Crime and Policing Bill

Karen Bradley Excerpts

Report stage
Wednesday 18th June 2025 Commons Chamber

[Tonia Antoniazzi]

My hon. Friend and I obviously do not look at this through the same lens. For me, it is prostitution and not sex work, and we need to see some more examples of that being used. We currently have a situation where sex buyers enjoy near-total impunity while the vulnerable women they exploit can face criminal sanctions if they solicit on the street. The state hands out fines to women in a self-defeating effort to stop them soliciting on the street, ignoring the question of where those women are most likely to earn the money to pay their fine. Sanctioning victims of sexual exploitation is counterproductive and a barrier to seeking help and exiting this ruthless trade.

That is why I have tabled amendments new clauses 2, 3 and 4. New clause 2 would make it a criminal offence to enable or profit from the prostitution of another person online and offline, thereby outlawing dangerous pimping websites that are fuelling demand and facilitating sex trafficking. New clauses 3 and 4 would together shift the burden of criminality off victims of sexual exploitation and on to perpetrators. New clause 3 would make it a criminal offence to pay for sex, sending a clear message to boys that that is not an acceptable way to treat women and an equally clear message to men who are considering paying for sex that they face prosecution. We know from research with UK sex buyers that this would be an effective deterrent. Over half of 1,200 sex buyers questioned in one study said that they would definitely, probably or possibly change their behaviour if a law were introduced that made it a crime to pay for sex.

New clause 4 would repeal sanctions against victims of sexual exploitation who solicit on the street to remove that barrier to women exiting prostitution and rebuilding their lives. It is also widely agreed that the expunging of criminal records of section 1 offences is necessary to end the unjust stigmatisation that these women continue to experience. That is why I have also tabled new clause 19 to introduce such a mechanism.

The Home Affairs Committee has recommended that

“the Home Office change existing legislation so that soliciting is no longer an offence”,

and

“legislate for the deletion of previous convictions and cautions for prostitution from the record of sex workers by amending the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act.”

For most of these women, their record of convictions is a record of their exploitation and abuse, and they live in fear of having to disclose that history when applying for jobs or volunteering. Decriminalising section 1 offences and allowing for the expunging of those historical convictions would allow those women to finally be free of the record of their abuse and the stigma they have endured for decades.

My amendments would usher in a legal framework that recognises that prostitution is violence against women, and the only way to end this violence is to deter the perpetrators and profiteers. I am delighted, then, that more than 50 hon. Members have signed new clauses 2 to 4. I particularly thank members of the all-party parliamentary group on commercial sexual exploitation, which I chair, for their support. The amendments are informed and supported by survivors and best practice frontline support services such as NIA, Kairos Women Working Together, and Women@TheWell.

I note that, unsurprisingly, some of my proposals are hated by pimping websites, one of which, Vivastreet, emailed its allies, urging them to mobilise against my amendments. A recent Sky News investigation found that over half of the 14,000 prostitution adverts on Vivastreet displayed a phone number linked to another advert on the site, which is a key red flag for organised sexual exploitation. I therefore find it reassuring that those prostitution pedlars are unnerved by my proposals.

I want to address a myth promoted by defenders of pimping websites that shutting down these sites will make no difference to the scale of sexual exploitation taking place and will, instead, simply drive it all into the dark web and make it harder to identify. That is patently nonsense, lacking in logic and evidence. The dark web carries major disadvantages for both traffickers and sex buyers. It would require significant technical expertise to post, as well as locate and access, prostitution adverts on the dark web, thereby substantially restricting the pool of exploiters able to engage in this crime. There is also no evidence that such a shift has taken place in jurisdictions that have outlawed pimping websites. The reality is that police simply cannot keep up with the scale of sexual exploitation taking place via pimping websites on the open web.

Another myth I want to address was all too visible in the written submissions opposing my amendments submitted to the Public Bill Committee. Every single one of the organisations who argued that pimping websites should be allowed to operate described prostitution as work—as “sex work”. The idea that paying someone to perform sex acts is an ordinary consumer activity—that ordering a woman online to perform a blow job is the equivalent of ordering a cappuccino—is a pernicious and harmful myth. Prostitution is violence against women.

Let us legislate to put pimps and traffickers out of business. We must protect individuals from exploitation today, but also address the historical criminalisation of victims and abuse. I thank Members on the Front Bench for their engagement on this issue and I look forward to working with them very closely.

[Dame Karen Bradley (Staffordshire Moorlands) (Con)]

I rise to speak to new clauses 12 and 123 in my name, new clause 43 in the name of the hon. Member for Tunbridge Wells (Mike Martin) and new clause 121 in the name of my hon. Friend the Member for Gosport (Dame Caroline Dinenage).

New clause 43 seeks to commence the Sex-based Harassment in Public Act 2023, which was taken through the House as a private Member’s Bill by Greg Clark, the predecessor of the hon. Member for Tunbridge Wells. Greg did great work on this Bill. I was one of its supporters and a member of the Bill Committee. I spoke on Second Reading, Third Reading and in Committee. It is a simple Act, which had cross-party support—it was not in any way a controversial piece of legislation. It corrected an oversight in the law that had been missed out in a previous piece of legislation.

As so often happens, a private Member’s Bill requires a statutory instrument to commence it, and that statutory instrument has not yet been laid in this House. I am sure the Minister is well aware of that and is seeking to do so. This new clause would allow the Act to commence now, rather than requiring that statutory instrument, thereby saving her a little bit of time. I hope, therefore, that she might look favourably on it. As I say, this was an Act that was supported across the House. There was no Division on it; it was very much something that we all wanted to see, so I hope that the Government accept the new clause and that the hon. Member for Tunbridge Wells can follow on in the footsteps of his predecessor in making sure that this Act of Parliament becomes live and real for the people who need it.

Let me turn now to new clause 121 in the name of my hon. Friend the Member for Gosport. I was almost disappointed not to be able to table this new clause myself, because it fits with the work that I have done previously on these issues. I was Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport when the Digital Economy Act 2017 introduced age verification for pornography. Again, new clause 121 is a simple piece of legislation, which would make non-fatal strangulation a criminal act if in pornography. This does not impact on what people may wish to do in their private lives, but it does mean that those images would not then be available to be seen in pornographic films. It also means that there is protection for children who may be looking at this pornography—we do not want them to look at it, but we are realists and recognise that this happens—and that it does not normalise what is a really dangerous act, which should not be promoted in any way.

I know from experience that social media companies will remove content if it is illegal. They will not remove it if it is not. Therefore this simple change would mean that the depiction of non-fatal strangulation would become illegal content and social media companies would therefore be forced to act. I hope that this is something that can be supported across the House. Although I understand that we will be pushed to Division this evening, I do hope that the Minister can say something about the Government introducing something similar—perhaps in the other place—so that we can make sure that this inappropriate content is illegal and therefore not available to be seen by children.

Let me turn now to the new clauses in my name. I wish to start with new clause 123, because my hon. Friend the Member for Meriden and Solihull East (Saqib Bhatti), who has been such a champion of this legislation, has to go to a Delegated Legislation Committee at 2.30 pm. I also wish him a very happy birthday. He is choosing to spend his birthday in this Chamber and attending a DL Committee—what a hero! Again, I think that this new clause will have cross-party support. It concerns the removal of parental responsibility for individuals convicted of sexual offences against children. When I have talked about this to colleagues and asked them to consider supporting the new clause, they have been utterly amazed that anybody convicted of a sexual offence against a child may be allowed to have parental responsibility for their own child. That responsibility is stopped only if the offence is committed against their own child. That cannot be right.

How can it be that a convicted sex offender—somebody who has been convicted of a sexual offence against a child—is allowed to make parental decisions about their own children? My hon. Friend’s constituent has talked about this—I believe that they are known as “Bethan” in this situation—and has been a real champion on this issue. In this particular case, a man who was convicted of raping a relative who was a child still has parental responsibility for his own child. That cannot be acceptable. Again, this feels like a piece of legislation where, at some point, we just failed to address this one issue. I hope, therefore, that this can be seen as a defect in the legislation that we all agree should be corrected.

New clause 12 is a relatively simple amendment to the Modern Slavery Act 2015, but it reflects a phenomenon that we simply did not know about when we introduced the Act 10 years ago. As the Minister on the Bill, I remember going through many definitions of what constituted trafficking and exploitation, but, at the time, the phenomenon of orphanage trafficking was simply not known. That may be a shock to some in this Chamber, because there is such awareness of the issue in Australia and New Zealand but we simply do not know about it here.