Chamber and committees

So the law works even if you do not enforce it. However, if you rigorously enforce it, as they have done in Sweden and France, it will work extremely well.

Absolutely. The committee might want to have a look at Ipswich. The committee will probably be aware that, a few years ago, there was a spate of murders of women working in prostitution in Ipswich. The local community came together and decided on a particular approach in an attempt to get a grip on what was happening. By using existing kerb-crawling laws and working with the police, they made the deterrent effect so strong that they eliminated street prostitution altogether—they simply got rid of it.

There was also a cost saving to that. There is a report that estimates that, for every £1 that was spent on that, the local area saved £2. We believe that a law of the type that I am proposing would eventually—not initially, because there would be set-up costs—result in a saving. We think that the costs would peak in the medium term—about four or five years after the law came into effect. However, after 10 years, once the trafficking and the prostitution market had gone down, the number of people seeking support—it is very expensive for the state to provide that support—would, we expect, have reduced, because that is what we have seen in other countries.

Ipswich is a great example for people to look at. However, you are right. Because of the nature of modern prostitution, the kerb-crawling laws are no use to the police—they have told me that. We have had conversations with the police—in particular, officers who specialise in sexual crimes—and they have expressed their frustration about the fact that, when they go into a premises, they find people who are clearly victims, who are sometimes people who have been trafficked, but they simply have to let the punters walk past them, because they cannot do anything. I sense that the police would like to have additional powers so that they could do something about that.

On policing, the commission on the sex buyer law submitted a report in 2016 to the then all-party parliamentary group on prostitution and the global sex trade in 2016 entitled “How to implement the Sex Buyer Law in the UK”, which the committee might want to look at. The commission looked at the law that applies in England and Wales. I think that it included a serving police officer and a former police officer. The report looked at the law in Sweden and considered what applicable powers and structures would be needed in a UK context. It concluded that a

“standard four-step enforcement operation ... would be consistent with existing policing powers.”

I will go through the four steps. First, police officers locate the premises that are used for prostitution. Secondly, they confirm that prostitution is taking place. To do that, they might contact the premises either in person or by phone. That is done covertly in Sweden, but it does not have to be. Thirdly, they observe—they watch the buyers going in. Fourthly, they take action.

Therefore, how the buying of sex would be policed would be very similar to how the police enforce the existing kerb-crawling legislation, which is to go to the area where the offences are taking place, observe and then make arrests.

When I spoke to the Swedish police about their approach, they explained to me that, in Stockholm, they have dedicated police who are working on prostitution. I cannot remember how many of those officers there were—I think that it was three. When they are in the office, they will visit adult websites, where they see adverts for sex. They phone or text the numbers and make an arrangement to purchase sex. After that, they usually get a message back that includes not a full address but an apartment block. The police wait outside the apartment block and then message to say that they are there, which is when they will be given the apartment number. At that point, they can go into the apartment. However, they might not do that; they might observe the sex buyers going past and then they can choose to take action at that point.

A constituent of mine wrote to me—I think that it was just last week—to say that two of the 16 apartments where she lives are being used for prostitution. When she is in the garden with her grandchildren, she watches a steady stream of sex buyers walking up the stairwell.

It is not difficult to find people buying sex. I believe that the police would tell you that, if the bill is passed, they will enforce the new offence in the same way that they do for kerb crawling.

It does.

Sure. I will send that to the committee.

This is a table that we have created, which shows rates of people in prostitution by legislative framework from 2006 to 2014. I will read those out to you. Obviously, countries have different-sized populations, so the rate is per 100,000 people. Sweden’s rates of prostitution per 100,000 are 6.6 to 15.4, and the Republic of Ireland’s rates are 16 to 20. We can contrast those with countries that have a different model, which we can go into later. Germany has a legalisation model and its rates per 100,000 are 185 to 493; in the Netherlands the rate is 147 and in New Zealand it is 183. It could not be starker. I will make a note to circulate the table to the committee, because the data clearly illustrates what we are discussing.

Thank you for the opportunity to speak to the committee and discuss what is in the bill. As is probably evident from who has come with me to support me this morning, I have done this bill by myself, with my staff team. I have not been supported by the non-Government bills unit. You will also know that there is nobody from the legal side of things here, so we will not be able to answer any technical questions on drafting. However, we could take those away and come back to the committee on them. With that said, I move on to my opening remarks.

Prostitution is not a theoretical debate. It is not an abstract discussion about frameworks or personal liberty. It is happening right now in our cities and towns to real women—women who are poor, addicted, traumatised and trafficked. We should not look away from that. Last October, I met a Canadian survivor, Valérie Pelletier, who told me that disassociation is not a work skill, but it is required in prostitution. That is not a job; it is the paid performance of compliance. It demands that women fake arousal, endure unwanted penetration and shut down their pain so that men can forget that they are doing harm.

This is not about sex; this is about male entitlement—the belief that sexual urges deserve infrastructure, tolerance and access to women’s bodies. That belief harms not only the women in prostitution but all women. As Andrea Dworkin said,

“The difference between women in prostitution and all other women ... is merely one of degree. Because as long as some women are for sale, all women are buyable”

and, when women are for sale or buyable, equality is impossible.

The Scottish Government’s equally safe strategy says that prostitution is a form of “commercial sexual exploitation”, and that it has no place in modern Scotland. The Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women urges states to reduce demand, and the Council of Europe says that prostitution is incompatible with gender equality.

Front-line services such as the Encompass Network and Routes Out in Glasgow confirm the harm. They say that it is not a choice; it is survival. However, our laws have not kept up. Prostitution is no longer happening only on street corners and in brothels; it is on smartphones, online and streamlined. Women are sold and reviewed like takeaway meals.

The current law, which covers soliciting, kerb crawling and brothel keeping, targets only yesterday’s industry. Today, exploiters operate behind screens. The victims are still unsupported; they are hidden in plain sight—often we do not see them.

While the harm continues, we face a well-funded, globally connected lobby that markets prostitution as “sex work”. It reframes abuse as empowerment, poverty as consent and violence as a career path, but it never explains whose daughter this is a job for. Should prostitution be in schools’ career advice? Should it be in the Department for Work and Pension’s back-to-work scheme? What does the Health and Safety Executive consider a safe working environment in prostitution? When a punter violates terms during the act, who manages the employment dispute? Those are not rhetorical questions; they are the logical consequences of pretending that commercial sexual exploitation is just another industry and that prostitution is just another job.

The law already knows the truth. In Smart v HM Advocate in 1975, the High Court said that a person is not entitled to consent to their own injury. Payment does not make abuse legal. Tolerating abuse is not neutrality—it is complicity. States must never legitimise violence against women.

UK Feminista’s Kat Banyard, who is on the secretariat of Westminster’s all-party parliamentary group on commercial sexual exploitation, said that the definition of a “pimp state” includes those in which Governments enable and take a cut from the commercial sex industry by licensing brothels operating in plain sight in our capital city or by taxing the owners. Local authorities have to pick up the cost of supporting those who are broken by an industry that commodifies women’s and girls’ bodies.

My bill adopts the Nordic model; it would criminalise the buyer and not those who are exploited; it would give women a statutory right to support to exit the industry; and it says clearly that, in Scotland, sex is not for sale. Sweden, France, Ireland, Norway, Northern Ireland and other countries support that, so why not Scotland? This is not a tidy policy issue. It is the raw reality of being raped for money over and over again.

Scotland already recognises in four other acts that prostitution is harmful. My bill provides the final piece to complete the jigsaw on prostitution law in 2025 by making a clear legal distinction between exploiters and those who are exploited, and by reframing the criminality and shame of commercial sexual exploitation.

The Scottish Government has a current strategy for prostitution. I am sure that the committee has probably looked at that during the past year or so. My view is that the Scottish Government’s strategy supports the bill’s core aims. As I set out in my opening statement, my bill is about taking further action to close the gap and bring it all together.

The Scottish Government’s equally safe strategy, which is a joint strategy with the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities, recognises prostitution as violence against women. If we recognise prostitution as violence against women, I believe that the onus is on the Parliament or the Government—and, unfortunately, progress on the issue has been too slow—to update the law to reflect the fact that the reality of prostitution has changed, as I set out in my opening statement.

Police Scotland is able to use laws to combat prostitution, and it does. The committee will no doubt be aware of operation begonia. Although that is quite an old operation that has been going for some years now, the Government has reinvigorated it recently, and it is very effective—the law on kerb crawling is effective.

I fully admit that the data on this is sketchy. Most of us around this table are old enough to remember when most prostitution was on the street and was very visible. We still have on-street prostitution, which operation begonia can target—and rightfully does target—but most estimates say that 90 per cent of prostitution is now indoors. My suggestion is that we update the law to give the police the tools that they need to target that, and to send the message that that type of exploitation is not appropriate in Scotland.

I think that you had a further question about support services.

It was called the Post Office (Horizon System) Offences Act 2024.

There was a lot in that. I have written down about five different points.

First, I need to be very clear: the international evidence presents an extremely compelling and consistent case that, if you bring in laws in the style of the Nordic model, you will reduce the market for prostitution, which will mean that fewer women are drawn into it to be harmed—we know that it is inherently harmful—and you will reduce the trafficking inflows to your country.

Doing so will not make prostitution safe. No law can do that, because prostitution is not safe. On the data that we have on that, a US study says that those who work in prostitution are 18 times more likely to be murdered than the general population. Prostitution is just inherently harmful. I think that I answered that question using the French example about the safety level. Nothing about the bill will make anybody less safe than they are now. That covers the evidence.

When it comes to the internet, you are right. A few years ago—more than a few years; a few decades ago—it was all about on-street prostitution. The police in Scotland knew where the red-light districts were. They could go there and, periodically, make arrests or whatever. If you were a pimp running several exploited persons, it was fairly high risk; you had to wait for buyers to come along, then you or they might get arrested.

Now, everything is so anonymous that pimps can run hundreds of adverts at very little cost and with no possibility of their arrest. That situation has also increased the number of clients that a prostituted person can see in one day. It makes the whole transaction very low risk to the pimps and much more lucrative. You are right: it has created that perfect storm, if you like.

To go back to the safety comment, there is a myth that, somehow, out there, there is a “good” sex buyer. Good men do not buy sex. That is a myth. Just a couple of weeks ago, I was reading about the Emma Caldwell case—about which the committee will, no doubt, be aware—which is going to inquiry. One of the women who worked on the street in prostitution alongside Emma said that she had seen that buyer many times. There are often examples of buyers who behave normally and are not violent and abusive during one visit but become violent and abusive on a different visit.

Some people talk about the idea of screening time, which would allow you to check out who the buyers are, but I would say that the reality does not quite meet up with what they are suggesting. We know that buyers routinely use fake names, burner phones and encryption apps—they do not want to be caught or to have to give out their full identity. The reality is that there is not a lot of screening time.

I have also spoken to women who have worked in Edinburgh brothels, and they told me that a buyer will appear and go to one of the people who is working in that brothel at that time. Those people do not have an ability to refuse the client. Despite this idea about screening, there is no screening. The punters arrive, and somebody will see them.

A lot of people here work on criminal justice in relation to violence against women, and we know that, in other settings, it can be very difficult to assess which men are going to be a problem, because they do not have “dangerous man” stamped across their forehead. We use risk assessment tools and so on. We have single-sex spaces for that purpose, so that we can, quite rightly, keep vulnerable women safe in some circumstances. Even trained professionals will struggle to identify a risky man. I do not think that there is a possibility to screen and to try to identify a good punter in a system that is so inherently dangerous.

I think that I have answered the questions. Were there any points that I did not cover?

It will, because all the international evidence sets out a very clear and compelling case. The international evidence shows that, if you pass the bill and enforce it appropriately, you will see a reduction in the influx of trafficked people. We know that that is the case.

Ireland has issues with enforcement. Maren Schroeder has found the correct page in the briefing, so she can give us more detail on that. The issue is not the legislative framework, so the situation is exactly the same as what we have seen in Northern Ireland, which we discussed with the convener. The legislation in Ireland is having an effect, but it is not having as much of an effect as it would do if it were rigorously enforced.

To come back to the statistics that I gave you earlier about the make-up of the people who are in prostitution, 60 per cent do not choose it; they are trafficked. They do not decide to traffic themselves on to a boat to Italy or other parts of Europe; they are sold or coerced into being trafficked. In some cases, they are forcibly taken from their home countries, stuck in the back of a transport vehicle and brought here to service the demand.

Yes. For those in the committee who do not know, I have been working and researching in this area for probably more than a decade. I was working as a volunteer on the issue before I got elected. When I got elected, I was about to do a member’s bill on the same topic in 2018, and then I got made a minister. I was then made a minister in this area of law, so I thought, “Okay, that’s great—I will be able to do this as a minister”. Some of the front-line services that work in this area and I thought that that approach might be more appropriate, because, if you think about it, this piece of legislation directly takes on serious organised crime. It would be good for the Government, with all the support that it has around it, to do that; however, that is not where we are. I was not able to progress the bill when I was a minister for various reasons; I have done it at the first possible opportunity after leaving Government.

We have been engaging with the Government extensively. I have been meeting the minister who is responsible for this area every couple of months or so. I update her on progress. We meet regularly, and we continue to talk about the bill. We met most recently on Thursday last week. Last week’s meeting was to hear from the Government about what issues it might have with the provisions of the bill, and I believe that the minister set that out in her letter to the committee.

Once we get to the point of amendments, the Parliament will provide us with drafting services. If the Government and I agree on amendments, I would be happy for the Government to draft them.