Clause 71
Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill
10:30 am
David Heath (Shadow Secretary of State for Justice & Lord Chancellor, Ministry of Justice; Somerton and Frome, Liberal Democrat)
I beg to move amendment No. 351, in clause 71, page 49, line 21, after ‘person’, insert ‘aged 18 or over’.
Thank you, Sir Nicholas. I welcome you to the Committee this morning. The name of my constituency seems to defeat even the most erudite Members of the House. Despite the overcast conditions outside, I am sure that your chairmanship will brighten our proceedings.
In an attempt to enliven our discussions, we now move on to the subject of prostitution. The amendment, which is in my name and that of my hon. Friend the Member for Cambridge, deals with people under the age 18 who are working as prostitutes. I hope that a lot of our debate on this aspect of the Bill will be about prostitutes as not so much offenders, but people who are exploited and the victims of others. I also hope that we shall explore people trafficking, a subject in which the Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department is very much engaged, as am I and others. We shall want to see how to mitigate the awful consequences of trafficking.
In the case of under-18s, we are dealing not only with people who might be from other countries and fall into the category of trafficked people, but those who are indigenous to this country and vulnerable to exploitation, whether or not they know that they are being exploited. The amendment would decriminalise the offence of loitering or soliciting for persons aged 17 and under. There is consistency between my proposal and what happens in practice. There are many fewer prosecutions of young people for prostitution offences than there were previously, and part of that is due to a change of attitude on the part of the authorities that seek to understand the behaviour of young people and to attack the reasons for their offending behaviour.
We are all conscious of the fact that many young people who find themselves in the world of prostitution do so because they come from a significantly difficult social background. A lot of them come from children’s homes. Unfortunately, it is a huge indictment of our system that so many young people from children’s homes are engaged in prostitution. Many others come from chaotic or disorderly home backgrounds and regard it as an escape.
Let me refer to the numbers of young people involved in loitering for prostitution purposes. In 2005-06, Barnardo’s worked with 2,148 young people between the ages of 18 and 24. Research that it undertook in 2005 showed that as many as 1,000 young children in London alone were at risk of, or involved in, exploitation. That can take many forms, but it often includes prostitution.
The question for the Committee is whether prosecuting a young person for this offence is the right way of dealing with them in the first instance, rather than using the other possible disposals available, and whether that is likely to have the right consequence of deterring reoffending. All the evidence shows that it is not. There is also a question about whether young people will recognise that the authorities are trying to assist them if the threat of prosecution is hanging over them, or whether they will be alienated further from those who can provide genuine assistance and remove them from the exploitative situation in which they find themselves. We must also recognise the vulnerability of young people in this context and that to call them offenders and bring them before a court is probably not the best outcome, either for the child or for the system that is being used. Rather, more caring and long-term support is needed.
If we do not remove the possibility of prosecution for young people, they will be persistent offenders. However the crime is defined, all the evidence indicates that they will not be single-time offenders, but will appear before the courts time and time again. They will eventually find themselves in more and more serious difficulties as a result. Removing that possibility is the principal objective of the amendment. The amendment is supported by the Standing Committee for Youth Justice and, particularly, by Barnardo’s, which often works with such young people, as well as the Children’s Society, and I commend it to the Committee.