My Lords, the amendment introduces a new, separate child exploitation clause aimed at filling the gaps which, despite the Government’s amendments, still exist in the Bill. Clause 1 requires evidence of slavery, servitude and forced or compulsory labour. However, force or compulsion should not be required in the case of children because a child can be controlled far more easily than an adult, and in many cases without direct force or compulsion. That is one of the reasons why we need a separate child exploitation clause. Clause 2 does not just require evidence of trafficking; it also requires proof that the trafficking took place with a view to exploitation. Proving that somebody was trafficked is difficult enough, but proving that they were trafficked with a view to exploitation is almost impossible, and proving both in the case of children, who are moved at the behest of adults, sets the bar far too high for the CPS to be able to prosecute.
There are a number of circumstances in which children are being exploited that would not be deemed offences under the Bill: children who had not been trafficked but had been sent out to the streets by family members to beg or to steal; children used to make multiple claims for benefit; children brought in from baby farms overseas to be illegally adopted. I shall give two examples of what is actually happening. When I was serving on the Metropolitan Police Authority, the police went into a house and found a young girl of about 12 years of age who was looking after three children under six. She was working from dawn to dusk: cleaning, cooking, washing, ironing, looking after the children. The bed was a mat by the fire. She had never been to school. The police removed her from the house and took her to social services. However, social services brought her back to the same house the next day, saying that compared to some of the children that they had pulled out of crack joints she was living in the lap of luxury. The only thing the police could prosecute for was the fact that she had not been to school and they could not home-school her. Once the aunt and uncle—so-called—had promised to send her to school, they basically got off scot free, because there was no way the police could prove that she had been trafficked with a view to being exploited.
In another case, a girl of 12 was sold by her mother in west Africa to a woman who brought her to London to exploit her in domestic servitude. After about a year the woman’s next door neighbour started to ask questions about the girl: where she had come from, what she was doing. The woman immediately sold her on to another man, who also exploited her in domestic servitude. When the police were finally contacted, they said that they could not prosecute this man because he had not trafficked the girl into the country.
If either of these cases of exploitation happens after the Bill becomes law the authorities would still be unable to prosecute, because they would be unable to prove the trafficking element required under Clause 2.
I am not alone in believing that a separate child exploitation clause is essential. The Joint Committee on which I sat, which scrutinised the Bill, recommended such a clause. The 41 NGOs which form the Refugee Council’s consortium, including ECPAT, the NSPCC, UNICEF and the Children’s Society, believe that such a clause is necessary. Leading barristers whose daily work is to prosecute these cases, several of whom gave evidence to the Joint Committee, also believe that the clause is necessary. The amendment that I propose makes it an offence to exploit a child, but it also defines that exploitation using the exact words of article 2 of the EU directive on human trafficking, by which our courts are already bound.
This amendment makes explicit the fact that a child cannot consent to their own exploitation and it removes the need to prove any threat, coercion or deception. The Government have tabled an amendment that says that consent is irrelevant for the offences in Clause 1. That is very welcome because it brings Clause 1 into line with the trafficking offence in Clause 2. However, it does not change the fact that we still need a separate exploitation clause, because in many cases exploiting a child will simply not meet the threshold required for slavery, servitude or forced or compulsory labour.
I cannot say with any certainty how many children are being trafficked and/or exploited in the United Kingdom today—no one can, because our system of justice has failed properly to recognise that such offences exist, let alone to investigate how often they occur. That is a sadly familiar tale, as we have seen recently in the evidence from the Jay report into child sexual exploitation in Rotherham. We must take the opportunity afforded by this Bill to provide a legal framework which offers the very highest standards of protection to children, recognising, as we do in so much other legislation, that children need a higher standard of protection than adults and, sadly, sometimes a higher standard of protection from adults. We need a specific offence of child exploitation to tackle the deficiencies in the Bill. If we do not get it, we will fail the many hundreds, if not thousands, of children who are exploited in our country every day. I beg to move.