Criminal Justice Committee 26 November 2025 [Draft]
Thank you, convener. I want to put on record my thanks to the committee for the scrutiny that it has undertaken on the bill. I have listened very carefully to every witness and read every submission that has been made; no voice has been ignored.
I welcome the Minister for Victims and Community Safety’s clear statement that the Scottish Government strongly supports the principle of legislating for the criminalisation of the purchase of sex. It is a significant moment for the Government, more than a decade on from the equally safe strategy, and for the public, whose views now firmly align with the principle at the heart of the bill.
I thank the Law Society of Scotland and the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service for their constructive support and all the stakeholders with whom I have had engagement. I remain fully committed to working with the committee and other Parliament colleagues to amend the bill to address the concerns that have been raised during stage 1 scrutiny.
Committee scrutiny and consultation have revealed that there is substantial common ground, and even those who are opposed to criminalising buyers support the bill’s three other pillars of decriminalising sellers, the right to support and pardoning previous solicitation offences.
Tackling prostitution is only complex until we acknowledge the silent presence in every discussion: the sex buyer. Prostitution is not empowerment; it is exploitation and violence, and exploitation must never be acceptable in law or society. In 1999, Sweden criminalised the purchase of sex, and it now has the lowest number of women involved in prostitution and the lowest number of men buying sex in Europe. Scotland now has an opportunity to learn from Sweden and the many nations that followed its lead in continuously adapting to counter an ever-shifting global sex industry.
The unbuyable bill reflects the lessons learned from operation begonia and brings forward a clear principle: challenge the root cause, which is the demand to buy sex. The Crown Office has been clear that tackling sex buyers is in the public interest; it is already known that many commit other offences, including rape and domestic abuse. The bill will align the law with justice, public expectation and current policing practice. Its aim is simple but profound: to place criminal consequences on exploiters while removing criminal barriers that continue to harm the victims, and to support those in prostitution to move on with their lives.
The bill cannot wait. Against the backdrop of a multibillion-pound global sex trade that never stops marketing and exploiting, prostitution is driven by demand, and it targets women and children in what is now the world’s third-largest criminal marketplace after drugs and the arms trade.
Trafficking is a global scourge on humans. Last year, in Scotland, 78 per cent of those who were identified by the national referral mechanism as being trafficked with a sexual element were female; 36 of them were children. However, those figures are only the tip of the iceberg.
Vulnerable women and children in Scotland have waited long enough. As with rape law and domestic abuse law, criminalisation is the right decision, even though it is challenging. Criminalising sex buying is the right decision now, because doing nothing is in itself a decision—one that allows exploitation to continue unhindered.
The evidence points to one fundamental question: is prostitution a job like any other, or is it exploitation of the vulnerable? I think that we already know the answer, so now is the time to act. Sex buyers exploit vulnerability openly, in their own words, on review websites where women and girls are rated like products. We know the severe physical and psychological harm that is caused, and we know that those who claim that they choose prostitution do not speak for the majority—those who have no choice and no agency.
Buyers rarely ask whether a woman is safe, coerced or trafficked, or if she is a child. They only ask whether she is available. That is why the unbuyable bill is so necessary and urgent. Until the law names sex buyers as the problem, the vulnerable will continue to pay the price.