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Policing and Crime Bill

Well, the law is already there to deal with the issue, as the hon. Lady knows. The measure would ensure the prosecution of men who have had sex with a woman who appeared to them to have given her consent freely. The hon. Lady and Ministers have failed to answer the question of what in practice is the difference between giving money to a child beggar and perpetuating child trafficking for the purposes of begging, and giving money to a prostitute and perpetuating prostitution. The fact is that this is bad law, and talk of strict liability will not make it any better. The hon. Lady gave the example of people who sell alcohol to underage children, but obviously shopkeepers can ask for valid ID and check it out. Somebody else gave the example of people running red lights, but we all know that when we drive past traffic lights, it is our responsibility to be sure that they are green; if we do not and we run a red light, we are to blame and can be prosecuted. There is no way in which a punter going to a prostitute can find out for certain whether she has been trafficked. If sex is apparently freely given, the client has to assume that the woman has not been trafficked. It is no good the hon. Member for Slough talking about every act of prostitution being one of sexual exploitation. That is not what the prostitutes say. As I said to her earlier, this morning I met a very articulate lady; in fact, I assumed that she was a solicitor and did not at first realise that she worked in the sex industry as well as lobbying Members of Parliament. Her take was that many women work in the industry quite freely because the money and the job are good. She tells me that most of those whom she meets are perfectly nice and decent and that most who run brothels are also that. She even described one brothel as a happy family business. I have no way of knowing how representative she is, but her union is linked to the GMB, which has more links to the hon. Lady's party than to mine. What concerns me is that in going after the punters we will be going after the wrong people—it is the traffickers whom we should be targeting. If we start making it easy for the police to get prosecutions by going after clients, then they will go after clients and spend a lot of time trying to collate evidence about them. The clients themselves, who in many instances do report cases where they think that women are being abused, will not go to the police and certainly will not give evidence. I would like the Government to answer these simple questions. Why have they done nothing about running a public information campaign to discourage people from giving money to child beggars and try to stop those activities? Why are they doing so little to prevent forced marriage, which is another form of trafficking whereby women are taken from one country to another to act as domestic and sexual slaves for people whom they have never even met before? While we are on the periphery of this subject, perhaps they could also explain why they have done nothing to enforce the law on female genital mutilation that they introduced in 2003, when lots of Members of Parliament made speeches saying that that disgusting practice must be stamped out. They encouraged the Metropolitan police to set up a unit to hunt down and seek out people who had perpetrated this disgusting crime, yet since then not one single person has been convicted and only one person has been investigated. I know that that is the case only because I had to make a case to the Information Commissioner to get the information out of the Metropolitan police, who did their damnedest to try to stop me from having any of it. By all means, let the Government show their commitment—let us all show our commitment—to stamping out the evil act of human trafficking, but let us go about it in the right way. We should not criminalise men who seek prostitutes in the belief that they are perfectly willing to have sex, or criminalise prostitutes, some of whom, contrary to what the hon. Member for Slough may think, are perfectly happy with the jobs that they are doing, but go after the traffickers. We should discourage people from giving money to a woman who has obviously been coerced into sex or giving money to a child who has been taken from their home in eastern Europe, or somewhere else, and put out on to the streets of London. We should discourage people who are party to the fact that domestic slaves are brought into this country from some parts of the middle east and forced to work for little or nothing in the houses of very wealthy people from that part of the world. Those are the people whom the Minister should be tackling; if he did that, he would have support in all parts of the House.