The home secretary was asked about the levels of organised prostitution in her constituency as she faced questions over the fate of trafficked women under her small boats bill.
During Wednesday’s Home Affairs Committee, Dame Diana Johnson said an adult website currently listed 300 sex worker adverts in Suella Braverman’s Hampshire constituency.
Half of those, the Labour MP said, included “red flags” that the women advertised have been trafficked.
Asked what action the government was taking against those websites and what was available to trafficking victims, Braverman responded by saying there are “new mechanisms in legislation” to deal with trafficking, exploitation and prostitution.
Johnson then pressed the home secretary on provisions for sexual exploitation victims trafficked into the UK through illegal routes.
The MP said: “I just want to drill down in this a little bit—if a woman who had been brought into the United Kingdom by an illegal route for sex trafficking, if she came to the attention of the authorities, would she be subject to arrest and detention under the Illegal Migration Bill?”
Braverman conceded that trafficked women could be deported under measures to tackle illegal migration.
“We are not including blanket exclusions in our legislation,” the home secretary told the committee.
‘Boats Keep Coming’
Former prime minister Theresa May previously warned the Illegal Migration Bill to “stop the boats” could harm efforts to tackle human trafficking.Braverman said victims “could claim an exemption,” but she stressed the need to tackle people “claiming to be victims of modern slavery when they patently are not” to thwart removal from the UK under the legislation.
Johnson, who grilled Braverman over a range of issues surrounding the controversial bill, replied, “It’s quite clear that particularly victims of trafficking for sexual exploitation find it very difficult to come forward.”
Braverman was also challenged on the promise to tackle the backlog of asylum cases, insisting the “legacy” backlog predating June last year has fallen by around 17,000 claims.
But she said the overall numbers are high because the “boats keep coming.”
“It’s absolutely impossible to ever get that number down to zero because there are constant cases coming into the system,” she told MPs.
“But I accept, of course, the numbers keep rising because the boats keep coming and that is the flow of casework and that is what we are also working on to reduce.”
She confirmed that from Saturday to Monday, around 1,200 migrants had arrived in the UK after crossing the English Channel including 661 in one day alone—the highest number this year.
Johnson said, “It seems to me you have a backlog of backlogs now, you’re just building backlogs on backlogs.”
Braverman replied, “No I wouldn’t say that, I would say we’ve got a caseload of cases.”
154 Children Missing
The home secretary also faced questions on what the Home Office was doing to find over 100 unaccompanied child asylum seekers who have disappeared from government-funded hotels since last year.Scottish National Party (SNP) MP Alison Thewliss asked Braverman what she would do if one of her own children went missing.
After replying that she would contact the police, Thewliss said: “There are, according to an answer to a written question that I had this week, still 154 unaccompanied asylum seeking children still missing who were in a Home Office hotel.
“What are you doing to find those children?”
Braverman replied, “So any child going missing is extremely serious and that’s why we work very closely, if that case arises, with local authorities and the police to operate a very robust system of missing persons protocols to ensure that the appropriate efforts are put into place to identify where they might be.”
She added that the government did not have the power to detain children in the hotels but took any cases of missing children “very seriously.”
“Generally, when it comes to missing persons, if you speak to the police to trace them, it is incredibly challenging to find someone who does not want to be found.”
The SNP politician said it was Braverman’s Rwanda policy that was “putting the fear” into unaccompanied child asylum seekers who were choosing to flee instead of being put on a plane out of the country.
Braverman replied that “the point of Rwanda is a deterrent.”
“We want to stop people coming here on boats in the first place,” she said.
“We want to stop people making this illegal journey in the first place. We want to stop these people smuggling gangs, exploiting vulnerable people, we want to stop them, putting children on their unseaworthy vessels, travelling late at night without a life jacket in the vain hope of getting to a life in the United Kingdom.”
The home secretary said that as of last week, no children were currently being held in hotels in the UK.
However, with the arrival of over 1,000 people in the last number of days, that could have now changed.
