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Policing and Crime Bill

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for his intervention, but I profoundly disagree with him. That organisation has done a huge disservice to the cause of trafficked women and coerced sex slaves. I particularly welcome and endorse the points made by my hon. Friend the Member for Stourbridge. I very much hope that my own council, Rotherham metropolitan borough council, will seek to use this legislation—without endless consultation—to listen to the residents of Rotherham who are sick and tired of the ever-increasing presence of these clubs and institutions in which women are turned into dehumanised sex objects for the pleasure of men, whether those men are leering at them, having a discussion about Lib Dem policy in a private booth or doing whatever else might happen in a private booth. I welcome the fact that my right hon. Friend the Member for Leicester, East (Keith Vaz) went to Soho and could find only contented prostituted women who were happy to discuss their trade with him. Again, however, this simply defies every statistical and academic survey in every country. Those surveys find that a minimum of between 80 and 90 per cent. of prostituted women are desperate to get out of the business. They are in it because of drug dependency or coercion, or because they have been beaten up or raped. We must remove ourselves from this happy hooker, Belle de Jour nonsense. It is absolutely ridiculous to say that prostituted women are in the business simply because they have chosen the profession just as a doctor, a lawyer or a Member of Parliament might—although when we consider the way in which women Members of Parliament are about to be treated under the Kelly proposals, there will soon be fewer and fewer of them.