I shall speak to Amendment 100, which is also in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee. As both she and the noble Baroness, Lady Royall, were speaking, it struck me that this is something to do with the inadequacy of language, which may be stopping us getting across what we mean in that amendment. When we refer to exploitation it is about this idea of the continuum so, for me, the key phrase is in subsection (1)(c) of its proposed new clause. It says,
“and in particular whether there should be an offence of exploitation which does not amount to slavery, servitude or forced or compulsory labour within section 1”.
Although I hesitate to use such a term, we have really been talking about slightly lower level criminal offences. Organisations such as FLEX, which the noble Baroness mentioned, say that those offences tend to slip through the gaps a bit because they are seen as being not quite serious enough to go the whole way with the kind of sentences that are being proposed, and so on. That is really where the amendment sits.
I take the point about the one year. That is fair enough, were we to institute the proposed new clause, although it is obviously a probing amendment. There is a specific set of problems around the continuum of the seriousness of offences. I am not aware whether evidence exists about the extent to which persistent perpetrators of the offences we are talking about then escalate their criminality into much more serious offences; it would be useful to know whether it does. If so, it would be worth concentrating some effort on trying to root out these slightly lower level crimes. I support the amendment mainly to get some response from the Government, so as to get a sense of where they think some of these other types of offences might sit in relation to the Bill as a whole.
4.30 pm