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Policing and Crime Bill

I support Amendment 45. I apologise to the Committee. I did not take part in the Second Reading debate. We know that trafficking is bad. It deals with a supply of women who go into the sexual services business. The answer seems to be that if we reduce demand, something will automatically happen to the supply, leading to a reduction in the number of women offering sexual services and, therefore, in trafficking. I am laying all this out because there are links in the chain which do not work. If it were a question of drugs, there would be a straightforward connection between the person demanding drugs and the person supplying them, but, here, there is an intermediate human being who becomes the service provider: the woman. The clause implies that almost everyone supplying sexual services is somehow forced into it by the traffickers. It is essential to understand that there are women who provide sexual services either voluntarily, because of various circumstances which I do not have time to go into, or because they are trafficked. If you confuse the two and reduce demand, you are as likely to drive away the women who are voluntarily there and you will not do much to reduce trafficking. All that will happen if the price falls is that more ruthless and efficient suppliers will drive away the voluntary, one-person or two-person providers. You might therefore be just as likely to strengthen the traffickers. These sorts of perverse effects—or unintended consequences, as the noble Baroness pointed to in another context—are well known in economics. We should therefore be careful in believing that just because we cut demand for a service, we necessarily get rid of its supply, especially that part of the supply which is more odious. The amendment of the noble Baroness is an attempt to discriminate between those women who provide sexual services voluntarily and those who have been forced into it. It is a difficult distinction, but we should make some attempt to make it, otherwise we shall punish the women who do not deserve to be punished as having been trafficked.