Our next item is to take evidence from Scottish Government officials on the Human Trafficking and Exploitation (Scotland) Bill’s financial memorandum. I welcome to the meeting Neil Rennick, Ann Oxley and Cat Duggan. Good morning to you all.
Members have copies of the financial memorandum, as well as all the written evidence received. We will go straight to questions. You know the drill: I will ask some opening questions and then I will open out the session to colleagues around the table.
First, I will ask about consultation. Aberdeenshire Council has suggested that
“the consultation window was ... relatively short.”
Was there a reason for that?
There was no formal consultation on the bill. We took the position—it is set out in the policy memorandum—that there had been extensive dialogue and a number of reports produced on adult and child victims of human trafficking. We drew heavily from and took account of the work of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, Scotland’s Commissioner for Children and Young People and the Justice Committee, which is reflected in the detail of the bill.
A matter on which everyone seems to agree—it is a fair point, but it must be frustrating from your perspective—relates to the overall accuracy of the projected costs. Human trafficking is a covert criminal activity. If the bill is successful, the costs will go up; if it is not, they might not go up, because people are not being arrested and tried and so on. That all being said, the margins between the projected costs are quite wide. Is that because you have taken the absolute minimum and maximum amounts that you think the bill will cost? Could the costs go beyond the financial memorandum’s suggested parameters?
We acknowledge—in the financial memorandum and today—that it is hugely difficult to make estimates. Human trafficking is by its nature a hidden crime. We know that people are identified and referred through the national referral mechanism and are confirmed as trafficking victims. We know from agencies that they are in contact with people who, as adults, do not want to engage with that process, although there is a strong belief that they are trafficking victims. We can be reasonably confident that far larger numbers of people who we do not identify and do not come into contact with may well be trafficking victims but be receiving support in other ways.
Given the crime’s hidden nature, there is no way to confirm an absolute figure. We have looked at the National Crime Agency’s strategic assessment of trafficking levels across the United Kingdom. That draws not only on the number of referrals but on intelligence, information and advice from agencies. It estimates that the true number of victims is two to three times the numbers referred through the national referral mechanism. We have used that figure to make our best estimate of the numbers in Scotland.
It is acknowledged that the support grant for human trafficking victims is significant. However, a number of local authorities, including North Ayrshire Council in my area and South Lanarkshire Council, have talked about subsequent additional pressures being placed on social work, for example. North Ayrshire Council said:
“additional pressures may occur within social work assessments associated with investigations and or prosecutions”.
South Lanarkshire Council talked about the impact on social work, education and housing services. Does the financial memorandum take enough of a long-term view of the bill’s potential impact on local authorities?
On the arrangements that are in place for people, when someone is identified as a potential human trafficking victim, they have a right to a period of support, to allow them to adjust from their experience and to take decisions about their long-term needs and life choices. The Scottish Government provides funding for that period of immediate support. That is set at a minimum of 45 days, which has been increased from a lower level. For adults, we fund that through direct grant funding. Part of the function of that is to allow them to take decisions about their long-term future and ensure that, once they move beyond that period, they can access mainstream services just as any other person can access them.
It is important to note that a significant majority of the people who are identified as trafficking victims come from outwith the European Community and are therefore subject to asylum and immigration arrangements, which means that they are subject to support arrangements organised by the UK Government, including support arrangements that involve funding to local authorities. The vast majority of people who are identified as trafficking victims get support through that route.
There are separate arrangements for children, which Cat Duggan can describe.
The situation in relation to children is somewhat different, because local authorities are already under a duty to provide such services to children under the Children (Scotland) Act 1995. We do not expect that there will be more trafficked children in Scotland because of the bill. However, we think that a lot of children who might not have been identified as being trafficked currently receive services for a different form of abuse and that the awareness and training that will result from the bill will mean that front-line services are better able to identify those children as being trafficked and, perhaps, give them a different form of advice and counselling.
Yes. North Ayrshire Council has talked about the fact that it is already training staff to recognise victims of trafficking and exploitation and does not believe that it will face a financial burden.
The Scottish Court Service has concerns about the
“one off costs of around £12k to amend its criminal case management system to allow it to record statutory aggravators for offences connected with human trafficking”.
However, curiously—I find it curious—it also said:
“If responsibility was to lie with the SCS for forfeited aircraft and ships … then we would require to procure a service which would provide for the transport, storage and disposal of these items.”
How likely is it that there will be any forfeited vessels or aircraft? If there are any, how will the matter be addressed?
The bill allows for additional powers. Two elements are involved, and it is important to separate them out. One concerns the immediate seizure of vehicles, ships and small aircraft that the bill will allow the police to undertake so that they can immediately stop trafficking happening or prevent the risk of further trafficking.
There are separate provisions under existing proceeds of crime legislation that allow for the seizure of vehicles and aircraft. However, such seizures happen already and we do not expect huge numbers of additional seizures. There are existing arrangements to cover the situation.
The financial memorandum says:
“between 2012 and 2013 the number of potential identified victims across the UK identified through the NCA strategic assessment and NRM increased by 22% and 41% respectively.”
However, the bill envisages a year-on-year increase of about 10 per cent. Why was that figure chosen, given that the numbers seem to be increasing.
We have been looking at NCA and national referral mechanism figures for Scotland. Only the most recent NCA figures provide separate information for Scotland, whereas the national referral mechanism figures run back to 2012 at least.
The numbers that we have seen for the national referral mechanism have gone up from 96 in 2012 to 99 in 2013 and 111 in 2014. That is with Police Scotland putting a lot of effort into the matter and undertaking more training of officers, and with the NHS and others, including local government, providing training. There is an increase in the numbers of people who are being referred, but it is a steady increase rather than a huge step increase.
The NCA figures for Scotland were slightly unusual. We saw higher estimates for the rest of the UK than in the NRM figures once intelligence and other factors were drawn in. However, for Scotland, the figures came back lower once we took out people who were not confirmed as victims and duplicate cases. We are trying to understand why that was the case.
On the basis of the NRM figures, we are confident that the numbers will continue to go up over the next few years and we think that 10 per cent is a reasonable estimate. We do not expect the work that we will put in to have an immediate effect on increased identification.
If there is going to be an increase year on year, I assume that you do not think that the bill will have a deterrent effect.
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The hope is that, in the long run, there will be a deterrent effect. To be honest, I suspect that there is still quite a significant pool of people whom we are not identifying and whom we need to identify before we can be confident that we are seeing a genuine downturn in the number of people who are being trafficked. The aim is to deter people who are trafficking, and a number of measures in the bill, such as the risk orders and the control orders, try to achieve that.
Does Cat Duggan want to say something?
No.
Sorry; it is just that Neil Rennick looked at you as if he thought that you did.
I want to press you a little further on the issues that local authorities might face. If the legislation is going to be tighter, presumably we will find more young victims, whom the council will then have to take into care, which will involve quite a cost. Further, if we are imprisoning more adults, they might have children of their own who might have to be taken into care. Is there a possibility that a considerable number of younger people will need to be taken into care?
I will answer the question on prisons; Cat Duggan will answer the other question first.
In 2013, 22 children and young people were referred through the national referral mechanism. The number for 2014 is 25, even taking account of what the National Crime Agency has said.
We have done quite a lot of work on the issue with local authorities and health boards. They have told us that a lot of children present as being victims of abuse or as being vulnerable and in need of care, and they would have been taken into in care anyway—perhaps they would have been seen as a looked-after child. It is only later in the process that they become known as victims of trafficking. I think that what we are dealing with today will result in exactly the same situation, and that there will, therefore, not be a huge upturn. There will not be a lot of children appearing from nowhere and presenting as victims of trafficking; there will simply be a better understanding that the children who are in the system might have been trafficked.
That is the point that I was asking about. You are saying that you think that we are in touch with all the kids and, as you say, we will find out more about some of them as they go through the system. I have not been involved in the bill process, but I had imagined that, by tightening up the legislation, it might become apparent that there were kids whom we were not aware of. However, you are saying that that is not really the expectation.
There might be some, but I think that it would be a small number. As everybody has said, it is a complex issue and a lot of it is hidden, so we do not really know anything for sure. However, all the evidence that we are getting anecdotally from local authorities and from services that work directly with children and young people on these issues suggests that only a small number of trafficked children would not be known to services at all.
On the criminal justice system and the number of people going through the courts, we know from advice from the Lord Advocate that only a small number of people have been prosecuted under existing human trafficking offences. I think that four was the maximum in any year—that was in 2013.
The Lord Advocate has advised that other people are believed to have committed offences in the context of trafficking, but although the courts can prosecute them for offences relating immigration, money laundering or brothel keeping, for example, the trafficking element cannot be proved. Most of the people we are talking about will already be going through the court system and then to prison, but not under the label of human trafficking.
The bill aims to strengthen and clarify the trafficking offence but it also aims to introduce a trafficking aggravator, which can be applied if someone is prosecuted for one of those other offences and there is reasonable evidence of a trafficking background, so that we can see that those are cases with a trafficking background as well. Of course, there may be people whom we are not currently identifying, and we hope that we will be able to identify and prosecute them.
I will come at this from another angle. The figures that I am looking at show that it costs £42,500 to put somebody in prison, which presumably includes the cost of building the prison, paying the interest, paying the governor and so on. However, that does not mean that putting one more person in prison would cost £42,500, does it?
No. We use that as the unit cost basis. You are absolutely right that you have to look in the round in terms of the overall impact on the prison population and passing the threshold at which new accommodation is needed. The numbers involved in human trafficking are very small and would be at the normal margins of the daily change around of the prison population.
I am not saying that we should do this, but I presume that if we took the marginal cost of one extra prisoner in a given prison, it would be very small.
Yes. The cost of the first prisoner in a prison is very expensive and it goes down as you add in more people. It is a difficult thing to cost and we try to reflect that in much of our criminal justice legislation. We try not to underestimate or overestimate, but we recognise that it is not an exact science.
Thank you.
There is not too much left to ask about.
Table 7, on the last page of the financial memorandum, is a collection of most of the costs. The total costs for year 4 are shown in the bottom right corner as being between £775,000 and £1.928 million. Am I right in thinking that, based on the work that you have done, the likely maximum cost as a consequence of the bill will be just over £1.9 million by year 4?
Yes, that is right. As Mr Mason has pointed out, the largest part of those costs relates to the Prison Service, and to a lesser extent, the courts. In reality, we think that the full costs will not be at that level.
They could well be lower than that.
We would expect them to be at the lower end, rather than the upper end, but we have included the range to reflect all possibilities.
The convener asked about a deterrent effect and presumably the policy objective, and your hope, is that, over time, the bill will have a deterrent effect, although it is unknown at what point and to what degree there will be such an effect. Do your figures assume a deterrent effect of nil, so that the deterrent effect would be a financial bonus, as well as being good full stop?
That is broadly right. We have not assumed that we will see a turnaround in the short timescales that we are discussing in the financial memorandum. On the basis of various reports that have been done, my suspicion is that there may well be victims whom we are not identifying, and we need to take account of that.
We have looked at the introduction of specialist risk orders for people who have already been prosecuted as traffickers or identified as potential traffickers. We are introducing the new risk orders to control their actions and to deter them from undertaking further human trafficking activity.
When similar provisions were introduced down south, the presumption was that they would offer a significant financial benefit because certain criminal cases and related actions would not have to be proceeded with. We have not assumed any such savings; we have assumed cost neutrality.
Is it possible that, by the time that we get to year 5 or year 6, the £1.9 million will drop to £1.7 million? It is perfectly possible that, instead of a guaranteed upwards trajectory, over time, the trajectory would become a falling one.
That is certainly our hope.
The final point that I want to raise has been touched on, but I seek clarification.
Paragraph 39 in part 3 of the financial memorandum deals with confiscation of property. I want to check what the Government’s approach to that is. It seems that there will be no additional costs, but the financial memorandum does not really talk about any additional benefits, either. In practice, however, I presume that there are bound to be some additional costs. The convener suggested that this would be unlikely, but if a boat was involved, for instance, there would be a cost attached to its confiscation. Ultimately, if that property is confiscated and can be sold off under proceeds of crime legislation, that would be income.
I guess that you have taken the approach that there will be neither a cost nor income. Was that a policy decision? Are there other ways of looking at it?
That particular element is focused on a fairly narrow timeframe. Seizure happens immediately: that is, when someone is first arrested, but before they have been formally prosecuted. That approach allows the police to take immediate action if someone is using a vehicle for the purposes of trafficking, in order to deter that trafficking by seizing control of the vehicle.
As I said, separate arrangements apply once someone has been through the court process and has been convicted. There are existing arrangements to deal with the formal forfeiture of a vehicle or boat.
Okay—I take the point.
Perhaps this is an impossible question to answer. but, for the sake of argument, let us say that a boat is involved. Do the costs of seizing, holding and storing a boat versus the costs of selling it tend to work out fiscally neutral, broadly speaking? Overall, does the Government generally end up slightly better off or slightly worse off financially? I know that that is a very general question, but is there a rule of thumb?
We do not tend to separate out the individual elements of proceeds of crime income. We get a total figure for that. Overall, we gain a benefit under proceeds of crime legislation, and that money is used by the Government to invest back into communities through various schemes. There is an overall benefit relative to the costs.
I have a general question. We all assumed that the people to whom you were referring earlier had been involved in human trafficking from outwith the European Union, as people in the EU are free to come here. However, there is some knowledge of bogus agencies that have set themselves up as employment agencies in some eastern European countries and which treat people in a way that is almost equivalent to the way that has been described in the references to modern slavery or human trafficking. There is a similarity with the bogus colleges that were set up to bring foreign students in—I think that they were investigated. Do the financial implications take into account how we investigate employment agencies that are, to say the least, dubious in their ambitions for finding work for people from Poland, Slovakia and so on?
Ann Oxley will correct me if I am wrong, but I think that the bill and existing legislation include provisions that allow for extraterritorial application of the law. If people who are committing crimes abroad are here in Scotland, there is scope for prosecution of those crimes.
Is there anything else, Ann?
No—what you have said is correct.
The strongest evidence that I have read, with the biggest range of concerns, came from the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities, which reflected some of the submissions from individual local authorities. COSLA deals with various sections, but I will start with the protection of victims. I suppose that you have already answered the point in relation to child victims of trafficking. COSLA suggests that key points of the bill include increasing awareness and the identification of victims. There might be some scepticism about the idea that the numbers will not increase at all.
COSLA also makes points about internal trafficking and the possibility of appointing guardians. Is that against policy?
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The answer depends on the definition of a guardian that is used, and the evidence that the Justice Committee has had shows that it can vary quite a lot. We have the Scottish guardianship service, which the Scottish Government funds. It deals with unaccompanied asylum-seeking children. They do not have to be trafficked children, although some have indicators that they have been trafficked.
We are reviewing that organisation’s funding. It does an excellent job of providing advice to children who come here from outwith the UK, and particularly outwith the EU, on understanding their immigration rights. It puts them at the centre of the process, as opposed to having the immigration process at the centre and fitting children around that.
Our position on guardians is that we will look at the Scottish guardianship service’s work with unaccompanied asylum seekers, which we will review later this year.
On services for adults, COSLA says:
“these services are provided through dedicated providers (TARA and Migrant Help)”.
It goes on to say that
“a significant number of potential victims do not engage with the National Referral Mechanism”
and that therefore
“COSLA is keen to confirm that if the potential victim of Human Trafficking does not consent to referral into the NRM, the processes in place for TARA and Migrant Help are flexible and able to provide emergency funding to cover accommodation and support”.
I do not know in detail how that works. Does that funding come from you or the UK Government?
The national referral mechanism’s purpose is to be a route into Government-funded services. Any adults who are referred to that process and are confirmed to be trafficking victims have automatic rights to support that, for people in Scotland, is funded by the Scottish Government. That is the current arrangement, which will continue under the bill. We will continue to pay for that.
When people do not wish to take part in the NRM or are not identified as trafficking victims, they are not part of the same arrangement and will be subject to other arrangements. If they are non-European Economic Area nationals, they will be subject to the asylum and immigration system, which the UK Government funds centrally. Other than that, they are—like anyone else—able to access mainstream services.
Can you reassure COSLA on its concern about the funding of the trafficking awareness-raising alliance—TARA—and Migrant Help?
We currently fund TARA and Migrant Help and we will continue to fund services. Our assumption in the financial memorandum is that more of the people who we think are genuine trafficking victims will be identified, so we have assumed an increase in our funding for that.
Do you accept COSLA’s point on funding for awareness raising and training?
The Government and local authorities already fund training, as the convener mentioned earlier, on recognising the signs of human trafficking. The year before last, we worked with Police Scotland to publish an information leaflet to raise awareness. We have included in the financial memorandum an assumption that we will carry on funding additional training and awareness-raising activities as part of the human trafficking and exploitation strategy that we will prepare.
Last year, the Scottish Government published a toolkit on identifying potential victims of trafficking, to support front-line practitioners who engage with children and young people. We have included that in our national guidance, which we refreshed in 2014. Following this committee meeting, I will meet child protection committee chairs. That meeting has been set up for quite a while and will have a trafficking element to look at how the committees are responding to things locally and what we can do at the national level.
COSLA says:
“clarification is required with regard to the costs and arrangements for managing and overseeing any Trafficking and Exploitation orders within a local authority.”
It is the costs that we are concerned about.
The main costs of monitoring the orders would fall on Police Scotland. That must be offset against the costs of not having to investigate and prosecute trafficking offences because we will be controlling things and preventing people from committing those offences.
I have a final question. At the beginning of its section on offences, the COSLA submission talks about
“additional pressures ... on existing local government services such as social work assessments”.
It says:
“Local authorities could also incur costs in supporting any individuals that have a specific physical or mental health condition”.
Do you accept any of COSLA’s points on that and have they been taken on board?
We will certainly keep a watch on what happens with the new offence and the aggravators, to see the scale of any increase. As I said earlier, the number of people who are currently prosecuted is extremely small. Our advice from the Lord Advocate is that people are being prosecuted for other offences, so we think that a reasonable proportion of the people who might be prosecuted for the additional human trafficking offences will be people who are already being prosecuted under other offences. One of our key aims is to monitor that. If there are any extra costs for local authorities, we will discuss that with COSLA.
I will be brief, as Malcolm Chisholm covered some of the points that I had hoped to raise. My questions relate to part 4 of the bill, on trafficking and exploitation prevention orders and risk orders, which he mentioned. The bill states that there will be
“two new civil orders and associated interim orders to assist in preventing trafficking and exploitation: Trafficking and Exploitation Prevention Orders (TEPOs) and Trafficking and Exploitation Risk Orders (TEROs).”
That is the terminology. I have read through the financial memorandum and read about costs and savings. When a TEPO or a TERO is granted, the monitoring process will fall to Police Scotland. I heard what you said to Mr Chisholm about the benefits of not having to investigate in certain cases. Have you estimated how many TEPOs and TEROs are likely to be issued in, say, the first five years?
We think that the numbers will be very small, based on the number of prosecutions at the moment. Even if we assumed that we would manage to double the maximum number of prosecutions in any one year, we would still be talking only about roughly eight people. The numbers will be very small compared with the activity that Police Scotland undertakes.
That is eight per year.
Yes.
Have there been discussions with Police Scotland about what the level of monitoring will be? Eight people does not sound a lot, given the resources that Police Scotland has, but it all depends on the level of monitoring that is put in place.
That is correct. The position also depends on whether the police are already engaged in monitoring the people involved for other reasons, such as organised crime or issues associated with prostitution and brothel keeping. Part of the dialogue that we had with Police Scotland was about giving it the powers in relation to people it is already aware of and in contact with.
I do not want to get too hung up on the numbers but, as this is a financial memorandum, I suppose that we should get a bit hung up on the numbers. Figures such as eight per year have to be guesstimates, by the nature of the legislation and the criminality that it is trying to expose. Are we thinking that half those people—or all of them—will already be under the monitoring of police via investigations? What do you think?
I worry that the committee is encouraging me to make guesstimates. In our dialogue, Police Scotland was comfortable that the powers would be helpful to it, that the numbers would be relatively small and that the people involved would probably be people who the police are in contact with already.
As I said earlier, we have not assumed that there will be a significant saving from not prosecuting people, but clearly the intention of TEPOs and TEROs is that we will not have to pay the costs of investigating trafficking crimes and of prosecuting people through the courts. There is a balance from putting the work up front, to save having to do the investigation and court activity further down the line.
I know that Police Scotland is content, and I do not want to drift into policy matters, as we are discussing the financial memorandum. However, there will always be a debate about, for example, how extensive the monitoring of sex offenders in the community should be. Should there be a multi-agency approach? Is it really just Police Scotland that will be monitoring such individuals who, as you say, might be involved in a variety of crimes? We are not talking about a new specialist unit; we are talking about teams in Police Scotland that are already actively involved in such matters day in, day out.
That is correct. I give Police Scotland significant credit for the fact that, very quickly after it was established, it put in place a national team and specialist local officers to deal with human trafficking and make sure that, as a country, we deal more effectively with that crime. Those resources are in place and are being used to monitor those activities.
That is helpful. If Police Scotland is content, the level of monitoring comes down to a policy question rather than a financial memorandum question. Thank you.
That appears to have exhausted all the committee’s questions. Would the bill team like to make any further points?
No.
Thank you for answering our questions so comprehensively.
11:10 Meeting continued in private until 11:14.