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Policing and Crime Bill

I thank all those who have taken part in the debate. I am extremely grateful to the lawyers here who have been able to support the amendment, or at least the elements of the amendment that we put forward. I am also aware that the Minister may have wished that he was somewhere else, as I know that it was wished to bring the Attorney-General in so that she could stand up to our noble friends and explain at some length and in some detail how this clause and this aspect of it has come about. The Minister might have been quite interested if he had seen the faces around the Committee as he gave his explanation of how this offence came about and how the campaign might develop as a result of it. I made clear from the outset that I had no interest in the moral or the campaign aspect. I said that I was interested wholly and entirely in the justice aspect. There have been many contributions from around the Chamber. I have not yet heard of one solid area where a defendant has no defence against something about which he can reasonably have no knowledge. If the Minister takes this away, this is the area that must be explained. It has to be explained why this offence, apart from the myriad offences that we have in this country, is so awful that it can have no defence. What is a person going to do? Is he going to go into a brothel and say, "Hello, just before we have sex, have you been trafficked? If you have I am going to have to go away again because I’m going to be prosecuted if somebody comes in". We have to get real about this. We have to be very sure that we do not muddle up a moral campaign with justice against somebody who is going to appear in a court of law and not be able to say anything in their own defence. We have rehearsed all this as much as we can. Both Ministers have to listen very carefully. My noble friend Lord Baker asked whether Clause 13 was relevant. We may come to that. We need to look at this. Trying to discourage an action that a majority of people are totally against may be laudable but it is quite outside the terms of the law and the legal way of going about things. I do not think we can have that.