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Human Trafficking

I join the hon. Member for Totnes (Mr. Steen) in praising the Minister. Indeed, I add my praise for the work of the hon. Member for Totnes. However, I am extraordinarily depressed by his speech, because the reason why slavery was abolished was that it was made a crime to purchase slaves, and he has just said that we should not consider in the House or anywhere else the demand side of trafficked and other prostituted women, particularly trafficked children, and make any purchase of sexual favours from trafficked people a crime. He wishes to intervene simply on the supply side, but unless we tackle the demand side, there will be absolutely no reduction. The hon. Gentleman talks about creating a Europe-wide network of parliamentary groups, and obviously, as a strong pro-European, I wish him well and will support that. He said jocularly that he would sort out Europe first and then the rest of the world, but the main difficulty is that a great part of the trafficking takes place within the borders of the European Union. For example, when the World cup was held in Germany in 2006, the Germans organised the trafficking of 40,000 extra prostitutes into Germany to serve the clients, as they put it, who came to the World cup and, in the midst of either jubilation or dismay at their teams' performances, felt that they should go and buy sex with some girl brought in from Czechoslovakia, Latvia or Lithuania. There is a fundamental divide on how we should tackle the problem. I am firmly of the view that, unless we consider the demand side in some way, we will not deal with the supply. The hon. Gentleman read out some of the statistics from Pentameter 2, but if we look at the latest available conviction data for England and Wales provided by the Ministry of Justice, we see that there were a total of 15 convictions in 2006.