Committee (2nd Day)

Policing and Crime Bill

House of Lords debates, 1 July 2009, 5:15 pm

Photo of Lord Brett

Lord Brett (Government Whip (technically a Lord in Waiting, HM Household); Labour)

I am happy to give an example, which is always dangerous. If a brothel is under observation and it is suspected that prostitutes are being trafficked, primarily because they are being moved between different cities, which is quite a common occurrence, the place will be kept under observation for a number of days. People will be seen going in and coming out, prostitutes will be seen going in and coming out and the movements of the people running the brothel will be seen. At some point, sufficient evidence will have been gathered to make arrests. They will be made in the light of those observations. We are going on to the question of strict liability; the person who has been to that brothel will be interviewed by the police and, under strict liability, cannot defend himself by saying that he did not know, provided, of course, that we ensure that when this becomes law, there is sufficient publicity to ensure that men understand that there is that risk that if they use prostitutes, there will be circumstances in which they may find themselves fined up to £1,000. I hope that makes it a little clearer.

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Stephen Paterson
Posted on 13 Jul 2009 10:46 pm (Report this annotation)

Oh, right. What is being said here, then, is that when it is suspected that women are being held capitive and undergoing a process akin to being raped many times daily, the police wait "a number of" days to do anything about it, until, "at some point, sufficient evidence will have been gathered."

Pity they didn't wait a number of days over Charles De Menezes until sufficient evidence had been gathered, isn't it?

Now I really can't understand why the Home Office is sometimes accused of failing to take a human rights victim-based approach, especially when the Blue Blindfold site has, for the last two years, made so very clear the extensive support proferred to trafficking victims:
http://www.blueblindfold.co.uk/victimsupport/

But as ministers can't even tell us how many trafficking victims they've found (because it's "not collated centrally"), whilst being pleased to proffer all sorts of estimates as to how many there might be, I guess I shouldn't be surprised.

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