Policing and Crime Bill

The position expressed by my noble friend Lord Waddington, which is that we should legislate to outlaw paying for sex, is entirely honest. When the Government started from that position—indeed, it sounded as if that was the position that they wanted to take—I thought that we were going to have an honest debate. I may not agree with that position—in fact, I do not agree with it—but it seemed that at least we had an honest position to start from. However, we seem to have ended up with an entirely dishonest clause. It pretends that there is a tenable position half way between outlawing paying for sex and allowing it. That is not so. We should start from the position from which the noble Baroness who moved this amendment comes—the protection of the women involved in this business—and from the position adopted by the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, on dealing with trafficking. Those are the evils that we should be intent on dealing with and we should ask ourselves at every step whether those are the effects that the clause or the amendments to it will have. Some have argued that the Norwegian experience of banning paying for sex has been effective. Yes, but that is not where the Government are. The Government are in this strange half light of criminalising men for something that they cannot know that they are doing. That is an exceptionally undesirable position for the Government. I know that we will visit this issue later, but not while I am here. The Government should think again and say, "We have gone down the wrong road and Clause 13 is not the right way to do it". The amendment is an improvement on Clause 13, but I urge my noble friend and the noble Baroness, Lady Miller, when they divide the House—if not now, then on Report—rather to go for eliminating Clause 13 altogether. It surprises me that a Labour Government should go down this route. In the end, it will be a law that, among other things, will bite the poor, not the rich. It attacks the forms of prostitution used by ordinary working men, not those used by rich men. That is unjustifiable social discrimination. Again, if the Government were being honest and had gone for the position expressed by my noble friend Lord Waddington and their own original desire to ban paying for sex, that would bite all equally. The Government’s social conscience should not allow them to go down this route. We have not heard any declarations of interest by noble Lords who have spoken—at least not in the sense that I mean. I note that there are a couple of dozen of us here and it is said that one in eight men uses prostitutes. There is, therefore, a less than 5 per cent chance, on average, that none of us has an interest to declare—but then we are not an average lot.