Policing and Crime Bill

My Lords, it is a pleasure to get to an amendment that I can move. This amendment takes us back to the question of whether children under the age of 18 should still be included in the provisions on prostitution. We had a pretty full debate on this in Committee, so I will not go back over the arguments. I will say, however, that I was very grateful for the support of the noble Baroness, Lady Hanham, who said very concisely: ""If anybody needs to be taken out of the system, it is a child under 18".—[Official Report, 1/7/09; col. 283.]" The Minister continued to resist our arguments by saying that, ""decriminalising under-18s could risk sending out a message that we do not think it is acceptable for adults to be involved in street prostitution, but we consider it acceptable for a child or young person to loiter or solicit for the purposes of prostitution".—[Official Report, 1/7/09; col. 286.]" His argument that removing under-18s from these provisions could be dangerous for them takes us back to the days of Dickens and is akin to saying that this would encourage the Fagins of the modern world to employ six year-olds to commit robbery because the criminal law cannot be applied to them. His argument continues at Third Reading: that what the amendment proposes would encourage pimps to seek people under 18 to sell sex because they cannot be regarded as criminals. That is not a good argument. Further—I mentioned this in Committee but would really like to re-emphasise it—the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, to which we have now signed up, states: ""The State party should always consider, both in legislation and in practice, children victims of these criminal practices, including child prostitution, exclusively as victims in need of recovery and reintegration and not as offenders"." That conclusion was not come to lightly; there was substantial debate on the issues. Our own domestic Joint Committee on Human Rights is correct that it is far more appropriate to strengthen the duties and capabilities of children’s services. In our debate the other night, we heard just how many children come from care into prostitution. I hope that the noble Baroness, Lady Stern, will refer to that in a moment. Children end up in prostitution because of the failure of institutional services, and we should not criminalise them further. I beg to move.