Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill

My Lords, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mayhew of Twysden, tempts me to extol the virtues of ironmonger shops which, sadly, hardly exist in this country now. I would have to turn to France where you can find everything from a chestnut roaster to grout. However, as he correctly said, time is limited, so I will resist that temptation. This Government, under Gordon Brown, when he became Prime Minister, made much of saying that they wanted to strengthen the role of Parliament. Therefore, I find it extraordinary how this first piece of important Ministry of Justice and Home Office legislation under his premiership, has proceeded. As other noble Lords have said, the Government treated the elected Chamber with total disregard when it came to guillotining discussion and introducing important clauses with no time to debate them. If this had been a technical, uncontroversial Bill—in which case, it would have started in your Lordships’ House—that would not have mattered. However, this Bill contains some very controversial items which need to be debated. I am going to talk about three of those issues, two of which I will particularly concentrate on in Committee. I want to mention the issue of young people—I will not be discussing it so much in Committee, but it needed debating in the other place. The issue is very much in the headlines at the moment, with talk of feral children, and little can be more important than instances of violence perpetrated by children. It is something which shocks society. The Bill’s response to how we treat young people—their rehabilitation, their response to the justice system and how to make that system effective—really needed to be debated by elected Members and I hope that we will be able to do it justice in your Lordships’ House. It is not simply the legislative response but also the ministerial guidance that follows it. That comes out so clearly in debate. For example, Clause 39 provides for imposing orders that will enable a court to impose an unpaid work requirement, a curfew requirement or an attendance centre requirement. When discussing these, we should debate whether the provisions are to be used only when a young person will not pay rather than cannot pay. Ministers will have to be sensitive in the guidance they issue and should give assurances regarding the resources that the legislation requires. That is because far more pressure will be put on youth offending teams and probation services, both of which are currently overstretched. The two issues I shall concentrate on are set out in Part 7—the first is extreme pornography. It is a difficult issue to debate at all, but one to which I hope we shall bring some cool and objective thinking. Again, it did not really receive the sort of examination in the other place that it should have had. We have had an interesting briefing from a large number of academics such as lecturers in media studies and so on who have joined together on this issue. The first point they make bears repeating at this stage: the Government have been using a rapid evidence assessment to back up their claims that legislation is necessary in this area. They say that the REA document is based on largely discredited research emanating from particular psychology and sociology traditions once favoured in America and that the supporting evidence has no real connection to the British case. That is the sort of issue that we need to examine in Committee. Legislation needs to be objective and evidence-based, not subjective. Personally, I do not like pornography and believe it to be essentially degrading to the spirit, and violent pornography is even worse. Indeed, anything depicting extreme violence is, I think, dangerous as regards the well-being of society. However, I also do not believe in censorship unless it is absolutely essential to protect people, and my personal view is not what I want the House to focus on. We need to concentrate on the fact that this sloppy clause is dangerous. On 6 December last the Minister said that the Government believe that the individual pornography user will have no difficulty in recognising pornography. That is not an objective or evidence-based approach. Surely it cannot be for the possible perpetrator of a crime to judge whether he actually is committing a crime. A great deal more thought needs to go into exactly how these clauses have been drafted, and I recognise that the Minister has suggested that the Government will bring forward something which I hope will be more evidence-based. Further, I am extremely glad that we will have the benefit of the report of the Joint Committee on Human Rights before us. Before I leave this point, I refer to the specialist interest material we have received from the Outsiders Trust, which represents the interests of physically disabled people. That is the sort of issue I hope we will come back to in Committee. I turn now to the provisions on prostitution. Given that the Government started to create a strategy in this area with the publication of guidance in 2000 entitled Setting the Boundaries, followed by legislation with the Sexual Offences Act 2003 and a year later a consultation paper entitled Paying the Price, to which they received responses and then developed a strategy, I am shocked that the result of all that work is simply two short clauses which represent a pathetic response to a severe problem. The fact is that prostitution happens. People are willing to pay for sex and others are willing to sell it. Within that framework, whether we like it or not, it is going to take place. The responsibility of the legislation is to make prostitution as safe as possible so that it presents a small health risk to both the buyer and the seller and minimises as far as possible the physical risks for the women who operate in the trade. It is also a question of striking a balance between privacy and safety. It is a mistake to regard all prostitutes as victims or unwilling participants, but that is the line the Bill is taking. It is a Victorian Bill because it talks a lot about rehabilitation of prostitutes. I was interested to learn that Ministers have been to Sweden, which has gone down the criminalisation route. It has criminalised the user as well as taking the further step—I know the Minister will deny this—of criminalising the seller. The Bill will criminalise those who do not fulfil their rehabilitation orders. The Ministers could have chosen to visit New Zealand, which has gone down the decriminalisation route, and seen if that has worked better since legislation was introduced there. That is a point I will want to explore in Committee. Women who own brothels and run them well and safely should be able to do so without fear of prosecution under the trafficking laws if they are employing people who are there of their own free will. I believe that that would be safer. But I do not believe we can achieve all this in this Bill, and I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Howe, that we need to remove the clauses dealing with prostitution in their entirety. That is what I will be concentrating on. I shall also be looking carefully at exactly how the clauses on immigration in Part 12 are going to affect the children of immigrants and at all the issues raised by the Joint Committee on Human Rights on those provisions. It raises serious issues, and I look forward to debating them in Committee.