Chamber and committees

We are aware of the findings of the cross-party group’s report, which follows its inquiry into websites that host adverts for sexual exploitation. We have previously written to the online platforms, including Vivastreet, to make our concerns clear and help to ensure that people are protected from exploitation. We will continue to develop policy in that area as part of our on-going engagement with the United Kingdom online safety bill, and as part of our work to develop a model for Scotland that challenges men’s demand for prostitution.

Last week, we published in the programme for government the Scottish Government’s commitment to develop a model that effectively tackles men’s demand for prostitution. We will progress that in this parliamentary term. Due to the complexities of the issue, we require to assess not only the legislative needs of our chosen model but the support that is available for those who are involved in prostitution. We will be commissioning a programme of lived experience engagement to further inform the work.

Many countries have adopted a challenging demand model from which we can learn, and we are working on a comprehensive international review to develop our evidence base and understand key challenges and common principles applied across the approaches.

I know that the member shares my resolve to get this right and supports our overarching aspirations to embed equality and human rights in Scotland.

The consultation highlighted that we need to do more to ensure that women are able to access appropriate support services that can meet their needs. We know that services, including those that help people exit prostitution, are inconsistent across Scotland, and our aim is to address that. As part of that work, I am clear that we need to involve the voices of those involved in prostitution in the design of the services that affect them.

I think that it is. We are always cognisant of the potential for things to be used in that way. May I give that a bit of thought and come back to you?

You have hit the nail on the head—there is quite a polarity of opinions in that area and that is one of the reasons why, as I said, taking a little bit of time to see whether we can build consensus on the issue might be a good way forward. There is probably consensus in a couple of areas. Almost everybody agrees that we should decriminalise the seller—there is good consensus there, and we should absolutely do that. It is also important that support services are designed to reflect the priorities of women, because it is mainly women and girls who have been exploited in prostitution. We must prioritise that service design and make sure that the services are there and are easy to access—that is another area where there is probably a lot of consensus.

I am very interested in listening to the voices of people who have been involved in prostitution. Some committee members will probably be aware that, yesterday, a survivor-led organisation called on the Government to look at that area and see what more we could do. We should all listen to those voices, but there can sometimes be a problem with that. Sometimes, people who have worked in prostitution do not want to sit in a Scottish Government focus group and talk about all the ways that they were traumatised, or even admit to the fact that they have worked in prostitution, so that can be an issue. There are challenges around doing that work, but I am determined that we will try to get those voices in here somehow. We are developing a programme for lived experience engagement, which we will work on over the next year or so. I am happy to engage further with Maggie Chapman if she wants to contribute to that work.

With regard to harm reduction, we reduce the harm if we reduce the number of people who are being trafficked into the market of prostitution. The data shows that trafficking inflows are much lower in countries that challenge men’s demand to purchase sex, so we have a duty to take note of that. We also have international commitments that we need to make good on in Scotland and move towards. I think that we all want the same things—to reduce harms, protect women and girls from that exploitation and promote equality. That is the starting point that I am working from. I do not know whether our proposals will come to this or another committee but I hope that we can work together to achieve those aims.

You have alluded to a certain issue. The Roberton report was published quite a few years ago—in 2018, I think. It was quite a wide-ranging report, and it suggested some quite revolutionary changes to the legal system. The idea would be that we would move to a different model. It is fair to say that the main recommendation of the report was not well received by many of the stakeholders—I think that that was clear.

We have consulted on the recommendations and have worked very hard to build consensus. We have worked with all the stakeholders to see where there might be a way forward. We will consult on a number of different models in the autumn. That will give everyone an opportunity to see the kind of things that we are laying out and give their views on them.

We are trying to improve things for consumers. We want to give that issue a bit more focus. However, we also accept that members of the legal profession are important to what we are trying to do. We want to ensure that we put forward a system or model that everyone can work with and be happy with.

Denise Swanson can give a bit more information on that.

Attempts to reform succession law have been going on for about 35 years now. The situation is a bit like the one that we have just discussed, in that it is quite complicated and technical with not a lot of consensus on how we should proceed. In the last consultation, we noted a couple of areas of consensus, such as on prohibiting someone convicted of murder from acting as an executor of their victim’s estate and reviewing the small estate limits. We are definitely considering such reforms and will perhaps progress them ahead of more fundamental reform, given the lack of consensus on the broader terms of that kind of reform.

We are doing further research on public attitudes to the matter, and perhaps Denise Swanson can say a little bit more about that. I cannot really give you a timescale, because we are still trying to find a legislative vehicle to take it forward, but that is where we are.

My understanding is that we do not have a date for when that convention might come in. We are in unknown territory just now.

First, I will give a bit of context around legal aid. We hear quite a lot about the problems with legal aid, so I want, for the committee’s benefit, to set out a couple of the positives about legal aid in Scotland. The committee might not be aware that 72 per cent of the population of Scotland are eligible for legal aid. We are a leading jurisdiction on legal aid—we are one of only two jurisdictions that have a completely uncapped fund that is entirely demand led; only Scotland and the Netherlands operate such a system. The system is working for the people of Scotland, but we want to modernise it and provide a bit more flexibility. As we discussed earlier, we want to be able to direct aid more than we have previously.

I suppose that there is a way of thinking about legal aid that is more like how we think about other public services, because it is a kind of public service. Should we try to reframe legal aid in that way and, potentially, put the user more at the centre of how it is accessed and how the system is set up in the future?

We have talked about the timings; Denise Swanson will talk a bit about themes that came through the consultation. However, I believe that, in general, people are looking for a user-centred system that is easier to access and use.

Last year, we published what I think was a first: a consultation on what sort of approach we should take to tackle prostitution in Scotland, with an emphasis on challenging men’s demand for prostitution and with the aim of working to reduce the harms and supporting women to exit, should they wish to do so. We received about 4,000 consultation responses, which is quite a lot. Some were from organisations and some were from individuals.

The responses have been published, so members of the committee are free to have a look at them. It would be fair to say that they were evenly split. We did not ask whether we should change the law on prostitution, but lots of people wrote in to say that they favoured one criminal approach or another. Lots of people supported the Nordic model, in which the seller is decriminalised and the buyer is criminalised, such as is done in Sweden and a number of other countries in Europe. There was an approximately equal level of support for what is called the decriminalisation model—the sort of thing that is being done in New Zealand.

The committee may be aware of the Scottish Government’s equally safe strategy, which sets out that commercial sexual exploitation, of which prostitution is a part, is a type of violence against women. If we want an equal society in Scotland, we need to think about how women and girls should be treated. I am particularly interested in making Scotland a hostile place for sex traffickers. I will not beat about the bush: I am really keen that we set that out, and we are very firm on that. To my mind, challenging demand for prostitution is one of the ways to do that.

I know that this is a long answer to your question. We will develop a model for Scotland that contains an element of challenging demand, but we have not got to the point where we can set out exactly what that model will be. We have quite a bit of road ahead of us, and I do not anticipate that our bill will be introduced imminently. However, there is a lot of potential to think about how we want women and girls to be treated in a modern Scotland.