Chamber and committees

Do you think that the principle of independence is important?

The reason for the approach is to make implementing the right as effective as possible; it is not to do with just making your jobs easier or something.

A cynic might worry that the Scottish Government is looking to capitalise on warm words around the bill without delivering the right to food in practice. How would you reassure such a person that there is a serious commitment to having a right to food in Scots law?

The right could also be in the Good Food Nation (Scotland) Bill, if you wanted it to be.

I will not be taking interventions, as the dominant view has already been very well represented in today’s debate.

I thank Ruth Maguire for bringing forward the motion for debate; I believe that her concerns are genuine. However, I am concerned that moves to criminalise online platforms that are used by sex workers will actually increase the risk to their safety. Sex workers themselves have said that they use online platforms to screen clients, improve safety and connect with each other for support. Such platforms also provide greater opportunities for sex workers to access outreach, safety and support services than would likely be the case in unregulated online spaces such as the dark web. That is why I believe it important for any decisions that could affect the safety and livelihoods of sex workers to be taken after meaningful consultation with those in work and to be based on evidence.

The evidence from studies so far shows that the vast majority of sex workers believe that there are benefits to their use of online platforms. The Beyond the Gaze project surveyed sex workers, who agreed that online platforms had improved their safety and their ability to access support and noted that they enabled them to screen clients, engage with sex worker networks and access support services. Crucially, the vast majority of them believed that both advertising sexual services online and purchasing such services should be legal.

What happens when a criminalisation approach is pursued? The US has opted for criminalisation of online platforms through the FOSTA-SESTA law and the End Banking for Human Traffickers Act 2021. Research that was published in the Anti-Trafficking Review found that those laws had increased the financial insecurity of sex workers, with some forced to move offline to work on the streets or through an exploitative third party. The laws have also undermined sex workers’ safety with the loss of web-based harm reduction tools that helped to identify clients with a history of violence.

The result of those laws, therefore, has been to push these workers into more dangerous ways of working, into greater financial insecurity and away from support networks, and they were passed in the face of opposition from workers, anti-trafficking organisations, criminal defence lawyers and LGBT, health and social justice organisations. The approach that has been taken by the US is the clearest example of policy being made in spite of evidence and without meaningful consultation with those affected.

As I have said, if we are serious about supporting people to exit sex work, we have to tackle the underlying material issues that often drive people into sex work in the first place. Some issues such as the lack of employment and education opportunities and inadequate social security provision are long-standing, while others are being worsened by the current cost of living crisis with regard to rent, food prices and heating.

Given such underlying material issues, the criminalisation of online platforms will not help individuals leave sex work. Instead, it will leave sex workers facing greater risks to their safety, drive them into financial insecurity and deny them access to support networks and services. The proposal to criminalise online platforms is based on neither the evidence nor the views of sex workers. We need a new approach, which is why I continue to believe that we should pursue decriminalisation of sex work offline and online.

I conclude with a comment from a sex worker reflecting on the FOSTA-SESTA law, who said:

“It was written to remind”

us

“that our lives are dispensable, we are not protected, our work is unseen and irrelevant, to destabilize our ability to live with any degree of agency”.

I understand that the legislation will allow the Government to subsidise fishers. It is important that the subsidies are pinned to delivering public and environmental outcomes. Examples of those outcomes are in the United Nations sustainable development goal 14, which states:

“By 2020, prohibit certain forms of fisheries subsidies which contribute to overcapacity and overfishing, eliminate subsidies that contribute to illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing and refrain from introducing new such subsidies”.

I feel that Scotland should be leading the way on that issue, but the proposed regulations do not seem to provide for any such conditionality. They provide wide-ranging powers and leave the awarding of subsidy to Scottish ministers’ discretion. In fact, recent rounds of funding have seen money given for new, more powerful engines and bigger nets, without any link back to what that might mean for sustainability. How will the Scottish Government ensure that subsidy that is created using the regulations does not contribute to overcapacity and overfishing, as set out in the UN sustainable development goal 14?

Will you confirm whether the Scottish Government agrees with the principle that subsidies should be linked to public and environmental contributions and improvement?

What is the Scottish Government’s view of how the precautionary principle could be applied in relation to planning applications for aquaculture and other coastal and marine installations, where knowledge and information are incomplete?

Thank you. I have no further questions.

If those initial regulations—this framework—does not include conditionality, I am not sure how the Parliament and members can have faith that that will come later on. How will the Government use the regulations to incentivise a move towards sustainable forms of fishing? Is there any further detail?