considered inaccurate then. They are now way out of date. A scoping study was supposed to be published last June, but we were told that an inter-departmental ministerial group was “monitoring progress” and that Pentameter 2 would “improve our understanding”. However, so far we have little in the way of hard facts and I hope that my hon. and learned Friend the Solicitor-General will say what can be done to improve the position when she replies to the debate.

We have no official statistics for child victims, whether they are in domestic servitude or imported for benefit fraud, to work in cannabis factories or in the catering trade, or for sex or forced marriage, which was mentioned earlier. We have no statistics on labour trafficking. Without details about scale, we cannot properly judge the efficacy of any response.

Much has been made of the Council of Europe convention. We first recommended that it be signed and ratified in October 2006. We have repeatedly pressed for a timetable for ratification. We therefore greatly welcome the timetable that my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary announced earlier this week, and the fact that we will ratify by the end of the calendar year.

However, the convention comes into force on 1 February, with the ratification of Cyprus. Given that we have not ratified, we cannot participate in the Committee of Parties, which is drawn from ratifying states and will make recommendations on the convention’s implementation and appoint GRETA—the group of experts on action against trafficking, who are chosen from nationals of ratifying states. There will, therefore, be no UK membership of that group.

The Government have been honest and correctly said that we should not ratify the convention until we can comply with it. However, that prompts the question: what remains to be done to come within the convention’s terms? The real issue is not ratification per se, but ensuring that we do what the convention requires of us to combat this vile crime. The heart of the convention focuses on victims. The Committee’s recommendation was that the protection of victims must be incorporated in our legislative framework, especially in immigration law. The Government say that they will consult widely on the issue and investigate all the options, but we do not think that any of that is necessary.

It is clear what is needed in that respect. We suspect that the problem is to do with immigration and the unwillingness in certain circles to accept that the so-called pull factor argument is a myth. In that respect, I exonerate my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary, who was distinctly uncomfortable when he was put up to advocate it when giving evidence to us. Indeed, he looked extremely sheepish indeed. It beggars belief that a woman would volunteer to be transported across continents, enslaved in a brothel and subjected to repeated rape and deprivation of liberty, with the threat and actuality of extreme violence, on the off-chance that she will beat our tight immigration system.

The immigration issue is, I suspect, the sticking point. The convention requires a recovery and reflection period of 30 days—we on the Committee consider that inadequate and recommend three months—but it is not clear whether co-operation with the prosecuting authorities is a precondition for that. I suspect that the real issue is the renewable residency permit requirement. The key to that is the proper identification of victims. At the Council of Europe session on that last year, the Government set out a new process for the identification of victims, with the prime responsibility lying with the police and the ultimate decision resting with the Border and Immigration Agency, with the right for review at the request of a non-governmental organisation. However, that process is heavily dependent on effective training, so perhaps the Minister could say what progress has been made on that.

We welcome the support that has been given to victims, but we are concerned about the future security of the system because we understand that the funding as it stands will last only until 2008. In particular, what support is being given to the devolved Administrations? The fact remains that there is no support for victims of labour trafficking, and there are significant concerns about the support for child victims. It is also interesting that the criminal injuries compensation scheme has at long last recognised trafficking as a crime and has started to award compensation.

We welcome the decision to reconsider the UK’s reservation to the UN convention on the rights of the child over immigration matters. The Government say that children are fully protected by existing law, so we cannot see what objection there could be to lifting the reservation, although the Under-Secretary indicated when he wrote to me about the matter that there would be no preconditions on that review.

Labour trafficking remains a serious issue, particularly in relation to domestic servitude. As has been mentioned, the visa regime prevents a change of employer, meaning that people are hostages and become open to abuse. We were told last summer that the Government would consult publicly on the safeguards in the business visa arrangements. I should like to know what progress has been made on that and whether the Government will consider naming and shaming employers of trafficked labour, particularly in the agricultural and catering sectors, where there seems to have been very little progress indeed and certainly a lack of support for the victims.

We in the Committee also recommended that the Government should publish an annual report to Parliament. The Government say that there will be an annual updating of the action plan and an annual report from the UK Human Trafficking Centre at the end of the financial year. That is all welcome but, given the cross-party interest that has been shown in the issue, it is important that the Government should pull those different strands together and provide the House with an annual report on the progress being made. That is the best way that we can monitor what is happening.

The Joint Committee on Human Rights will continue to maintain a keen interest in the subject. We will continue to press the Government on the need for progress. I know that we are pushing against an open door with my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary, although I am not quite so sure that that is the case elsewhere. However, I assure him and the House that the issue is close to our hearts and that we will continue to pursue it until we see justice for the victims of trafficking.

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Order. I remind the House that there is an eight-minute limit on Back-Bench speeches, although I think that that has now become obvious to everyone. I call Mr. Anthony Steen.

Hear, hear!

I am grateful for the support of my hon. Friends and other hon. Members.

We know that the Government have been active on the legislative front, and I think that they have done a good job. However, I shall point out some of the things that they have not done, and I hope that that will be constructive. However, it is not only the Government who have been active; the Joint Committee on Human Rights has also been very helpful and active. I should also like to note that there have also been three debates on trafficking in the past year.

Back-Bench Members of the House of Commons and of the House of Lords, of all parties, were particularly active in the establishment of the all-party group on trafficking of women and children—of which I am chairman—on 9 July 2006. That group does not just meet the bigwigs; it has also got its hands dirty down at the rock face. It has met African child victims of trafficking, eastern Europeans, Vietnamese trafficked children involved with cannabis factories and, most recently, Roma children on the streets of London. That group has tabled more than 100 oral and written parliamentary questions, which have stimulated further Government action. My thanks go to all the officers involved. My hon. Friend the Member for Wellingborough (Mr. Bone) is the astute treasurer of the group, and it has other distinguished members here and in the other place.

The Government’s major problem is their inability to provide accurate figures on anything to do with human trafficking. The most reliable figures came from Operation Pentameter 1, which are very modest, and we have not had the results from Operation Pentameter 2 yet, so we have no idea of the scale of human trafficking. We talk with great emotion about it, but we have no idea of its scale. The Government are appallingly bad at providing information. In answer to a written question from the hon. Member for Luton, South (Margaret Moran), the Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, the hon. Member for Gedling (Mr. Coaker) said:

“Data on the numbers of children and unaccompanied minors trafficked into the UK for each year since 2000 are not centrally recorded.”—[Official Report, 12 December 2006; Vol. 454, c. 1053W.]

Nobody has any idea what the numbers are.

Human trafficking has not only attracted a huge official infrastructure; it also has a huge vocabulary. The definition of “human trafficking” is not clear. Sex trafficking gets endless newspaper coverage in the tabloids, but confusion still exists between sex trafficking and prostitution. Human trafficking involves not only sexual exploitation but exploitation of labour such as domestic servitude, forced labour, begging and benefit fraud. It does not only involve women; it also involves men, including young men, and young children. Children under 10—which means they have no criminal liability—are being brought over to Britain by their extended family, having been trained in eastern Europe by people like Fagin in “Oliver Twist”. They are forced to work in a range of criminal activities such as shoplifting, theft and automated teller machine—ATM—fraud. A talented under-10-year-old can earn between £50,000 and £100,000 a year for the gangs that they work for.

The inability of this country to handle this problem is well illustrated by my experience on the beat on Oxford street as part of the police service parliamentary scheme. We apprehended a young Romanian girl at Marble Arch underground station. We believe that there were other children there, but they disappeared very quickly when we arrived. She refused to co-operate or to tell us who she was, where she lived or how old she was. The police officers took her to Marylebone police station as a place of safety. She had no money on her, only a return underground ticket. She refused to speak English, although she attended a school here and could speak the language. An interpreter was called for, at public expense. On searching her, she was found to have shoplifted goods on her, but their value was so small—under £20—that the police did not prosecute her. She had to be released from police custody and the social services in Haringey—which is where she said that she lived—said that they could not look after her. She is one of the many children from eastern Europe trafficked by gangs to work on the streets. Oxford street is full of such children. How are we going to deal with this?

Will the Minister reconsider all the cases in the past few years in which children have been prosecuted and criminalised for theft or for cannabis cultivation, in the light of the new Crown Prosecution Service guidance, which states that they should be treated as victims of trafficking, not as criminals? Will he confirm that no such children who have been apprehended and prosecuted in this way are in prison? I believe that such children are being wrongly criminalised.

A further problem with trafficked children is that they often go missing from social services care within 24 hours, and often within three hours. The ECPAT report “Missing Out”, produced in 2007, revealed that in three local authority areas, of the 80 reported cases of known or suspected child victims of trafficking, 48 had gone missing from social services care. They go in one door and come out of the other. The Government report—I think that it was a Serious and Organised Crime Agency report—produced in June 2007 revealed that, of the 330 supposed victims of child trafficking, 183 had gone missing without trace.

In answer to my question of 30 October 2007, the Home Secretary confirmed that in West Sussex, which covers the Gatwick airport complex, 50 children from abroad went missing from care between 2004 and 2006. In Hillingdon, which contains Heathrow, 74 children were reported missing in 2006 alone. The reason why children disappear from care is that their traffickers are the only people they know in this country—the children do not speak our language—and the only people they can rely on. They have been brainwashed not to trust anybody in authority, let alone the social services or the police.

How can we start to help such children out of their miserable existence and to make them a priority? The problem is compounded by the diversionary activity of numerous officials who attend conferences and meetings all over the world—with upwards of 600 delegates, including lawyers, experts, officials and diplomats. Those conferences cost millions of pounds of public money, as the delegates travel first class, but those officials talk rather than focus on the real problems. Such money would be far better used to fund refuges, which often barely scrape by, to provide safe havens for trafficked children. Many refuges in the EU do not receive public funding. The POPPY project is the only refuge in the UK to receive a Government grant, while the position of east European countries’ refuges is particularly dire. Why does the EU not help them? While diplomats munch in style, the people at the grass roots and the victims remain penniless.

The Government must start to collect reliable data and statistics on trafficking in the UK. They keep promising, but they cannot deliver. With the police powerless to act against child trafficking of the under-10s and with human trafficking not being a police performance indicator, with social services losing children and with the immigration services having little expertise to identify victims and being unable to stop EU passport holders, the situation is now desperate.

According to the former Minister for Women and Equality, the hon. Member for Sheffield, Heeley (Meg Munn):

“We are leading Europe on providing for victims and ensuring that people are recognised at ports.”

—[Official Report, 22 February 2007; Vol. 457, c. 404.]

That is just not true. As we conclude the 200th anniversary of the abolition of slavery, we have a new chapter and a new form of slavery right on our doorstep. History is repeating itself and we have not learned the lessons.

I start my speech where the hon. Member for Totnes (Mr. Steen) finished his by drawing that comparison between the current horrendous slavery that we face today and that of the past. According to the International Labour Organisation, the estimated minimum number of persons exploited as a result of trafficking at a given time is approaching 2.5 million—an estimate made in 2005—but many hon. Members believe that the real figure today is much higher.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Hendon (Mr. Dismore) said earlier, most people are trafficked for sexual exploitation, but he also referred to economic exploitation, and some people are trafficked for other reasons. There is also now the additional horrendous crime of trafficking in humans for organ donation. As other hon. Members have noted, trafficking in human beings is now the third most profitable criminal activity in the world after illegal drugs and arms trafficking.

We are debating today a Council of Europe convention on trafficking. Like other hon. Members, I have served on the UK delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, which comprises national delegations from 47 European parliaments. I have recently been elected vice-chair of the Assembly’s sub-committee on trafficking in human beings, whose aim is to campaign to promote the widest possible signature and ratification of the Council of Europe convention on action against trafficking in human beings, so that it can come into force not only at the earliest opportunity, but with the widest possible ratification.

We are pleased to note that the convention will enter into force on 1 February, following the 10th ratification by Cyprus. However, entry into force is not an end in itself. To be successful, it must enter into effect in all the member states of greater Europe and in other parts of the world, providing a global response to a global problem. The wider the ratification, the better the protection for victims, as the convention can reach its full potential only when it is ratified by all the countries of Europe and beyond.

To help parliamentarians and people who want to promote the widest ratification of the convention, the sub-committee has drawn up a handbook for parliamentarians, which I commend to Members. In the wider sphere, the Inter-Parliamentary Union is contemplating drawing up a worldwide handbook. I am pleased to note that my hon. Friend the Member for Hendon, with his great knowledge and expertise, will represent the British group of the IPU at a conference in Vienna next month on drawing up that handbook.

The convention can make a genuine difference, not only to prevention but to victims of this crime. Some have questioned the need for another convention, saying that there are already laws and international agreements. It is true that we have the United Nations protocol—the Palermo protocol—and the convention against transnational organised crime to prevent and punish trafficking in persons, especially women and children. We also have the European Union directive of 29 April 2004 on the residence permit issued to third-country national victims of trafficking, or to third-country nationals who have been the subject of an action to facilitate illegal migration and who co-operate with the competent authorities. We have the EU Council framework decision of 19 July 2002 on combating trafficking in human beings, and we have the action plan from the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe to combat trafficking in human beings. So why do we need a new convention?

We need a new convention simply because the existing international texts either are not sufficiently binding or take account of just one aspect of the problem. The geographical setting of the Council of Europe enables countries of origin, transit and destination to agree on a common binding policy against trafficking. The main reason we need this convention, however, is that none of the aforementioned legal instruments focus on victims of trafficking. The Council of Europe convention is the first international instrument to focus on the victims, and that is its added value. One of the primary concerns of the Council of Europe is to safeguard and protect human rights, and trafficking in human beings directly undermines the values on which the Council is based.

Other Members have referred to the Government’s slowness to sign the convention. I think that the arguments about the dangers to our immigration policy—the “pull factor”—were spurious, and that the Joint Committee on Human Rights was correct to say

“It is not credible to suggest that a woman would voluntarily submit to indeterminate sexual slavery of the most brutal kind for the purpose of obtaining UK residency.”

I am pleased to observe the progress that has been made. It is true that the pressure to persuade the Government to sign was exerted on a cross-party basis, and I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Totnes for not just his knowledge of the situation but his determination. I also pay tribute to members of the Council of Europe delegation across the parties: to my right hon. Friend the Member for Rotherham (Mr. MacShane) and my hon. Friend the Member for Calder Valley (Chris McCafferty), and to the hon. Member for Ryedale (Mr. Greenway), who is no longer present, and the Baroness Knight of Collingtree. There has been a cross-party consensus on the issue, and I think that some of our debates on it have shown Parliament at its best. Parliamentarians have worked together to achieve a common goal.

The features of the convention that are important and illustrate why we should ratify it include compulsory assistance measures and a “recovery and reflection” period for victims of trafficking; the possibility of delivering residence permits to victims not only on the basis of co-operation with law enforcement authorities, but on humanitarian and human rights grounds; a non-punishment clause for victims of trafficking; a strengthened international co-operation scheme; and the independent monitoring system, GRETA, to which my hon. Friend the Member for Hendon referred.

My hon. Friend also expressed one of my own concerns. The Ministers who are contracting parties to the convention will determine its procedures, the appointment procedures for the members of GRETA and the way in which they will work. If we have not yet ratified the convention by the time those discussions take place, what input will we have, and what consultation will we have with non-governmental organisations and other stakeholders to ensure GRETA’s independence?

Finally, let me raise two issues that others have mentioned. Both my hon. Friend the Member for Hendon and the hon. Member for Totnes have referred to the disappeared children on other occasions. In an earlier debate, the hon. Member for Totnes spoke of the international activity over one child who had tragically disappeared, and the media speculation and coverage of that one child, and contrasted that with the amount that we read in the national press about children who have gone missing from care. There is also the issue of unaccompanied minors who disappear. Do we know where they are, and do we know how many may have disappeared into the sex trade in Italy? We are becoming not only a country of destination, but a country of transit. That is why we need ratification, and we need it early. I know that my hon. Friend the Minister wishes to see that done with minimum delay.

I welcome the guidance that the Government have produced and the statement that the Home Secretary has made this week. I think that there is a determination in the House and on the part of the Government. I hope that the motion will not need to be subject to a vote this evening.

This has been an informative and educative debate. In the few minutes that I have, I want to concentrate on the most vulnerable in society, about whom we have heard so much this afternoon—the children.

According to the US State Department, 800,000 people are trafficked across international borders each year. Approximately 50 per cent. of them are minors. In a world that is opening up so fast, the challenge is how to control and monitor who is travelling where, when and why, and often whom they are travelling with. That is why I believe firmly that a co-ordinated border policy, starting with our airlines and airports, as well as gold-plated ratification of the Council of Europe’s convention on action against trafficking in human beings, offers our best hope to end the trafficking of children into the United Kingdom.

Children are trafficked into the UK using many different forms of transport, but I want to focus on the airlines. As the Minister will know, no data are available regarding the percentage of children trafficked into the UK via airlines because there is no central data collection on children trafficked into the UK. However, it is known that children are trafficked into the UK and are arriving at airports across the country, including at smaller regional airports frequented by budget airlines.

There are no global standards or regulations related to the age at which a child can travel alone by air transport. Airlines vary enormously in their standards. For example, Virgin, which sets a good standard, insists that children between the ages of five and 15 must be registered in advance of travel for the unaccompanied minor service, or be accompanied by someone aged 16 or over. Children above 16 can travel alone. Children can travel alone with easyJet from the age of 14, with British Airways from the age of 12 and, amazingly, from the age of just four with Air France.

To protect children and to prevent trafficking, there must be checks and balances at every point in the journey—from pre-check-in until immigration services on arrival. The airlines themselves have an important part to play, yet it is my understanding that they have not been involved in policy development to any degree. I would be interested to hear from the Minister if that is the case and if so how he intends to rectify what is clearly a serious oversight.

Is my hon. Friend aware that children from Vietnam and China check in, show their passports and then, during the journey to Britain, flush their passports down the loo or even eat them, so that when they get to Heathrow or Gatwick, they have no papers at all? People have to photostat their passports in China or Vietnam and send them by wire to Britain, so that when the children arrive we know who they are.

When my hon. Friend made that point about 10 minutes ago, I was amazed. I remain amazed. It is a good point and no doubt the Minister will wish to reflect on it, although there are issues about taking records at the point of departure.

A useful point to return to is the findings from Operation Paladin, run by the Metropolitan police in 2004. It involved the immigration service, Hillingdon social services and secondees from the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. The operation risk assessed children arriving at Heathrow airport over three months without their parents or legal guardians, and social services followed up those considered at risk. In total, 1,738 unaccompanied minors passed through immigration services in that period. Not all of them were trafficked, but it shows the number of children who travel unaccompanied. That did not include EU nationals or British children. The Paladin team risk-assessed 551 children, or 30 per cent., based on a list of indicators considered by police to indicate that something was not quite right. The largest risk group were African teenage girls.

UNICEF showed that, in an 18-month period, 330 children were believed to have been trafficked into the UK. Of that total—we have heard a lot about this—183 went missing from the care of social services. Most appallingly, there is evidence that many children may still be under the control of traffickers while they are in local authority care, let alone those who went missing from it.

There is currently no safe accommodation providing 24-hour care for trafficked children, and as a result many of them end up in foster care, hostels or even bed-and-breakfast accommodation. I hope that the Minister will extend funding to the POPPY project to look after such vulnerable children and provide professional support and, critically, counselling where appropriate.

Many young victims of trafficking are awaiting asylum determinations whose age is disputed by local authority social services and the Home Office Border and Immigration Agency. If their age is assessed as 18 or over, they are placed in the adult system, which does not provide for safe accommodation and support services for age-disputed victims, unless, of course, they get access to the POPPY project. ECPAT UK found child-trafficked victim identification

“to be ad hoc, unsystematic and sometimes accidental; information is not always recorded or passed on to relevant agencies; and children might be in the looked-after system for some time before they are identified as a victim of trafficking.”

How will the Government ensure that both the Home Office Border and Immigration Agency and social services comply with the 2005 Council of Europe convention against trafficking in human beings on the provision of accommodation and support to age-disputed young victims of trafficking?

Like all Members, I welcomed the decision to ratify the convention, but the Government need not wait until the end of the year to instigate these recommendations, and I hope that they do not prevaricate any further. In order to combat the sexual exploitation of children, there must be a comprehensive, co-ordinated partnership between many groups—not only the police and the Home Office, but prosecutors, lawyers, embassies, non-governmental organisations, the travel industry and the media. Trafficking in children is an escalating problem, although how big it is is debatable, so I hope that the Minister will commission authoritative research to provide hard facts and evidence to inform the debate. As yet, there is no system of best practice in the travel industry, no consistent multi-agency approach at borders, no systematic tracking or spot checks and a weak support structure. I await the Minister’s recommendations with hope that he will grasp this nettle.

In 21st century Britain, it is frankly an outrage that child trafficking can exist. The Government must now act with greater speed and clarity, and provide the requisite resources to stamp out this unacceptable practice.

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for East Devon (Mr. Swire), and to have been listening to such an important debate with so many excellent contributions, such as those from the Minister and the hon. Members for Ashford (Damian Green) and for Eastleigh (Chris Huhne). I was going to say that we cannot put a cigarette paper between the Front-Bench positions, but we are not allowed to talk about cigarettes any longer, of course.

All Members understand the seriousness of the issue under discussion. As we have heard, the phrase “human trafficking” covers a wide variety of behaviour, ranging from the experiences of the illegal immigrants from China who worked as cockle pickers at Morecambe bay to the abused women, many from within the European Union, who are tricked into working in the sex industry in the United Kingdom. Although recent operations in our country have focused on the sex trade, as the hon. Member for Totnes (Mr. Steen) pointed out in his eloquent speech, there are other issues such as bonded labour in areas such as domestic service and the restaurant trade that involve even more people, so the effects might be even wider than the experts present today believe.

The hon. Member for East Devon quoted State Department figures. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime estimates that 1 million people are trafficked across borders each year, and the trade generates $32 billion a year worldwide, making it the third biggest earner for organised crime gangs after illegal drugs and arms trafficking. Although estimates vary, it is agreed that thousands of people are trafficked into our country every year. I take on board the point made by Members that it is important that we have up-to-date figures from the Government on how many people are involved. Victims of trafficking are sold from gang to gang and are moved across the UK and between the UK and other EU member states by the people who seek to exploit them, which makes the detection of these people very difficult indeed.

I, like other hon. Members, warmly welcome the Government’s decision, announced by the Home Secretary yesterday and reinforced by the Minister today, to ratify the European convention on human trafficking. Obviously, we all hope that that happens as quickly as possible, although the timetable given suggests that it should happen by the end of the year.

I also welcome the effects of the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002, which this Government introduced. Some £109,328 has been seized by my local Leicestershire police force as a result of the operation of that legislation. I congratulate the Home Office on other significant measures, such as the creation of the UK Human Trafficking Centre in 2006 to ensure that the response of our various police forces is co-ordinated.

Yesterday, I met Kate Allen from Amnesty International. Although she praised what the Government have done, she raised a number of issues concerning the identification of trafficking victims and touched on many of the points raised by hon. Members on both sides of the House about the immigration implications for those who are left in this country.

The Home Affairs Committee has considered a number of those aspects. It has examined aspects of immigration, asylum law and human trafficking. I am pleased to tell the House that we decided at our previous meeting to initiate a full inquiry into human trafficking, whereby the Committee will try to establish the scale and type of human trafficking and the way in which investigations can identify the victims, and make recommendations and suggestions to the Government.

The inquiry will almost certainly examine the issue of international co-operation with other EU member states and with the new transit countries, such as Ukraine, Moldova and Croatia. We hope, of course, to take evidence from the Minister. I am pleased to say that we agreed to ask the hon. Member for Totnes to give evidence to help us examine how we can obtain good information. As other hon. Members have done today, I bend my knee to his vast experience on this issue.

The inquiry will hear from the Border and Immigration Agency and the Serious Organised Crime Agency. We will almost certainly visit a number of EU and other countries. I am not sure that we will follow the Minister around Europe, but I know that Ukraine and Moldova, and possibly Lithuania or Poland, have been mentioned as places to visit. We are, of course, the Home Affairs Committee, so we do not intend to spend too much time abroad, but it is important to examine the source countries to ensure that we are able to track what is happening.

I am certain that the inquiry will be thorough and will go a long way in helping the Government to take the right steps forward, in eradicating this terrible problem and in trying to deal with the far-reaching problem of organised crime in this area. These women and children often come to Britain in the hope of a better life, and it is this House’s duty, as reflected in the comments made by hon. Members on both sides of the House, to ensure that that is exactly what they get. They must not be exploited in the way that they have been in the past.

It is a pleasure to follow the Chairman of the Home Affairs Committee, the right hon. Member for Leicester, East (Keith Vaz). I welcome this timely debate. It is right that we collectively, as parliamentarians, demonstrate our shared commitment today to tackling this evil activity, at a time when other countries are trying to demonstrate that they are doing their bit. For example, last Friday the United States held a national day of human trafficking awareness. It had been initiated by the US Congress to try to raise the American public’s consciousness of this issue.

Many hon. Members have referred to similar sets of data on the scale of the problem, which have come from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, the International Labour Organisation and the US State Department. There is common agreement on the size and scope of the international problem. My hon. Friend the Member for Totnes (Mr. Steen) was right to identify just how thin the data are on victims of human trafficking in the UK. That will be a real barrier to effective Government action to tackle the problem. Unless there is more serious research and a much better understanding of the nature of the problem within our own borders, we will come up against that barrier, which will be difficult to overcome in terms of securing effective action.

I spent the earlier part of today looking through the national action plan that the Home Office produced last year. It attempts to set out some specific objectives for tackling the problem. However, that was a year ago and there was a push to produce the document to coincide with the bicentennial of the abolition of slavery. A year later, more information has come to light and progress has been made on the ratification of the convention, so it is time for a revamped and updated national action plan. It is right that we should review the situation each year and assess how well we are meeting the objectives. We should also question whether the objectives are the right ones and will be effective in tackling the problem.

Most of the debate this afternoon has focused on the problem of trafficking within our borders. Actually, most of the victims of trafficking globally are outside Britain, in the developing world. This afternoon and this evening, thousands of women from eastern Europe and the former Soviet bloc will be working on the streets and in thousands of brothels in communities up and down this country, but we should not forget the faces of the other victims of trafficking internationally. Young Burmese boys continue to be plucked from street corners and bus stations in Burma and forcibly conscripted into the army. The gangster regime in Burma has created the army with the largest proportion of child soldiers in the world, and most of them have been forcibly conscripted and many trafficked. I also think of some of the children whom I met near Hyderabad in India last year. They were from the Dalit community—the untouchable caste—and victims of trafficking, working in a bonded labour scenario. Trafficking has multiple facets and many faces, and we should not forget that most of its victims are outside this country.

It is vital that we have a new, integrated border security force and I strongly the support the commitment by my party to instigate such a force, especially if resources can be found to restore some of the border security at Welsh ports. I represent a seat in west Wales that has two ferry ports with connections to Ireland, and there is a growing concern in Wales that the four ports that link to Ireland are being used as a back-door alternative trafficking route from the continent, through Ireland and into the UK. That issue has been raised with me by police officers confidentially back home in Pembrokeshire. It was also identified in a report last year by the Welsh Assembly Government. I therefore urge the Minister to take that into consideration as he and his colleagues assess the issue of border security and what can be done to choke off the supply of trafficked people through UK borders. In recent years, there have been many cuts to Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, so we no longer have any permanent customs cover at the two ferry ports of Pembroke Dock and Fishguard in my constituency.

On the issue of convictions for trafficking offences, my hon. Friend the Member for Totnes hit the nail on the head when he highlighted the disparity between the number of prosecutions and the number of convictions. What work has been done to identify the barriers to achieving successful convictions of those who are charged with trafficking offences? If we understood what those barriers are, it could lead to more effective police training and, I hope, to more convictions.

Is not the problem with prosecutions and convictions that the women are not prepared to give evidence against their traffickers? The women have no security, other than their families back home, and they do not have identity cards that would enable them to stay on in Britain. Those are the two reasons why we do not obtain more convictions.

Again, my hon. Friend brings his experience, knowledge and good judgment to the debate. I hope that that has been noted by the Ministers.

Let me move from the subject of supply to that of demand. We have a real problem in this country with a booming sex industry that lumps together a whole set of legal and illegal activities. They range from legal and illegal pornography through legal and illegal lap-dancing clubs to prostitution, which takes many different forms and is conducted in many different places. I sense an element of schizophrenia in how we think about the problem. There is gross moral outrage when we talk about human trafficking and people who are forced into sexual slavery in this country, yet when we talk about prostitution we almost stand back, afraid of climbing down from our position of liberal neutrality. We cannot tackle a large part of the trafficking problem in this country unless we start to tackle the growth of the sex industry. The growing demand from British men for easily available paid-for sex is largely driving the supply of trafficked women into this country.

My hon. Friend the Member for Ashford (Damian Green) mentioned the change that has taken place over the past 10 years. We have gone from a situation where 85 per cent. of those working in prostitution were from the UK to one where an estimated 85 per cent. are foreign. Such a massive change will have come about in one of two ways: either through a huge fall in the number of domestic girls and young women working in the sex trade, or through a massive increase in the supply of foreign women to meet additional demand. I think that the latter has happened.

Demand is booming for easily available paid-for sex and it is being met by women who have, effectively, been imported. That is backed up by some research that I read earlier today, which suggested that the proportion of men who admit to paying for sex has more than doubled in the past 10 years from about 2 per cent. to 4 or 4.5 per cent. That backs up my assertion about the growing demand in this country for paid-for sex. I pay tribute to the work on that point done by the hon. Member for Slough (Fiona Mactaggart) and to the tone that she has struck.

In my last 20 seconds of allotted time, I shall make a final point about victims. The hon. Member for Bridgend (Mrs. Moon) talked about transferring knowledge from this country to countries from which people are being trafficked. There is also a need to learn from some of the excellent initiatives on the ground in those countries when we work with the victims of trafficking in this country.

In the spirit of bipartisanship, I am delighted to follow the hon. Member for Preseli Pembrokeshire (Mr. Crabb) as well as many other colleagues. In January 2006, I had the pleasure of publishing an article in The Daily Telegraph to urge the signature and ratification of the convention on action against trafficking. A year later, the shadow Home Secretary, the hon. Member for Ashford (Damian Green), came on board. The campaign was already well under way thanks to my hon. Friend the Member for Hendon (Mr. Dismore) and, in particular, the hon. Member for Totnes (Mr. Steen) and his all-party group. They all raised the issue repeatedly in oral questions, Home Office questions and directly with the Prime Minister.

A year ago, I received a letter from the then Prime Minister. He said that signing the Council of Europe convention would

“send a strong signal that as well as commemorating the abolition of slavery, we are also taking action to eradicate modern forms of slavery and discrimination, such as human trafficking.”

Two years after we began the campaign, the fact that we have signed and ratified the convention is cause for modest parliamentary celebration. It shows that working in Europe and accepting some derogation of our sovereignty in agreeing to change our laws at the behest of a European agency is something that all parties can support.

I should like to take this opportunity to join others in thanking Ministers—especially my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, the Member for Gedling (Mr. Coaker), and my hon. and learned Friend the Solicitor-General, as well as my right hon. Friend the Minister for Security, Counter-Terrorism, Crime and Policing—for showing leadership and courage in facing down objections from Whitehall officials on this measure. No one should underestimate how far we have come in two years, or the extent to which political leadership and parliamentary pressure have changed the story.

I want to focus on the problem of the young women, many of them under 18 years of age, who are trafficked to work as prostitutes in Britain. I and other hon. Members have raised this matter in the House, usually to the scorn and sniggers of the sketch-writers and commentators—the lads with the laptops, so to speak. They find that any threat to what they consider to be men’s inalienable right to buy sex from women, even when they are forced, beaten, trafficked or trapped into prostitution, is something that simply has to be dismissed.

I hope that the hon. Member for Wellingborough (Mr. Bone) will not take it awry when I say that I was dismayed to hear his contribution to last Sunday’s “The World This Weekend” programme. He attacked those of us who want to tackle the demand side of sex-slave prostitution for being engaged on some sort of moral campaign.

I was not attacking anyone on a moral basis. The debate about prostitution is very important, but I do not believe that banning or liberalising prostitution can have any effect on human trafficking. Whichever we do, the trafficking will continue.

indicated dissent.

The hon. Member for Preseli Pembrokeshire was shaking his head vigorously during that intervention. I expect that we shall return to this discussion. I mean no negative comment on what the hon. Gentleman has said, as his position is shared by many men and by a number of women, but the debate is out in the open and we must get our response right. I happen to think that slowing down the ever-increasing demand in this country for sex slaves, many of whom are still children, is morally a good thing.

Along with Ministers and other hon. Members, I have embarked on a campaign to encourage men to take responsibility for their part in sustaining this modern form of slavery. The ever-growing demand that I have described gives rise to advertisements for brothels in newspapers that state, for example, that fresh girls are imported every week. Without that demand, there would be a smaller supply of sex slaves.

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

I am able to take two interventions, apparently, and then my time will run out. I give way to the hon. Gentleman.

The right hon. Gentleman is making an important point, but is he aware that a mainstream evening newspaper in south Wales carried a front-page story last October about raids on brothels in Cardiff where trafficked women were working as prostitutes? Further into the paper, however, it printed adverts in its advertising section for exactly the same brothels that were being reported on the front page.

Voltaire defined hypocrisy as the compliment that vice pays to virtue, and never was that more accurate than in the case of that south Wales newspaper.

I am delighted to see that my right hon. and learned Friend the Leader of the House has taken her place on the Front Bench, along with my hon. Friend the Deputy Leader of the House. My right hon. and learned Friend has taken a lot of unfair criticism since she very bravely raised this matter on the “Today” programme just before Christmas, but this is a debate whose time has come. It will not be easy, but the discussion has to begin.

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

If the hon. Gentleman will forgive me, I really cannot, as an eight-minute limit has been imposed on speeches. I am sure that he will have other chances to make points in the weeks and months ahead.

What are the figures? I confess that no one can supply a fully accurate figure for the number of women trafficked into Britain for sexual slavery purposes. By definition, however, people being trafficked in and out of the UK sex-slave trade are not going to queue up at a border control to announce their arrival.

On 19 October 2005, that fine newspaper the Daily Mirror carried the headline “25,000 Sex Slaves on The Streets of Britain”. I was once a Daily Mirror reporter, so I trust the report that appeared beneath, which stated:

“The Home Office believes between 2,000 and 6,000 women are brought in each year. Many are made to have sex with up to 30 men a day. Police say there could even be up to 50,000 women from every continent working in most cities.”

I do not know whether those figures are right; I am quoting the Daily Mirror citing the Home Office two years ago.

The rather ludicrous claim is advanced that because the number of prosecutions and convictions for trafficking has been low, and because the recorded number of foreign nationals detained following raids on brothels and massage parlours is low, there is not really a problem. That argument has been advanced not in this House but by a huge number of people commenting after the interview given by my right hon. and learned Friend the Leader of the House. It is like arguing that as the number of rape convictions is low, there are not many rapes in Britain.

The defenders of men’s right to have sex when they like, as often as they like, in any manner they like, with any teenage girl they like—those penetrating columnists with their defence of unlimited male penetration—need to examine the statistics with more care. The Council of Europe and many other international agencies—the UN, the International Labour Organisation, the International Organisation for Migration and the OSCE—as well as national Governments and non-governmental organisations, have tried to establish the true figures.

The ILO, to which I am grateful for the material that it sent me yesterday, reckons that there are 2.45 million victims of trafficking. The US Government estimate that 80 per cent. of trafficking victims are female, and that 70 per cent. of them are trafficked for sexual exploitation, meaning that up to 1,658,000 women are trafficked each year for sexual purposes, of whom up to 225,000 are trafficked into industrial countries such as the UK. The Dutch reckon that there are about 3,500 victims of sex trafficking in their country, and the US Government believe that up to 17,500 women are trafficked into the USA each year for sex purposes, notably to provide internet porn for the world’s masturbators.

The ILO has estimated the profits per victim of sex slave trafficking at between $60,000 and $70,000 a year. An extra 40,000 prostitutes were said to have been imported into Germany just to service World cup fans in 2006; I am not sure whether English demand dried up after our boys’ heroic performance. There will not be a problem, of course, for English fans at the next World cup.

Those are some of the figures that we must consider. I put them on the record because I hope that they will balance the view that there is not really much of a problem and that the sex-slave industry is just a happy business of consenting adults exchanging money for services rendered. There may be some contented belles de jour or happy hookers, but every survey shows that most prostitutes and sex slaves would quit the industry if they were not obliged to service men to pay for a drugs habit or debts or, in the case of foreign women, if they were not kept in fear by brutal pimps. That is why a number of us on both sides of the Chamber have raised the issue of the demand side of the question of ever-increasing prostitution.

In signing and ratifying the convention the Government have done well, but as long as there is an incessant demand for paid-for sex, trafficking will increase to supply it. I know that calling for some control of demand brings down the wrath of the media establishment; I hope that the Opposition Member who winds up will address that point and say whether they support the hon. Member for Preseli Pembrokeshire and the Leader of the House. Ministers have been to Sweden to see the impact of putting the responsibility on men rather than women for criminal activity in the sex-slave industry, and the House will listen to their reports with interest.

A national debate has begun. I know that the position that I am defending is unpopular; it is attacked by much of the establishment media. Making men responsible and accountable for their actions is the best way to slow down and turn back the rising tide of sex slavery and trafficking. I welcome the ratification. I do not think that there is any need for the House to press the motion to a Division. I note the references in the Opposition motion to Europol and Eurojust, but as the hon. Member for Totnes said, Europol cannot agree even on common statistics. Frankly, we need more European co-operation on the matter. We need a European bureau of investigation to tackle trafficking. That would mean co-operating fully in Europe. I just point out to Conservative Members where their arguments may take them.

rose—

Order. Before I call the next hon. Member to speak, I should just say to the House that although interventions gain extra time for the hon. Member addressing the House, they do of course have the unfortunate side effect of possibly squeezing other Members out of the debate.

I point out to the right hon. Member for Rotherham (Mr. MacShane), in case he missed it, that the England team have not yet failed to qualify for the World cup; they failed to qualify for the European cup. I ask him not to wish it on them.

The Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, the hon. Member for Gedling (Mr. Coaker), and everyone else who has spoken have shown a great commitment to the issue that we are discussing. I pay tribute to all who have contributed for the effort that they have put into it. I have been working on the issue for the past 15 years. For the last 10, I have been heavily involved in the work of the Council of Europe. I congratulate the British parliamentary delegation from all parties and both Houses. Over that time, it has played a significant part in forcing the subject on to the agenda. It was the driving force behind a new commitment to the issue of trafficking.

My hon. Friend the Member for Eastleigh (Chris Huhne), who led for the Liberal Democrats, mentioned some of the countries that had not yet signed the convention. Those countries, including France, Germany, Italy and Spain, have not wanted to get involved because of the repercussions internally. They would have to face up to the reality of prosecuting those from whom many of them seek to gain votes. In Italy, 50,000 young girls, under age, are employed in the sex industry and are probably having sex with five clients a night, five nights a week. There are millions and millions of illegal sex acts in Italy, but very few men have been prosecuted by the Italian authorities for having sex with under-age girls.

The right hon. Member for Rotherham was right in what he said about trying to do something about demand. It is too easy to criticise such countries as Romania, Moldova, Bulgaria and Ukraine and to say that they are driving the industry, but that is not the case; the issue is where the demand lies.

I had the misfortune to meet a man from Moldova who had had an operation in Turkey to have an organ removed. He was quite open about it. He was dying from the consequences of blood poisoning that he had contracted during the operation. He claimed that the organ was received by a British citizen who had gone to Turkey for the operation. It was done not in some back-street workshop but by sophisticated doctors and nurses who knew what they were doing. Presumably, the recipient of that kidney paid a fortune for the operation. The chap from Moldova got $1,000 and death. Many of the journeys of the trafficked start in desperation and, sadly, many, if not all, end in despair, and an increasing number end in death.

We must appreciate the size of the problem. It is not just a matter of knowing the figures. There is universal agreement in the House that we are talking about a very big issue. The Minister is to be congratulated on the robust way in which he put his case today, and on accepting that we must get to grips with the size of the problem. There has been a slow—sometimes painfully slow—recognition of trafficking right across the world, but particularly in Europe. It is a disgrace that all 47 countries of the Council of Europe have not, as a duty, signed and ratified the convention.

The issue of co-operation is fraught. The right hon. Member for Leicester, East (Keith Vaz) is no longer present, but he asked for people to give evidence to his Committee. When the Council of Europe committee on which I served wanted evidence, we did not have to go very far from the home of the legislation that we are discussing. Less than half a kilometre away in Strasbourg, there were hundreds of women plying their trade not in brothels or massage parlours, but on the streets. So when the group that was looking into the issue wanted information, we went out with a team and spoke to a group of girls.

We met girls from 18 countries in the course of three hours. Some of them gave graphic details and some of them, surprisingly, had the dates that the European Parliament met in Strasbourg because they said that those were good weeks for them. The home of human rights is one of the bastions supporting the demand for the trade. We had the misfortune to meet a young lady whose sister had been killed and her body dumped in the Rhine. Both sisters had been trafficked not once, but twice. Why twice? Because they were both returned from the United Kingdom. They were found and returned. Why were they trafficked again? It was because, as hon. Members have said, there would have been problems and consequences for their family if they had not co-operated. Those girls were forced—not physically, but by the mental pressure of the threat that there would have been to their family’s very existence and life in Moldova if they had not co-operated with the traffickers. Once again, they were back on the streets.

I turn now to the issue of the children. I understand why it is difficult for local authorities to hold on to them—the law does not allow us to lock them in; they are not kept in secure units. Why are those children kept so close to the very streets from which they have been brought? The traffickers and organisers know only too well where they are. I agreed with the Minister when he said that one of the problems of having safe havens all over the place is that the traffickers know and recognise them. They haunt those places and drive on the evil trade.

We have to find new approaches. I was delighted when the Minister said that he had an open mind and wanted people with ideas to come forward with them. One of the issues is that children should not be kept close to where they are found. There should be widespread co-operation to make that happen. Another issue relates to the disclosure of information between our police force and others; there is wholesale police corruption in many of the countries. Many allow the trade to continue and are significant beneficiaries of it. If we give information, it is disseminated within hours of being received and the traffickers know whom to go after and punish.

Why does that happen? It is because, as every Member who has spoken in this debate clearly recognises, drugs, guns and the trafficking of human beings are the big money earners in the underworld across the globe. That is why we have to find new approaches to the issue. I hope that they will be found faster in this country because of the unity in the Chamber tonight and the excellence of this debate.

This debate has understandably concentrated on the enforcement in the UK of the Council of Europe convention on action against trafficking in human beings. However, I should like to consider the underlying causes of human trafficking.

Human trafficking emerges from poverty, conflict and bad governance. The world is facing an unprecedented rise in population, and with that has come increased urbanisation of the poor and marginalised. Underpinning that is the problem of unemployment. Current figures estimate that about 185 million people are officially registered as unemployed. However, the International Labour Organisation estimates that if we also take into account the under-employed and working poor, the figure is about 1.5 billion people—that is, 30 per cent. of the working-age population of the world. Nearly half of them are under 24 years of age, although that age group represents only one quarter of the working-age population.

The 2007 edition of the World Bank’s world development report reveals that in the next decade the world will see the largest-ever proportion of youth population in its history. There are 1.5 billion people in the world aged between 12 and 24, and 1.3 billion live in developing countries. Countries with the highest incidence of poverty are almost all in eastern and western Africa. We have seen the human suffering and consequences of the desperate scenes conveyed to us by the media in the past few years. Such scenes have come from the coast of Tenerife, from Malta, which has been overrun at times by people coming across by sea, and from the gulf of Aden, where people go to reach Yemen and go onwards to the west. Against that backdrop, it is hardly surprising that the trafficking of humans has become the fastest-growing international crime, as has been mentioned today.

Human trafficking does not happen only within our own borders; it is a growing problem in developing countries. The International Development Committee, of which I am a member, visited Ethiopia last year. We visited a local organisation that carried out a good deal of work to protect young children from poor, rural areas who had been sent to towns and cities in the hope of a better life. However, those children had often ended up as mere chattels.

Child labour and bonded labour are prevalent in many parts of Africa and Asia. It is estimated that 20 million people are trapped in bonded labour, domestic slavery and trafficking, the vast majority of whom are women or children. We must address the rights of children and women in particular if we are to change the culture that offers tacit support for such forms of bonded labour and trafficking. It is interesting to note that last year there was a TV programme in China that highlighted people being snatched from their rural communities to be used as slave labour in neighbouring areas. That prompted a massive response in China, as it was the first time that there had been a public acknowledgement of the problem and its scale, and it resulted in thousands of people coming forward to state the extent of the abuse in their own communities.

For the world’s youth, we need to provide the opportunity to obtain decent work, either at home or through properly organised and legitimate migration. That will require increased co-operation and harmonisation of policies and programmes if we are to maximise its success. As has rightly been stated, we need co-operation right across Europe and outside Europe if we are to have a good alignment in our policies to curb trafficking here and in the developing world.

The World Bank report recommends that a framework of policies is required to give young people expanding opportunities and the ability to improve their personal capabilities, and thus their income levels, but we also need to provide opportunities for them to have an effective voice in their communities and in public life. The ILO has called for global action to tackle the decent work deficit. Decent work is productive and delivers a fair income, security in the workplace and social protection for families, as well as allowing people to express their concerns and to organise. If we had that throughout the world, we would not have the problem of human trafficking that we see on our streets today.

As levels of wealth in the world have increased enormously over the past 30 years, the share of that wealth that is represented as income has decreased consistently. We cannot shy away from the conclusion that the tragedy of human trafficking is at least in part a consequence of insufficient attention to creating more work through greater investment in job-intensive industries. While the service sector has produced many new jobs in recent years, the agricultural sector has been largely static. Yet the demand for food globally is increasing at a significant rate, and over the past five years demand has been higher than supply. Not only in our development assistance programmes but in global macro-economic policy, we need to do much more to foster greater investment in creating jobs. I hope that the UN summit in Vienna in the next few weeks will try to deal with some of those issues and give them greater priority.

The Minister referred to the TARA—trafficking awareness-raising alliance— project, which runs in Scotland and is based in Glasgow. I commend the successful collaboration that has been taking place, particularly through the good offices of Glasgow city council and Home Office departments based in Glasgow and working with the Scottish Executive. The police have pointed to the continued problem of getting women to speak to the authorities. It is not surprising that they feel damaged and mistrustful of authority, so an extension of the reflection period should be seriously considered.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Rotherham (Mr. MacShane) and the hon. Member for Preseli Pembrokeshire (Mr. Crabb), my colleagues on the International Development Committee, rightly stated the need to address the domestic sex industry, which is fuelling demand in sex trafficking. The Minister may be aware that new laws recently came into force in Scotland under the Prostitution (Public Places) (Scotland) Act 2007, which specifically criminalises kerb crawling. To date, 40 men have been charged with that offence. I welcome the public campaign that was launched this week in Scotland, but more needs to be done. I hope that today’s debate will lead to a further debate on prostitution-related issues throughout the United Kingdom.

It is a great pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Glasgow, North (Ann McKechin), who made a powerful speech, particularly her point about the roots of human trafficking and the fact that the victims come from countries where there is grinding poverty. She also made a point about the need to increase the period of reflection for victims of human trafficking.

I congratulate the hon. Member for Ashford (Damian Green) on securing an Opposition day debate that has been so well attended and thoughtful, and in which there has been so much cross-party agreement. The great advantage of such a debate is that it highlights the problem of human trafficking. It is also very helpful to have the Minister here; he has fought very hard within the Government to deal with that problem. It is also good to see the Solicitor-General on the Front Bench; she has shown a great deal of interest in this subject. I would like to congratulate the hon. Member for Totnes (Mr. Steen), who is the chair of the all-party group on trafficking of women and children. As the treasurer of that group, I know how he has used his energy and expertise to publicise this matter. If it had not been for his efforts, we may not have had this debate, and the resulting media coverage.

The greatest problem that I had with this issue was believing that it was actually happening. I first got involved when an anonymous letter from a constituent was dropped through my letterbox. I shall quote a part of it:

“I am a self-employed therapist and yet there are women who are on benefits and paying no taxes—i.e. in Northampton an Albanian massage parlour are allowed to advertise and I have been told the men do people trafficking and drugs and the girls pay no tax…I am a professional lady and I get fed up with them asking for sex without a condom (I only do massage) and they are causing AIDS to spread. Please talk to the tax office and the police as somebody told me the Romanians in Northampton allow prostitution to flourish on the red light district”—

and she then gave a mobile telephone number.

The hon. Gentleman has made the point extremely well about the surprise many of us have felt when first finding out about this issue. I would like to remind him about the well-attended meeting of the all-party group on 4 December, where the important message was struck home that human trafficking for the sex trade is not only a big city crime, but manifest in towns and villages throughout the land. There is still a great deal of ignorance about that, which the debate and the all-party group can help to address.

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right, and I know of the interest that he has shown in this matter.

I also must acknowledge the effort that ECPAT has made in raising awareness and dealing with the problem, and I know how closely it has followed the debate today.

Does my hon. Friend accept that the vast majority of women involved in the sex trade, particularly the young ones, are victims of the trade?

Indeed, they are victims.

When I first got to know about this issue, I talked to Northamptonshire police, which confirmed that it was a real problem in our area, just as it is throughout the country. The Northamptonshire police quite often found that when it raided a brothel, the victims it discovered there would not co-operate. The force was pretty smart about that; it got the gangs who run the brothels on immigration laws, and got them expelled from the country, but that is not really a satisfactory way of dealing with the issue.

I decided to try to get to grips with the subject by producing a pamphlet called “Slavery in the 21st century—the trade of human beings for sexual exploitation”. The problem is that I have never been able to finish it. Every time I think I have finished it, I find out that the problem is greater and that there is more depth to it. I am grateful to Richard Britton and Miss Leigh Hooker for the research they have done on it. I had thought that the problem was simply one of bringing in people from abroad and putting them into prostitution. However, now we learn that people are trafficked within the United Kingdom, perhaps from Manchester to Cornwall. I hope that I will finish the pamphlet one day.

I want to give a couple of examples of the way in which people are trafficked into this country. The all-party group met some child victims, who had been brought into the country and forced into prostitution. One young lady was very black and had been brought here when she was 14 by a middle-aged white man on a passport that did not include her name or picture. She was taken to Liverpool and forced into prostitution. She escaped, made her way back to London, found somebody who spoke her language and who took her to the authorities. Thankfully, the NSPCC intervened to look after her. I asked her whether she was shocked at being forced into the evil trade and repeatedly raped. She said, straight faced, “Well, of course, I was being forced to do it in Kenya before I came to this country.” The hon. Member for Glasgow, North alluded to such matters earlier. The grinding poverty and the sort of activities that happen in the countries from where the victims come are also great problems.

We are considering modern-day slavery. The victims have no rights and they are often locked up, but they are sometimes taken to what one might call public brothels. One might ask why they do not run away. The answer is that they are worried that their families might be intimidated. They are terrified of the traffickers and frightened that the most appalling things will happen to them. One might ask why they do not go to the police. The simple answer is that, in their country, the police are as corrupt as the traffickers. One does not have to go far to find an example. A reliable source attested that, at St. Thomas’s hospital, a young lady ran out of the sexual diseases clinic along the corridor as fast as she could. She was pursued by an Albanian, who claimed that she was his property. That happened across the road from Parliament.

I want to deal briefly with prostitution. I understand where many hon. Members come from on the subject, and I am interested in the outcome of the debate. There appears to be no difference in the number of trafficked victims into the Netherlands, Sweden and this country, yet we all have different rules on prostitution.

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

I would love to give way but I am conscious that other hon. Members want to speak.

I agree with my hon. Friends on the Front Bench, which is not always the case, that we must have stronger border controls. I do not want to get into a debate about border police and so on. However, when I ran a travel company, I took young female workers to Florida to visit our associated company and understand the way in which the travel trade worked. Every time we went to America, I was let through, and went to get the baggage, but the three young females were taken off and interviewed for up to an hour, even though they had letters from their parents stating that they could come on the trip. We do not do that. If we did that sort of thing, we would reduce the number of victims that come into the country.

We could do a host of things to help people once they are here, but if we could stop them at source, it would be useful. That is an example of a practical measure that could be introduced quickly.

I thank hon. Members in all parts of the House who have supported my campaign to tackle the demand side in prostitution, because that demand is specifically directed at trafficking. I should also like to apologise to House if, because of the shortness of time when I moved new clause 2 to the Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill, my remarks misled people about the numbers of women involved in trafficking. I direct hon. Members to the corrected Hansard on the matter.

We need to start by asking what constitutes trafficking. I want to deal with that question, to ask why the most significant issue for Britain is trafficking for sexual exploitation and to argue that the Government must now do two things to reduce the impact of such trafficking: first, reduce the demand for prostitution; and secondly, adopt a human rights approach to the victims of trafficking.

What is trafficking? As the hon. Member for Wellingborough (Mr. Bone) rightly pointed out, trafficking does not require the transport of people across borders. It does, however, require

“the use of coercion, force or threats, including abduction…the use of deceit or fraud…the abuse of authority or influence or the exercise of pressure”

and

“the offer of payment.”

Those oppressive, abusive means, which are quoted in all the international protocols and framework decisions, result in consequences for the victim. However, her consent is not relevant, because of the abuse of power that is inherent in those means. It is important to understand that point. I argue that all women in prostitution are the victims of trafficking, whether they have come from another country or this one, because of the route that they have taken into prostitution, which almost always involves coercion, enforced addiction to drugs and violence from their pimps or traffickers. It is important for us to understand that the experience of the prostituted woman is one of being trafficked, whether she was born in Moldova or Manchester.

If we start from that understanding, we see how critical it is that the Government deal with demand. Traditionally, the Home Office has seen the pull factor in trafficking as its immigration policy. In fact, the pull factor is the demand for prostituted women. I welcome the hon. Gentleman’s recognition that trafficking does not require transport across borders. However, I query his claims about the statistics for the number of women trafficked into countries that have legalised prostitution, because there is no doubt—nobody would dispute this—that there are more prostituted women in those countries. I dispute his figures, although there is an argument to be had about how many of them were brought across borders to be prostituted in those countries. However, there is no doubt that there are more women who are prostituted in countries that claim to regulate prostitution.

Let us think about the ways in which the power over those trafficked women is exercised. Sometimes we are talking about women who are chained to radiators; more often we are talking about control in more subtle ways. As I have mentioned, control is frequently exercised through drug addiction, unpredictable violence, observing people or using witchdoctor techniques. A whole range of techniques can be used to keep women in a profession that puts their lives at risk. In every study, women in prostitution have been found to be 40 times more likely to die than other women of their age. In one US study, 50 per cent. of the prostituted women studied who had died had been murdered.

If we are to tackle this, we need to establish a mechanism to reduce the number of women being murdered and to save huge numbers of women from violent exploitation. The first step is to reduce demand. Men who buy prostitutes become part of the chain of trafficking. Unlike people who buy trainers that have been made by exploited labour, the men who buy prostitutes are directly part of the chain. We should therefore take action to prevent them from becoming part of it. According to the advice of the UN special rapporteur, that should involve taking legislative action against the demand for prostitution. In her excellent report, the special rapporteur argues:

“Demand created by prostitute-users is not the only factor that drives the sex trafficking market. However, it is the factor which has received the least attention and creative thought in anti-trafficking initiatives. By and large, anti-trafficking policy has been directed towards detecting, preventing and punishing the conduct of traffickers, or towards stemming the supply”.

If we were to reduce the demand in Britain, we would reduce the number of trafficked women.

In addition, we can reduce the supply of women by helping them to exit prostitution. That is part of the human rights approach. We should invest much more effectively in exit schemes for women in prostitution, whether they have been trafficked from another country or trapped into prostitution by pimps in this country. It is a hard business for a woman to leave her pimp. One of the reasons that women and children are likely not only to be trafficked but to be re-trafficked is that they are vulnerable in the first place. It is hard for them to resist being re-trafficked, but if we have effective exit campaigns and support mechanisms that can help those trafficked and prostituted women, we can save many of them from the fate that too many of them face.

It is striking that this is not only a human rights issue but a women’s rights issue. As the UN special rapporteur points out in her report, many of the countries that supply women into prostitution, and supply the demand, have attitudes towards women that belittle and degrade them. That makes it more possible to see women as objects to be traded. If we create a culture—as the advertisements in our local newspapers do—that sees women as objects to be traded, more women will be trafficked. We know how to stop this, and I urge the Government to take urgent action to protect women from that trade.

I am delighted to wrap up the Back-Bench contributions to this debate. I have always believed that this country should be rightly proud of the abolition of the slave trade as an outstanding act of moral and political courage. We should indeed celebrate the vision and courage of many of our predecessors without embarrassment, caveat, deep sorrow or apology. More importantly, however, we must continue to demonstrate to the international community that Britain does not, and will not, rest on its 19th century laurels, and that it will lead the 21st century fight against contemporary forms of slavery.

The Bishop of Sheffield said in a sermon to mark the bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade in Britain that

“we do not celebrate the end of slavery. For slavery is more rife in the world today than it was 250 years ago.”

It is one thing to point to the existence of a law, and quite another to uphold it. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Richmond, Yorks (Mr. Hague) said:

“The legal argument has been won: laws against slavery exist in every country. The moral argument against such a thing is, of course, enduring”.

The focus for today’s debate should be the enduring moral argument against slavery, not the achievements of the past or, indeed, the short-term initiatives of the present.

The first thing that we must focus on is strengthening the perception that human trafficking is slavery. Since we are left today with a modern evolution of an age-old evil, we should preserve the word “slavery” to describe it. It is a shame that we have updated and, in some ways, sanitised modern-day slavery by calling it human trafficking. It has the same quality of moral ambiguity or neutrality as another famously cruel misnomer—the notion of “honour killing”. I appreciate that the term is an international definition derived from the UN’s Palermo protocol and the Council of Europe’s convention, but “slavery” is a word that resonates with ordinary people, while “human trafficking” is more resonant with the mandarins than with the man on the street. I do not believe that that distinction is cosmetic.

One of the challenges of combating human trafficking is raising awareness among those who create a demand for it—a point made by many hon. Members—and reducing demand is indeed a key factor in controlling the scale of the problem. Initiatives such as the Fairtrade label and Rugmark help prevent legitimate consumers from purchasing goods that have been produced using slave labour. Changing purchasing habits is clearly a step in the right direction. However, as operations such as Operation Pentameter and its successor demonstrate, the bigger challenge lies in raising awareness that human trafficking is very much akin to slavery so as to reduce the demand for its victims.

Secondly, and more importantly, I am glad of the opportunity to focus on the Government’s proposals for the future. Reading the Library briefs left me with the impression that the Government have been slightly drifting, if not actually stalling, on this issue in recent years. The Joint Committee on Human Rights referred in its 2006 report to some admirably alliterative goalposts for the Government’s policy on trafficking: to prohibit and prevent trafficking, to prosecute and punish traffickers and to protect the victims of trafficking. One of the criticisms of the Government at that time was the failure to sign up to the Council of Europe convention on action against trafficking in human beings.

Along with every hon. Member, I welcome the recent moves by the Minister to speed up the ratification process, but it is a scandal that it took the UK so long even to sign the convention, let alone to proceed with the ratification process. The circumstances of the UK’s very late signature of the convention were scarcely more edifying than those of the Prime Minister’s signature to the Lisbon treaty. For the more cynically minded among us, it would be possible sometimes to see the Government’s response in terms of gesture politics. [Interruption.] The Leader of the House is saying “Oh, no”, but the convention opened to signatories on 16 May 2005, while the Government did not get around to signing it until 23 March 2007, which—by coincidence, I am sure—was just two days before the bicentennial of the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act 1807. I assume that the Minister would have signed on 25 March, had it not fallen on a Sunday in 2007. On 21 February last year, the former Prime Minister, Tony Blair, gave the House a commitment to look into the issue of ratification of the convention and to report back. Yet it has taken nearly a year for a Minister to make a statement to this House; indeed, the Minister has come to the Dispatch Box only to respond to an Opposition motion. It is a great shame that the convention will enter into force next month without Britain at the fore.

Thirdly, I want to conclude by challenging the Minister on some of the Government’s specific objectives. Operation Pentameter was hailed as a great success and its successor is halfway through its six-month life. Can the Minister make any commitments about the Government’s long-term strategy for the policing and prosecution of human trafficking, particularly in light of the decline in prosecutions under the Sexual Offences Act 2003 between 2006 and 2007?

The UK’s action plan for tackling human trafficking has been described as a living document that will continue to develop in order to accommodate evolving best practice, so what lessons have been learned from Operation Pentameter that will inform the Government’s policy in future? Is the Home Office meeting with any success in its research into the nature and scale of the problem, which has historically been bedevilled by a lack of concrete statistical evidence? More specifically, how is the strategy continuing to evolve in the light of the continuing impact of EU enlargement?

Finally, what steps are the Government taking to move away from ad hoc support for victims, paid for by periodic grants to the voluntary sector rather than by sustained funding? The POPPY project, for example, of which we have heard much this afternoon, was given a £2.4 million grant in April 2006, but the grant is to run over two years. I suspect that that decision will need to be revisited in the future. We need sustained funding, but we should also make full use of the capacity of safe accommodation—a point made earlier—by encouraging referrals and broadening referral criteria to include those under 18.

I hope that the Government will act decisively to consolidate all the work that has already been done, and I hope that the United Kingdom will once again lead the world in the fight against slavery instead of allowing the pace of change to be set by others.

The debate has been characterised by a generally constructive attitude among members of all parties, and there has been a large measure of cross-party agreement. Where there has been disagreement, it has been expressed both across the Floor of the House and within political parties, but I think that all who have spoken have been united in a shared loathing of the evil practice of human trafficking, and a determination to do all that lies in our political power to bring that trade to an end.

The debate was graced by no fewer than three chairmen: the hon. Member for Hendon (Mr. Dismore), Chairman of the Joint Committee on Human Rights, the right hon. Member for Leicester, East (Keith Vaz), Chairman of the Home Affairs Committee, and my hon. Friend the Member for Totnes (Mr. Steen), chairman of the all-party parliamentary group on trafficking of women and children.

I think there was a consensus that the debate focused on three themes: the need to disrupt supply, the need to protect the victims, and the need to seek measures to reduce demand for trafficking. I want to say a little about each of them.

It is clear to me that we need to do what we can to increase the risk to the traffickers that they will be caught and then convicted. Several Members made the point that, despite the hopeful trends announced by the Minister, the number of prosecutions and convictions, not only in the United Kingdom but in many other countries, looks incredibly low when set against the sheer scale of the problem. According to United Nations figures cited by the right hon. Member for Leicester, East, more than 1 million people are being trafficked each year, and the executive director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Mr. Costa, said in his most recent report that he was disappointed by the low rates of convictions for perpetrators of human trafficking.

To an extent, the answer clearly lies in our doing what we can to improve the criminal law and measures of enforcement. The Minister outlined some of the measures that the Government have undertaken and continue to undertake, and my hon. Friend the Member for Ashford (Damian Green) and other Conservative Members have advocated further ideas. In particular, we have strongly urged the creation of an effective border police force for the United Kingdom. However, looking at the criminal law and policing will not be an answer in itself. As my hon. Friend the Member for Totnes pointed out, we must use diplomatic pressure as well, not least to persuade other members of the Council of Europe that they too should ratify the Council of Europe convention without further delay. We must put diplomatic pressure on countries, wherever they are in the world, that are simply failing to address the challenge posed by this evil trade with adequate energy or dedication.

In its most recent report on trafficking, the US State Department lists a number of countries friendly towards the west that are among those that are failing even to enforce the duties imposed by international law and United Nations resolutions. I believe that, in the last resort, we should be prepared to follow the United States’ example, which it has written into its law, and consider withholding non-humanitarian and non-trade assistance to countries that consistently fail to comply with their moral and legal obligations.

In that context it is important that the Government reflect on the extent of their network of embassies and high commissions. A number of hon. Members have talked about how this trade is a particular curse for much of Africa. When I have met representatives from the embassies of north African countries, from Egypt to Morocco, they have told me how societies are being disrupted by large-scale criminal trafficking of miserable human beings brought from western and central Africa through their territories, with the traffickers wanting to move them on to Europe.

There is now no British post in more than 20 African nations. I think that it is true that if we were to land in Mauritania and walk east, the first UK embassy or consulate that we would encounter would be in Khartoum. I ask the Government to reflect on whether that gap in our diplomatic coverage reflects the seriousness with which we should approach this problem today.

We also need to do more to integrate the aim of reducing trafficking into our development policies. The hon. Member for Glasgow, North (Ann McKechin) said that the victims of trafficking often succumb to the temptation of traffickers out of desperation and dire poverty. My hon. Friend the Member for Preseli Pembrokeshire (Mr. Crabb) said that this is a problem that has victims worldwide, not just in the UK, so I would like our objective of disrupting trafficking to be built into our bilateral development and assistance programmes. In addition, I would like Britain to do whatever it can to ensure that the objectives of multilateral development programmes such as the International Monetary Fund’s poverty reduction programmes take account of the need to reduce human trafficking.

A particular challenge is facing the UK. The right hon. Member for Rotherham (Mr. MacShane) talked about how Germany saw an upsurge in trafficking in connection with the World cup in 2006. The German Government organised a comprehensive anti-trafficking initiative at that time. I hope that the British Government even now are planning what we need to do in respect of what I suspect may be similar pressures at the time of the Olympics in 2012. We would all support the Minister in planning early for that occasion.

On protection for victims, I think that every Member who has spoken wants the Government to develop further the laudable initiatives that they have undertaken. One thing came through strongly from the comments by my hon. Friends the Members for Wellingborough (Mr. Bone) and for East Devon (Mr. Swire) and the hon. Member for Luton, South (Margaret Moran)—the importance of taking seriously the plight of trafficked children.

The right hon. Member for Rotherham and the hon. Member for Slough (Fiona Mactaggart) argued passionately that one way to reduce demand would be to create new criminal offences to tackle the sex trade in particular. The Opposition Front-Bench team supports the review that the Minister has announced. We agree with the Home Secretary that we should look carefully at the evidence. There are questions that need to be tested in that examination, but we will approach that debate in a constructive spirit.

I want to make a further point about reducing demand. I do not think that this is something to which politicians alone have the answer. When William Wilberforce was rallying British opinion against the slave trade he said that

“the nature and all the circumstances of this trade are now laid open to us; we can no longer plead ignorance, we cannot evade it”.

It is true not only for Members of Parliament, but for every man and woman in this country who has eyes to see and ears to hear, that this accursed trade in men, women and children disfigures our world and that individual citizens—as consumers of products, sometimes made by people who are the victims of trafficking, and as people some of whose neighbours are customers of the sex trade—have the power to do something through their voices and their actions.

Those Members who have spoken in terms of outrage and shame are not exaggerating. We are rightly accustomed in this House to sober, rational debate and to considering evidence, and we should certainly continue to look carefully at the evidence on what measures will work effectively. However, it seems to me that, in the end, we need to combine political commitment with that sense of moral outrage. I believe that political action inspired by that clear moral purpose will enable us to reduce, and I hope one day eliminate, this trade.

I thank all Members who have participated in this excellent debate. It is obvious that there is total abhorrence of this evil crime across the House, and many voices have been raised. My hon. Friend the Under-Secretary has demonstrated not only by the sense of what he said, but by his obviously open, willing and committed attitude, how deeply the Government are committed to tackling this horrible crime. I will try to weave a response to Members’ contributions into what I have to say, but I hope that they will forgive me if I do not name them all; as there have been 17 contributors so far, if I were to try to do so it would sound like “Baird’s guide to parliamentary constituencies”.

The Government’s approach to trafficking involves being as inclusive and as multi-agency across the board as it is possible to be. Not only do we have a joined-up approach at policy level—we are always open to constructive suggestions such as those put forward today—but, for instance, the inter-ministerial group has a stakeholder group from non-governmental organisations with which it frequently engages in very unvarnished ways. There is also a practical approach on the ground: we have collaborations such as POPPY project outreach workers working at the UK Human Trafficking Centre to give advice. We are as inclusive as possible, and after this debate I can only expect that that will get better.

Having some responsibility for the Crown Prosecution Service, I am pleased that there have now been 70 successful convictions since the Sexual Offences Act 2003 brought specific legislation on trafficking into UK law. However, let me assure those voices of concern that have been raised that this does not reflect the full extent of prosecution against traffickers. On many occasions and for many reasons, traffickers are prosecuted for rape, kidnapping, sexual assaults and physical assaults, and I assure the hon. Members for Totnes (Mr. Steen) and for Eastleigh (Chris Huhne) that large numbers of them are convicted. It is important to remember that those convictions do not show in the simple statistics on trafficking convictions, but they are a significant part of the weaponry we use.

Sentences have been long; the courts also understand the serious nature of these offences and send out strong messages. Despite that, however, we need to go further. The CPS is in the forefront of Operation Pentameter. It now has specialists on trafficking in all its areas, and it has lawyers seconded to the trafficking centre. There is also national guidance. The hon. Member for Totnes made the point the most powerfully, although several other hon. Members mentioned it, that to prosecute successfully one needs evidence.

In Pentameter 2, a specific piece of work is being done on victim attrition, but it is not simply offering support—we are obviously trying to do that. The reality of trafficking is that the levels of intimidation are sky high and the trauma is intense. It is a hugely difficult matter. Many people are simply unable to help, so we must additionally look to other ways of preventing this trade from flourishing.

One of the Serious Organised Crime Agency’s top four aims is tackling trafficking through prevention, disruption, asset recovery and prosecution. In addition, the Gangmasters (Licensing) Act 2004 has been introduced. The Gangmasters Licensing Authority has revoked 42 licences, and 36 applications have been refused. Those cases do not show up as prosecutions, but bad gangmasters have been put out of business. Concerns were raised by the hon. Member for Eastleigh and my hon. Friend the Member for Hendon (Mr. Dismore) about work restrictions and the perhaps unforeseen consequences that they can have. We are committed to working on that.

As the Home Secretary said on Monday, we will ratify the Council of Europe’s convention by the end of the year. Let me be clear that we are compliant with much of it now, but we need to make some changes to domestic legislation. This is not any kind of delay by, or deficit of, the UK, and to call it a shame or anything of the kind is bonkers. The hon. Member for Ashford (Damian Green) did so briefly, but then he rightly became more urging of consensus. It is only a pity that his urging of consensus did not reach the hon. Member for Braintree (Mr. Newmark).

Some signatories have legal systems that mean that they allow ratification even before implementation—indeed, some systems demand ratification before implementation. Our system works the other way round. We cannot ratify a treaty until we have implemented it in our domestic law, so the process takes longer for us. May I reassure the hon. Member for Totnes, and my hon. Friends the Members for Erith and Thamesmead (John Austin) and for Hendon that the monitoring mechanism GRETA does not come into force until February 2009, and if we ratify this year, as we intend to do, we will not miss participation in that process? We will ratify as quickly as we can, but we will not stop there. Our existing action plan goes further than the convention requires us to go. Now that we have got this constant returning to the issue of ratification out of the way by giving that undertaking, I hope that we can all move on more consensually.

On demand, let me reassure the hon. Member for Ashford, who led for the Opposition, that no one is muddling up prostitution and trafficking, but they are clearly integrally connected. I was glad to have the hon. Member for Preseli Pembrokeshire (Mr. Crabb) on board on that point. I hope that he will speak to the hon. Member for Wellingborough (Mr. Bone) and put him right. I was glad of the support of my right hon. Friend the Member for Rotherham (Mr. MacShane). We think the correct figure is that about 4,000 women are trafficked for sex at any one time, so we think that his numbers from the Daily Mirror are off.

There is work to be done on reducing demand. My hon. Friend the Member for Slough (Fiona Mactaggart) has led a campaign on that. She put forward some of the reality that requires us to look honestly at whether we should follow the Swedish model of legislation and criminalise the purchase of sexual services across the board. We shall also look at tackling the advertising of any sexual services in the mass media—the hon. Member for Hexham (Mr. Atkinson) endorsed that—through stricter guidance at the very least, but if prosecution appears to be necessary, it will doubtless follow. We will also consider call-barring on phones that are obviously being used for brothels.

There is a good deal that I cannot directly answer because of the time available. Essentially, we are modelling a proper system of victim referral and identification, as we must to implement the convention. The difficulty of identification is at its height in respect of children. Let me reassure everyone that we are working as hard and as well as we can on that.

I reiterate the Government’s commitment to bring to justice as many perpetrators of this heinous crime as possible, while at the same time ensuring that victims get protection and safety. So much more remains to be done, but—

rose in his place and claimed to move, That the Question be now put.

Question, That the Question be now put, put and agreed to.

Question put accordingly, That the original words stand part of the Question:—

The House proceeded to a Division.

I instruct the Serjeant at Arms to investigate the delay in the Aye Lobby.