Policing and Crime Bill

I declare an interest as a vice-chairman of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Trafficking of Women and Children. I heard from the Director of Public Prosecutions on Monday—the noble Baroness, Lady Hanham, may be relieved to hear this—that over the past three or four years there has been an increase in the number of prosecutions, in the number of convictions and, just recently, in heavier sentences. It looks as though the CPS is going the right way and finding more and more people to prosecute. I have doubts about the effectiveness of both the Government’s clause and the variety of amendments that have been put forward. If there are to be amendments, I choose to support the noble Baroness, Lady Miller, but I say that there are doubts because there could be important unintended consequences. If the Committee will bear with me, I will tell the story of a Czech girl trained by her mother to be a masseuse, a girl of the utmost propriety who was brought here in the belief that she was going to a genuine massage parlour—not the sort of parlour that we in England would understand it to be. She found herself in a brothel in Totnes in Devon. She was there for a week, a girl with no experience, and I believe that there were 12 men on the first night. One has just to think what that must have been like for an inexperienced, decent girl. On the fifth, seventh or eighth day she was taken to the local pub, where she very bravely made a huge scene. The police were called, and they looked after her. She was returned to her home in the Czech Republic and to her perfectly respectable mother. The police take time to get evidence internationally. The way in which the questions are asked is a nightmare for the CPS and for anyone engaged in these trials; it takes months, sometimes years, for the evidence to be available to prosecute. So what did the police do? In this case, they prosecuted these people as brothel-keepers and got them convicted. Why? Because some of the men whom this girl serviced, or who were good enough not to make her do that, were so shocked by her story that they came forward and gave evidence against the brothel-keepers, who are now serving sentences of imprisonment. Would they do that if they were to become part of the criminal population for having had sex with someone who they knew, or ought to have known, had been trafficked? That is a really quite dangerous unintended consequence. If this clause goes through, amended or unamended, something will have to be done to protect those men prepared to come forward to help trafficked girls and to catch brothel-keepers. I am glad to say that the police are now going to prosecute them as traffickers, but that will be a long-drawn-out prosecution. However, I offer this example to the House as a problem about criminalising those who pay for sex.