My Lords, I rise to support the noble Baroness, Lady Doocey, in her Amendment 5. As I mentioned in the last grouping, while I welcome government Amendment 4, in my view it does not go far enough. It is evident that something is missing in the current legislative framework that is preventing criminals who exploit people of whatever age being brought to justice—but especially with regard to children.
The noble Lord, Lord McColl, referred to the Coroners and Justice Act 2009. Nationally, according to Crown Prosecution Service data, there have been no cases of a prosecution where a victim was a child since the introduction of Section 71 of the Coroners and Justice Act on slavery, servitude and forced labour. Yet, of the 59 defendants charged with human trafficking offences in 2013-14, there was only one case that was not sexual exploitation in cases relating to child victims. Clearly, the numbers are not adding up.
Although we were grateful for the views of the Director of Public Prosecutions, Alison Saunders, the national policing lead for modern slavery, Chief Constable Shaun Sawyer, and the director of the Organised Crime Command at the National Crime Agency, Ian Cruxton, in the letter that we received last week, we still feel that there is a legal difference of opinion on this issue which has not been resolved. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, who was until recently the Lord Chief Justice and the most senior criminal judge in the country, said of the Bill:
“We are making provisions for slavery, servitude and compulsory labour in clause 1 of the Bill. In clause 2, trafficking is the offence. It becomes an offence because you do it with a view to exploitation … You could have an offence of trafficking, full stop, and a separate offence of exploitation”.
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Alongside him, the former DPP, Keir Starmer, and Nadine Finch, a barrister specialising in children’s law, have identified a need for separate offences for exploitation and human trafficking. In particular, with regard to children, she said in her evidence to the Public Bill Committee in the other place:
“Children are at a huge disadvantage in evidential terms. They very rarely understand they have been trafficked—what trafficking means—or what kind of evidence is needed … Many of my child clients can tell me about what happened when they were exploited in domestic servitude, in a restaurant or in prostitution; but they actually did not understand enough about the links between people who brought them across England, Europe or the world, and therefore they are not able to assist the police or prosecutors in terms of a trafficking offence. They can assist in the matter of exploitation, and I have got quite a few children who have been able to take the police to a house where they have been kept in domestic servitude or sexual exploitation, but they are not able to explain who brought them to that house, and therefore no prosecution happens”.
In his letter of 16 February, the Minister outlined his reservations with regard to the prospect of creating a separate child exploitation offence. I have a couple of questions relating to some of the points he made. Why would providing age in cases involving child victims be difficult? Again, I quote from the evidence of Nadine Finch to the Public Bill Committee. She stated:
“I appeared last year for the Children’s Commissioner in the case of L and others and one of the issues we took up was the difficulty of addressing age assessments in a criminal court. Lord Judge, the highest judge in the criminal courts at that time, accepted that the criminal court already has case law that enables a judge to adjourn a hearing if there is an age dispute. The court can seek expert evidence on its own, but it can expect both prosecution and defence to bring evidence that will enable them to resolve an age dispute. That is set out in detail in the case, and there was no doubt in the mind of the Lord Chief Justice that it was workable. It has worked for decades in terms of age assessments, so that issue, in many ways, is a red herring”.—[Official Report, Commons, Modern Slavery Bill Committee, 21/7/14; col. 35.]
The Bill is intended to consolidate existing offences in order to get more prosecutions. I therefore ask why adding a separate child exploitation offence would cause confusion or make policing and wider criminal justice procedures less straightforward. Surely we want our offences to be watertight in order not to leave any gaps.
I come back to an issue raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Doocey. The Minister spoke earlier of the CPS and the national policing lead working more closely
together. Like the noble Baroness I welcome that. However, how will specific training now be provided for front-line police officers? As the noble Baroness said, often training is provided that is not adequate. I think that we all wish to hear from the Minister that the training will be incisive and will enable police officers to identify child exploitation.
As I mentioned earlier, the government amendment is not ideal and we would have preferred to see separate offences of adult exploitation and child exploitation. However, I trust that we will return to this matter, either as the noble Baroness mentioned or in post-legislative scrutiny, to see whether the offences as outlined in the Bill have resulted in a sharp increase in prosecutions and victims coming forward. I very much hope that they will. I take this opportunity to thank the noble Baroness, Lady Doocey, for her tenacity in pursuing this issue—which, I have no doubt, was a catalyst for government action thus far.