Examination of Witnesses (Questions 240
- 259)
TUESDAY 24 JUNE 2008
CHIEF CONSTABLE
GRAHAME MAXWELL
AND DETECTIVE
CHIEF SUPERINTENDENT
NICK KINSELLA
Q240 David Davies: Mr Kinsella, do
you ever feel like Hans, the hero of Haarlem, putting a finger
in the dyke: because no matter what you do, no matter how hard
you try, there are going to be millions of people wanting to come
to this country and, sadly, maybe hundreds of thousands willing
to exploit them? As soon as you put some away, there are going
to be more that are willing to take their place. I ask you two
things. Firstly, do you feel the sentences for those few who are
caught are long enough? I suspect we will agree on that one. Secondly,
whether you do not feel, going back to my previous question, there
is a lot more, to mix my metaphors, if you follow the Al Capone
example, that we could be doing, and one of the things we could
be doing is cracking down on illegal employers, because most of
them are exploiting people. Whether or not those people are trafficked
is by the by, they are being exploited, and you and I know that
11 companies across the UK prosecuted is disgracefully low, though
you probably cannot say so.
Detective Chief Superintendent Kinsella:
I think on your first point on sentencing, generally very good
sentences are handed down by the court. People regularly raise
the relatively low number of convictions for trafficking, but
actually that reflects the Al Capone approach.
Q241 Chairman: It is a very, very
low figure, is it not? We cannot just pass over it, as David says.
Detective Chief Superintendent Kinsella:
If I give an example, Chairman, there were 134 people charged
in Pentameter 1. Thirty-two of those were charged with trafficking,
because that is where the evidence led us. However, there were
others convicted of rape. Operation Glover, an operation I mentioned
earlier on, trafficking of UK national children within the UK
for sexual exploitation, started in our centre as a trafficking
investigation but the conviction was for rape because that is
where the evidence led us.
Q242 David Davies: I am happy to
allow you to just come back on this point about the HMRC: because
whilst you have said that there are close links, it does not really
appear that way. Maybe the figures have gone from 11 to 70; it
is still horrendously low, is it not?
Chief Constable Maxwell: There
are two things for me. Just answering your first question, if
we save one victim, it is worth it, because we remove somebody
from an horrendous life. The second issue is, I think there is
significantly more work to be done by agencies working jointly
together. Some of the issues we are looking at with the new established
immigration crime teams is to try and put HMRC in there and start
to actually get into where it hurts criminals, and it hurts criminals
when we remove their money from them, and that is the Al Capone
issue. If we cannot get them one way, we will get them another,
and it does require us to have more than 11 illegal employees
convicted.
Q243 David Davies: I think you could
pick any major street in London (and I know this because I married
into an East European family) and you will find people working
illegally there and to some extent exploited. Whether it is 11
or 70 or 80, it is an horrendously low figure. If the HMRC police
went in and investigated those businesses, surely you would find
a lot more evidence of trafficking out there?
Chief Constable Maxwell: I think
that is one of the things we want to try out with the pilots.
We are looking at the East Midlands to pilot with their immigration
crime team, putting HMRC in there, and we have found some money
from within the budget that we have got to actually pay for a
full-time investigator, which we hope will happen in the next
couple of months.
Detective Chief Superintendent Kinsella:
Can I also mention that they are doing particular work through
an adult entertainments programme, the Criminal Taxes Unit. There
is a lot of work going on that perhaps is not seen publicly. For
example, they are embedding a member of staff within the centre
in the very near future, and it is part of the G6 initiative,
going back to the Chairman's point about source, transit and destination
countries, that HMRC within that programme of work are trying
to build up a network of revenue investigators across national
boundaries.
Chairman: I think what frustrates the
committee in this inquiry is the fact that we have got all these
fancy names for these initiatives—Pentameter 1, 2, et cetera—but
prosecutions are very low. We are told that this is the second
largest problem facing the globe after drugs and we do not seem
to be able to find the people responsible. That is what is frustrating
this committee.
Q244 Tom Brake: Could I ask you whether
you feel perhaps that too much emphasis has been put on the sex
trafficking side of things? Are you now having to branch out into
the areas you have just talked about in terms of labour, domestic
service and benefit fraud, and, if that is the case—you
mentioned the pilot there—are there other ways in which
you tackle the prevention and detection of that type of crime
that are different to sex trafficking?
Chief Constable Maxwell: How I
feel is as if we are on a journey. As I said earlier on, if you
went back four or five years and talked to a police officer in
the street, he would not know about trafficking. He would think
that modern day slavery was something that happened elsewhere,
not in the UK. By concentrating on sexual exploitation, we have
seen people who are very clearly victims. These are people who
have been deceived, forced into the sex trade, victims of multiple
rape. I think that this very quickly got into the public psyche
and the public have determined that sexual exploitation does take
place. On that journey we have to shift our emphasis and actually
start to say that labour exploitation and domestic servitude exist
and start to raise awareness, and part of that raising awareness
is through the Blue Blindfold campaign, trying to get into the
neighbourhood teams, raising awareness with the police officers.
As we get the confidence of the community where you are used to
seeing your local PCSO, your local special constable, your local
PC, you start to determine what the changes are taking place within
the neighbourhood and we can start to identify those issues. It
is getting the confidence to challenge people for instance who
are working in fields and ask difficult questions. It is about
multi-agency working—so working with the Gang Masters Licensing
Authority the DWP, HMRC and the police—and I think the five
pilots that we have got operating will be the genesis of that
because we will start to scope that problem out. What we are seeing
is that we are starting to get victims who are victims of labour
exploitation, and some of those will emerge, I think, when we
have gone through Pentameter 2 and have done some of the analysis
around that. We have got a number of inquiries that are ongoing
at the minute which are showing that we have got people who are
being exploited for the purposes of labour.
Q245 Tom Brake: Can I ask you what
you would expect my local beat officer on the Safer Neighbourhood
Team to be doing to try and spot sex trafficking, labour, or benefit
fraud, or the types of thing that you are trying to deal with?
What are they supposed to do?
Chief Constable Maxwell: One of
the issues around that is to understand the neighbourhood where
they are, try and look at people who are coming and going in neighbourhoods,
and some of this is about whether you live in a transient neighbourhood
or whether you live in a very stable neighbourhood, look at the
people who are there, listen to what the public have got to say,
and there are things, particularly around sexual exploitation
that you may see. A brothel may be operating where a lot of men
are going into one house. There are other issues where there are
a lot of people living in one house, where a minibus turns up
and in that minibus you have got 12 or 15 people who are taken
off at 7.00 a.m. in the morning and do not return until 9.00 p.m.
at night. So there are some clues that we are trying to look for
and it is trying to raise awareness that this thing is happening
and how you combat that.
Q246 Tom Brake: Can I ask you about
your contact with the Gang Masters Licensing Authority? Do you
have an on-going working relationship with them?
Detective Chief Superintendent Kinsella:
Yes, a constant relationship with GLA. Our contact is their Director
of Operations, who we meet regularly. To go back to the first
point of your question about how we deal with it differently to
sexual exploitation, that is one of the ways we deal with it separately.
We work with different partners in forced labour campaigns. For
example, in three of the force areas the GLA are the first responders
with the police. We also deliver the training differently. For
example, in the training that we have done in these pilots there
has been NGO involvement in the delivery of that, anti-slavery
have been involved with that and ILO. The course was developed
by the UKHTC, but it had been discussed with the ILO and others,
and, of course, there are other issues that we do not know all
the answers to yet, and that is the different needs of victims
of forced labour—they will be different to the needs of
the victim who has been sexually exploited—and we will work
with NGOs and others and build up on the expertise that is already
within the centre. There is a good centre of expertise there.
Q247 Tom Brake: One final question.
With the points based system, and particularly the issue of unskilled
labour, are you and the Gang Masters Licensing Authority preparing
plans for what could be an upsurge of illegal, unskilled labour
being trafficked into the country?
Chief Constable Maxwell: At the
minute we do not anticipate that. What we need to do is keep an
eye on where things are.
Q248 Tom Brake: Why do you not anticipate
that?
Chief Constable Maxwell: Because
what we need to look at is what are the entrance routes into the
country. They have been strengthened quite considerably from where
they were two or three years ago. We need to work with UKBA colleagues
and we need to make sure of the intelligence picture. As we get
more rescues, as we find people in different situations, we are
using them as the examples to get over to police officers and
front-line staff that this is happening in their neighbourhoods.
To pick up one of the previous things you said, it is a lot easier
to explain sexual exploitation where a person is truly deceived
than when someone who comes to the country and actually thinks
that receiving two pounds an hour they are a lot better off than
in their own country, but that is exploitation as far as the UK
is concerned.
Detective Chief Superintendent Kinsella:
There is an example where we are taking proactive action where
we have seen a threat emerging. When Romania and Bulgaria joined
the EU, funded by the Home Office and in co-operation with the
IOM (International Organisation of Migration) and the FCO, we
ran an awareness-raising campaign for all forms of trafficking—children,
adults, sex and labour—in both those countries and, together
with the IOM, established an advice line in both countries.
Q249 Chairman: How many people telephoned
it?
Detective Chief Superintendent Kinsella:
I do not have those figures to hand, but I can try and find out
for you.
Chairman: That would be very helpful.
Q250 Bob Russell: As a result of
this inquiry and the visit we made to Moscow and Kiev, I am more
and more convinced that quite a lot of the advertisements that
we see in the backs of some of our local newspapers indicate that
some of the ladies, but not all, may well be victims of sex trafficking.
What are the police doing to check those ones out, because to
my mind those local newspapers are not only aiding and abetting
prostitution but they are aiding and abetting people trafficking?
Chief Constable Maxwell: Two things.
It is one of the tactics that are used, it is one of the ways
that we try and determine where we have got brothels and then
launch an operation to find out whether there is a trafficked
person within them. I agree with you actually. One of the stances
that ACPO have taken to try and raise awareness with editors is
to look at personal ads and see if they can really think that
is the right thing they want for their paper.
Q251 Bob Russell: Would you wish
this committee to make a recommendation?
Chief Constable Maxwell: What
I would like is if we could give some strong advice that this
is unacceptable behaviour in terms that it can lead to, and assist
with, criminality.
Q252 Bob Russell: That leads me to
the main question. We have heard about the guidance you give to
neighbourhood policing about trafficking, but does that guidance
include advice on whether the trafficked victim could be an illegal
immigrant from the European Union? Is there separate advice there,
because the person could be trafficked even though they are here
legally?
Detective Chief Superintendent Kinsella:
Absolutely, and that is the key point that we put out, it is one
of the points we consistently raise in numerous audiences, why
we deal with this as serious crime rather than as an immigration
issue: because if the victim is an EU national, which includes
UK nationals, there is no immigration matter, they are just a
victim of serious crime. We are very aware of that and we raise
that consistently.
Q253 Bob Russell: Lastly on trafficking,
I am sure you have noticed that there are many hand car wash enterprises
which have set up, some of them at quite reputable national firms,
it would appear, in car parks. Have you noticed, like I have,
that not only is this a cash industry but a large majority, if
not all of them, are not English speaking. Is this something that
perhaps your colleague in the Inland Revenue might wish to address:
not only the possibility of trafficked people using it but the
strong possibility, I suspect, that the operators are not complying
fully with the rules and regulations?
Detective Chief Superintendent Kinsella:
I think we look at a number of industries across the board.
Q254 Bob Russell: I can nominate
three sites if you want to use those as a trial run.
Detective Chief Superintendent Kinsella:
I would always welcome that information, but we do try to be intelligence-led
and I think we go back to what is the distinction from our perspective
in the trafficking centre between illegal working and forced labour.
I cannot speak for HMRC, but I know they are very proactive in
that field.
Q255 Martin Salter: I wanted to come
back to the point that my colleague, Bob Russell, was raising
in terms of the willingness or otherwise of local newspapers to
carry these adverts. Do you think it would be helpful if we were
to seek a memorandum from the Society of Editors just probing
whether or not there are any guidelines in place to suggest best
practice for local newspapers?
Chief Constable Maxwell: Indeed,
I think the Home Office has started those negotiations. I do think
it is a very positive step forward. We need that kind of guidance.
I think an MOU or some kind of undertaking from those editors
would assist us greatly. It is always of interest to me. On the
front page you would have something about: here we have had somebody
who is arrested, we have rescued a victim of sexual exploitation
and, if you turn the pages back, the advert is there. That cannot
be ethically right.
Martin Salter: Can I suggest that we
do request that memorandum as part of our inquiry because we have
clearly not got space to have more witnesses.
Chairman: Indeed, we have asked them
to come and give evidence to us. They have declined so far, but
we will pursue these letters to make sure that they do come, in
view of what you have just said.
Q256 Mrs Cryer: Can I ask you both
further about public awareness. One of UKHTC's functions is to
look at public awareness and try to encourage people to understand
what they are doing. Apparently you had a Blue Blindfold campaign.
Am I right in saying, I seem to remember some sort of poster that
said something like, "You arrive as a punter and leave as
a rapist", presumably referring to the fact that men sometimes
are aware that there is an element of coercion?
Chief Constable Maxwell: Yes,
I think there were two elements to that. We have had a number
of different campaigns: some of them related to Pentameter 1,
some of them were run by NGOs. Blue Blindfold is just about trying
to raise awareness to every single type of trafficking there is.
We need to do that within the £1.6 million budget. We have
had a number of people who have given their services free in terms
of putting together a very professional DVD, but what we are trying
to do is to get into places like cinemas, we are trying to get
places on buses. They are commercial enterprises. We have a very
limited budget in terms of that, and we are trying to spend quite
a bit of time to negotiate, "Can you do this for free"—this
is the good will part of what we are doing—and that would
significantly raise awareness with people about what it is. You
made a very clear point that if a man has sex with a trafficked
woman, whether he thinks he has paid for it or not, he has raped
that woman. We try to get that very clearly across. It is a very
difficult case to prove. When you look at the majority of prosecutions
that we have had in terms of trafficking, the victim can remember
the trafficker but when she has been a victim of multiple rape
one of the coping mechanisms is not to remember who you have been
forced to have sex with.
Detective Chief Superintendent Kinsella:
Could I add on the prevention point, as Mr Maxwell has said—this
is very much a multi-agency approach—our prevention strategy
was developed within our prevention sub-group and led for us by
Anti-slavery, which again shows the NGO embedded nature of our
work. We have four key audiences, and one of the key messages
is about identifying your audience and then delivering a very
focused message in the best possible way to that audience. So
there are four key audiences for us: the general public, of which
there are particular sets as well, such as men who purchase sex,
and the particular poster you are referring is to the pilot within
the Home Office demand review that is linked into Blue Blindfold,
because we are branding that as the national prevention strategy.
The second key audience are victims themselves. How do we safely
get messages to victims? The third key audience are other professions,
where we feel by upskilling their knowledge on identifying victims
we may more readily identify—so Social Services, Health
Service and others—and the fourth, the law enforcement themselves,
and at the moment our activity is focused on law enforcement,
awareness raising and the general public.
Chief Constable Maxwell: Indeed,
we are just about to produce a new DVD which is trying to raise
awareness with school children about the potential of trafficking
and the potential to become a victim of internal trafficking.
Q257 Mrs Cryer: Thank you very much.
Can I briefly ask you about how successful you have been in drawing
together information in order to assess the scale of trafficking?
Detective Chief Superintendent Kinsella:
In a number of ways. Let me give you an example. As I say, the
final results of Pentameter 2 are being analysed and will be released
shortly, but there are significant (in the thousands) new intelligence
reports around that, all of which will be analysed. In addition,
we have got the other campaigns I have already mentioned. In addition
to that, clearly, understanding the scope and scale is a key part
of our work. We are well advanced on a multi-agency programme
of assessment work around the various areas, all of which are
linked into the UK threats assessment and knowledge gaps identified
by SOCA and its partners, again linking into the programmes of
activity. I have already mentioned the intelligence requirements,
which are about improving our knowledge, links to the RIU network,
the immigration crime teams, the new analysts that are going in
post, but also we are linked into various universities for specific
pieces of research around the specific areas within the trafficking
agenda, and through Mr Maxwell's funding we have just secured
funding for a full-time research post which will help to co-ordinate
that work across the country to bring forward more knowledge and
data. We are also—in fact it is going in today—preparing
a bid with the International Organisation for Migration for EU
funding about standardised data collection, so that all of us,
not just the UK but our main European partners, can collect the
right data in a similar format and share it through an agreed
process.
Chief Constable Maxwell: It is
a very difficult to thing to estimate. We had a report in 2003
that said there were 4,000 victims. In P1 we looked at 10% of
all visible sex outlets and from that we rescued 88 people. The
best piece of research I have seen is from the South-West Regional
Intelligence Unit, and what I want to do is try and use that methodology
to give us a picture across the UK and try and get something which
is a fairly firm figure around what we are dealing with, because
at the minute I do not think we have got a real handle on what
the figures are.
Q258 Mrs Cryer: What did they do
that was different?
Chief Constable Maxwell: They
looked at each of the areas where there had been identified brothels,
where there were off-street brothels. They used this as the basis
of a multiplier across the population they have got, they used
it across the geographic area. Again, it was a multiplier, but
it was based on hard figures; so they have used the hard figures
on the number of rescues, multiplied that across, using a bit
of professional knowledge to give an indication. In the end we
will get a guesstimate, but it is a firmer guesstimate, about
what it is than what we have got at present.
Q259 Martin Salter: Like many people
representing urban constituencies, I deal with a lot of immigration
casework. I have come across people who have been trafficked and
come to members of Parliament for help. I have never yet come
across a trafficker. They tend not to make themselves known to
you. Can you give the committee a pen-picture of the characteristics
of the gangs involved in trafficking? What I am particularly interested
in trying to get at is are they total criminals and could be just
as easily trafficking guns and drugs as they could be people?
Chief Constable Maxwell: It is
extremely difficult to give you a profile of a trafficker because
they are as different as criminals are different from one another.
What we found during Pentameter 1 was that there were different
types of networks. There were networks which were very, very organised,
and you can actually see from the country of origin the transit
route which was controlled by the gang into the UK and the UK
outlets controlled by the gang. There were other gangs which only
controlled certain aspects of the route. They would take you to
from A to B and hand you on to somebody else from B to C onwards.
Some people were sole traders. They would actually go out to places
like an African village, find a child, bring the child in and
then exploit the child—any nationality. We certainly found
that in P1. There were UK nationals; there were foreign nationals.
We have got examples where women had been traded to settle bets
from playing a game of cards and people who were just as equally
trading people as they would drugs, as they would guns. It was
purely about how much profit they could make.
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