10. Short Debate: The exploitation of immigrants to the UK by immigrant criminal gangs — Postponed from 8 November

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 4:34 pm on 15 November 2017.

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Photo of Joyce Watson Joyce Watson Labour 4:34, 15 November 2017

I'm pleased to have a minute in this debate, but I'm not at all pleased about the debate; those two things are completely separate. I am, as everybody knows, the chair of the cross-party group on human trafficking or anti-slavery, and the founding member of that. I do find the whole tenor of what I have had to sit through and endure completely and utterly distasteful. I think it would have been far better to have served the needs of the people who need looking after and protecting if it hadn't been the case that we were focusing on one set of criminal gangs, and that was the immigrant. That is what runs through all of this. It is a pity, in my opinion, that the individual bringing this didn't actually look at what has happened in terms of the prosecutions of British-born perpetrators of this crime here in Wales, where that evidence was right under his nose, if only he had bothered himself to look for it.