Children: Sexual Exploitation

Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville Excerpts

Tuesday 1st February 2011 Grand Committee

[Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville]

My Lords, there are nine working days in your Lordships’ House in the first 15 days in February. On two-thirds of those nine days, the first Oral Question is in the name of one of the right reverend Prelates on the Bishops’ Bench. I do not know whether it is a convention of your Lordships’ House that the Bench of Bishops always takes the top of the Order Paper if a right reverend Prelate has a Question to ask or whether that is an index of the enthusiasm of right reverend Prelates straining like greyhounds in the slips to be the first away. On top of that, on Thursday the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Chester has the first two-and-a-half-hour debate, which is on the role of marriage and marriage support.

This episcopal procession is led today by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leicester, with his Question for Short Debate, which is itself a harbinger of the similar top Oral Question to be posed on 10 February by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Ripon and Leeds. We are all in the debt of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leicester for having triggered all this activity and for the skill with which he has launched it. Having used more than a third of my allotted span with this willing obeisance to the Bishops’ Bench, I shall use the final strait to make one observation and to ask one question.

My observation is that, when these matters were brought dramatically to public attention and general concern by a series of articles in the Times, the thought was aired that the police had been inhibited from raising the profile of these matters for fear that they would be liable to charges of racism. I can understand that inhibition. I had to ponder a similar dilemma more than 50 years ago, although in a different context and to a different degree. I chose then to make indiscretion the better part of valour. However, I hope that the climate will have been so changed by recent developments that this inhibition will be lifted. I share the views of my noble friend Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts, as a consequence of eight years as president of St Andrew’s Youth Club, half a mile from this Palace, whose reputation is that oxymoron, “the oldest youth club in the world”.

There are lots of questions that one could ask, but, in a debate of short speeches, my noble friend the Minister is liable to be reduced to a St Sebastianic barrage of questions and one must not be self-indulgent. Mine relates to trafficked girls, an issue that has already been mentioned. I am aware of the Christian organisation thus concerned that goes under the name of Chaste—for the benefit of the Hansard writer, I spell that title with “te” rather than “ed”—but how far is the fact that prostitution among such girls is a criminal offence at the specified age an obstacle to the resolution of such traffic?