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Policing and Crime Bill

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for his congratulations. I understand exactly where he is coming from, but the trouble is that under this Government the Treasury has so little cash that I suspect that persuading it to deal with this matter very differently may be a struggle. Nowhere in the Government's proposals is the evidence of failure more striking than in their approach to tackling human trafficking. That is a mere fig leaf for action. No one in this House should be under any illusion as to the scale of the barbaric trade pouring into Britain. Police upper estimates of the number of vulnerable women and girls trafficked into Britain for sexual exploitation have soared in recent years, from 4,000 to 18,000. The scale of the growth in this problem dwarfs the Government's efforts to contain it, yet instead of freeing up more police to tackle human trafficking, they are downsizing the specialist unit at the Met, and instead of their driving prosecutions of those profiting from this modern form of slavery, convictions have slumped by two thirds since 2006. That is the reality behind the Government's rhetoric. The Home Secretary's answer is a swathe of new criminal offences aimed at reducing the demand for prostitution. Should we take it from this change of focus, and from the failure to enforce existing laws against those who exploit vulnerable women, that the Home Secretary has now just given up trying to prosecute the criminal gangs involved? Does the Home Secretary agree with the Leader of the House that there is no evidence of any increase in people paying for sex? We will scrutinise the new strict liability offences closely and carefully to ensure that they do not create scope for abuse or injustice. The much greater risk, however, is that they will lie dormant on the statute book, along with so much of this Government's legislation produced over the last 11 years, because, as Commander Allan Gibson of the Metropolitan police's human trafficking unit has made very clear, these proposals will be ““very difficult to enforce””.