Asked by: Lord Hylton (Crossbench - Excepted Hereditary)
Question to the Attorney General:
To ask Her Majesty's Government, further to the Written Answer by Lord Keen of Elie on 30 July (HL17215), whether it is their policy to prosecute brothel owners and managers when women are removed to detention centres from their premises, in view of the probability of offences of trafficking or slavery.
Answered by Lord Keen of Elie - Shadow Minister (Justice)
It has not proved possible to respond to this question in the time available before Prorogation. Ministers will correspond directly with the Member.
Asked by: Lord Hylton (Crossbench - Excepted Hereditary)
Question to the Attorney General:
To ask Her Majesty's Government how many prosecutions of brothel owners or managers are (1) pending, and (2) completed, following the removal of women from their premises to Yarl's Wood and other detention centres.
Answered by Lord Keen of Elie - Shadow Minister (Justice)
The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) does not maintain a central record of the number of prosecutions of defendants charged with offences of keeping a brothel or of controlling prostitution. This information could only be obtained by a manual examination of CPS case files, which would incur disproportionate cost.
While the CPS does not collect data on defendants prosecuted by specific offence or the outcome of any prosecution, information is available for the number of offences concerning the keeping or management of brothels and controlling prostitution, in which a prosecution commenced at magistrates’ courts. The table below shows the number of these offences recorded on the CPS’s Case Management System in each financial year over the last ten years.
| 2008-2009 | 2009-2010 | 2010-2011 | 2011-2012 | 2012-2013 | 2013-2014 | 2014-2015 | 2015-2016 | 2016-2017 | 2017-2018 |
Sexual Offences Act 1956 { 33 } | 83 | 39 | 48 | 35 | 31 | 19 | 19 | 28 | 24 | 9 |
Sexual Offences Act 1956 { 33A } | 130 | 70 | 106 | 92 | 54 | 31 | 72 | 75 | 63 | 63 |
Sexual Offences Act 2003 { 52 } | 17 | 11 | 24 | 19 | 11 | 9 | 25 | 13 | 7 | 32 |
Sexual Offences Act 2003 { 53 } | 93 | 87 | 87 | 61 | 39 | 49 | 58 | 87 | 92 | 64 |
TOTAL | 323 | 207 | 265 | 207 | 135 | 108 | 174 | 203 | 186 | 168 |
Data Source: CPS Management Information System | ||||||||||
It should be noted that the figures relate to the number of offences and not the number of individual defendants. It is often the case that an individual defendant is charged with more than one offence against the same victim.
Asked by: Lord Hylton (Crossbench - Excepted Hereditary)
Question to the Attorney General:
To ask Her Majesty's Government what information, if any, they have received from North Africa, the Middle East and Europe about successful prosecutions for offences connected with trafficking in persons; and if none, whether they will call for better intelligence sharing about such crimes.
Answered by Lord Keen of Elie - Shadow Minister (Justice)
There is no information held about successful prosecutions for offences connected with trafficking in persons in North Africa, the Middle East and Europe.
However, the UK shares relevant information on organised immigration crime (OIC) with partners in source, transit and destination countries for illegal migration. This takes place both on a bilateral basis and through the European Migrant Smuggling Centre within Europol.
Through the multi-agency Organised Immigration Crime Taskforce, the government is improving the intelligence picture around OIC, modern slavery and human trafficking, undermining the criminal business model and building the capacity of upstream law enforcement partners to tackle the threat.
The police transformation program includes an analytical team, the Joint Slavery and Trafficking Analysis Centre (JSTAC) which is building and developing the strategic intelligence picture by improving data collection and focused analysis of the information gathered. To aid in international dissemination of information, a seconded national expert to Europol to coordinate activity between UK law enforcement and European counterparts during cross-border investigations has been implemented.
Asked by: Lord Hylton (Crossbench - Excepted Hereditary)
Question to the Attorney General:
To ask Her Majesty’s Government how many successful prosecutions for corruption overseas there have been of (1) British companies, and (2) individuals, in the last five years.
Answered by Lord Keen of Elie - Shadow Minister (Justice)
Official data regarding prosecutions are held by the Ministry of Justice, but the department does not record it in a form which allows it to distinguish between overseas bribery and domestic bribery.
Whilst not official data, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) and the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) record data for their own management information purposes. In the last five years, the SFO has successfully prosecuted three British companies and 10 individuals, nine of whom were British citizens, for bribery or corruption overseas (offences under the Bribery Act 2010 or the Prevention of Corruption Act 1906).
In addition to this the SFO has secured three Deferred Prosecution Agreements with British companies in the past two years for overseas corruption offences. The first agreement included a financial penalty of $25m, plus SFO’s full costs; the second resulted in financial orders of £6.6m and the most recent one was for £497.25m plus interest, as well as a payment of the SFO’s full costs.
CPS’s data measures the outcome of prosecutions against defendants but not on the outcome against individual offences. This information could only be obtained by examining CPS case files, which would incur disproportionate cost.