Clause 13

Part of Policing and Crime Bill – in a Public Bill Committee at 2:15 pm on 5 February 2009.

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Photo of Alan Campbell Alan Campbell Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Home Office) (Crime Reduction) 2:15, 5 February 2009

I was intending to come back to the issue of guidance. I hesitate, and would advise caution, because at the end of the day we are talking about men who will have committed an offence, albeit a strict liability offence—they will have committed an offence if they have purchased and had sex with a woman who is controlled for gain or who has been trafficked.

Whether through guidance or anything else, we should not be sending out a message that there is a way around this—that a man could, for example, have sex with a woman who was trafficked or controlled for gain and be allowed to reduce the severity of the offence he has committed, as long as he points her in the direction of help afterwards. We have to be careful before we go down that route. I take the hon. Gentleman’s point, but I want to make some progress.

Amendment 84 would not go quite as far as the other amendments in relation to strict liability. It would remove subsection (2)(b), and thereby the strict liability element of the offence. However, it would ensure that it was irrelevant that the person paying for sex, A, knew the identity of the person, C, responsible for controlling the prostitute, B. We are clearly in agreement with that aspect.

We do not think it should be necessary to establish whether the client was aware of the identity of the person responsible for controlling the prostitute. We believe that our clause already covers that; indeed, it goes further. For the reasons that have been outlined, we do not wish to limit the offence by accepting amendment 84 so that it would be valid defence for someone to say that he or she did not know the prostitute was being controlled for gain.

Amendment 79 also relates to the level of knowledge, on the part of the person paying for sex, necessary for an offence to be committed. It would ensure that an offence was committed only when someone had intentionally paid or promised payment for the sexual services of a prostitute. We have no difficulty in principle with that, but we do not feel it necessary to add the word “intentionally”. It is implicit in the wording of the new offence that the buyer must intentionally pay for the sexual services of the prostitute. He cannot pay for the sexual services if he does not intend to do so.

I want to turn to amendments relating to “controlled for gain”.