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Gangmasters Licensing Bill

I welcome the Bill, which is long overdue. I sincerely congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for West Renfrewshire (Jim Sheridan) on introducing it and on all his work in preparing it and in the discussions that have taken place since Second Reading. It deals with what has been a growing problem, at the heart of which has been the exploitation of vulnerable workers receiving extremely low pay, working in poor conditions, facing excessive charges for their travel arrangements—which, as the hon. Member for Mid-Worcestershire (Mr. Luff) pointed out, have frequently been dangerous—without proper insurance cover, often being charged ferocious rates for protective clothing and so on, and often living in very poor accommodation supplied by the gangmaster at vast expense, so that while their notional pay may have been low, their take-home pay dwindled into virtual non-existence because of the deductions for travel, accommodation and clothing.

It is also worth emphasising that not only was the vulnerable work force being exploited, but the taxpayer was being swindled left, right and centre. The Inland Revenue was not receiving the money that it should have been. Contributions were not being made towards pensions and other requirements of the Department for Work and Pensions, and you can bet your boots that VAT was not being paid. There have also been rising costs to the national health service. Because of the poor health and safety conditions, people were falling sick and being injured in a way that they would not have been if they had been properly employed by decent people.

The Bill is the product of legitimate concern that has been building up over a long period; it has not just occurred now. I recall time and again listening to Dick Body on the Tory Benches and Joan Maynard on the Labour Benches, a joint attack by two people who probably did not agree on anything else on earth other than their dislike of the gangmaster system. Dick will probably be pleased by it, because he is still in the land of the living, and Joan Maynard would have been very pleased had she still been around to see it.

That was all years ago, then my hon. Friend introduced this Bill and then there were the awful events in Morecambe bay. I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Morecambe and Lunesdale (Geraldine Smith), who, I confess, is a friend of mine. She had been exercising foresight and forewarning of the problems in Morecambe bay for a long time, but proper notice was not taken of what she was saying, and she found herself in the awful circumstances of being able to say "I told you so" after a tragedy, which was not something that she had looked forward to. She is still working hard and still drawing attention to shortcomings that might make it possible for such an event to occur again, in Morecambe bay or elsewhere.

One of the problems in the past, highlighted by the recent Select Committee report to which the hon. Member for Mid-Worcestershire referred, concerns the co-ordination of the raids—if that is the right way to describe them—involving the police, the Inland Revenue, and sometimes the immigration service, the Departments for Work and Pensions and for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, the Health and Safety Executive, and so on. As I understand it, one of the Bill's benefits will be that there will not be the necessity to co-ordinate raids in quite the same way. If there is a raid and someone is lifted, they can be arrested on the spot and taken to a police station. At that point, it should not be beyond the wit of anybody to get in touch with the proper people at the Inland Revenue, the Department for Work and Pensions, the immigration service, the police, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs or the Health and Safety Executive so that the full weight of every possible law comes down upon the offender.

Co-ordination will be made much easier by the Bill, which will be welcomed by all decent, law-abiding people. It is certainly welcomed by the law-abiding and decent suppliers of labour in the rather peculiar markets involved, and it is welcomed by the National Farmers Union, the Transport and General Workers Union and the major retailers.

Generally speaking, I agree with the hon. Member for Mid-Worcestershire in wanting the detail of the legislation to be included in the primary legislation. In these circumstances, however, there are good grounds for saying that much of that detail needs to be set out in regulations. If it were included in an Act of Parliament, it would probably take a great deal of time and effort to get any Government to make an appropriate amendment to that Act. We are dealing with some vile, villainous and ingenious people, so the fact that the detailed control of true regulation can be amended relatively quickly and easily in response to their latest ingenious villainy makes a good case for using the regulatory system.

I represent Chalk Farm and various other such places—Holborn and St. Pancras is not a very agricultural or even horticultural area—and while the Bill covers agricultural and horticultural work, shellfish gathering and the processing or packing of any products derived from those industries and sectors, I wish to point out that there are other areas where gangmasters operate. Some of them are equally villainous in cleaning, the building trades and further stages of food preparation, which I do not think that the Bill necessarily covers. We can pat ourselves on the back about the Bill, but we cannot say that we have dealt with everything. It is right that the Bill deals only with the limited area that we have been discussing, but there are other issues, and we cannot think that we have dealt with the whole problem of gangmasters because we have tried to deal with a particular aspect.

None the less, this is a good day, and it is the product of a lot hard work by Members of Parliament and officials. I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Minister on organising the process as he has done. His officials have had a number of meetings with the various interest groups, and he and they have also had meetings with the all-party membership of the Committee outside the Committee's proceedings, in which we managed to identify practical problems and come up with answers that dealt with them as far as we could see. There has been an interchange of ideas to meet a common and decent objective. It has been a good and productive process, and I congratulate him on his approach, which has been immensely helpful, as I think everyone who has been involved in the process would agree. After the law is passed, it needs to be implemented. As I said, I think that it will make it easier to co-ordinate the activity of the various supervisory bodies, but a great deal of hard work and effort will be needed and the various Departments will have to give the matter higher priority than they have been doing in practice until now if the Bill is to achieve what we want. We will also have to ensure that resources are available to back up the practicalities in the field. For all the good that the various working parties and such like are doing—and it may be very good work—what really counts is what happens on the ground, as I said in one of the meetings; it was a fairly chilly one at six o'clock in the morning in a pea field in Lincolnshire. We have got to get that sorted, and I think that the Bill goes a long way towards doing that. There will be further consultation about the regulations, involving the Transport and General Workers Union, which has done a great deal of work on the matter, as well as other organisations, including the National Farmers Union, which has been extremely co-operative.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Morecambe and Lunesdale said, the problem does not apply only to foreign workers. In fact, the majority of the people who have been awfully exploited are our own fellow citizens. An end to the exploitation of people who are in this country for a brief period, but who might want to stay longer, and of our fellow citizens is a good thing and a step forward.

The cost to a farmer and the ultimate cost to retailers and the rest of us of paying decent wages and ensuring that people work in decent conditions is an increase in the cost of the final product. We must recognise that, if we are going to ensure that people are decently treated when they are working to provide food for us, it may cost us a few more pence on our grocery bill, but that paying those few more pence is absolutely right if we are to bring about improved working conditions and get rid of the scandalous working conditions that some gangmasters—not the decent ones—have visited upon some of the most vulnerable people in our country. We may have to pay a little bit more to live in a better society, but I think that most people would agree that it will be well worth it.