Criminal Justice Committee 26 November 2025 [Draft]
The bill has been drafted differently—in fact, we spent quite a bit of time, in drafting it, looking at the drafting of various other pieces of legislation. In the original drafting, we had the offence drafted as it is drafted in the Northern Ireland legislation, and then we looked at the conviction rates. We also took note of the Irish review, which included a review of the way in which Ireland’s legislation had been drafted. Ireland has said that it now recognises that it has issues with the drafting of its legislation. When we drafted the bill, we took note of that and we drafted in a different way.
As I explained in a previous answer, we have included the reasonable inference test. I have sat down with the Lord Advocate, who is the head of prosecutions in Scotland. She read the description of the offence, and she said to me that there is nothing wrong with how the offence has been drafted, and that it is enforceable.
There have been issues with enforcement; I am sure that, if the committee had somebody here from Northern Ireland, they would say that. I have not been to Northern Ireland for some time—I went over there in 2017 and I spoke to the Advocate Attorney General—it was John Larkin at that time. At that point, the law had been in force for only a very short period of time, and he admitted to me that they were having issues with enforcement. Ruth Breslin, when she spoke about the Irish experience, said the same thing: they recognise that they are having trouble with enforcement.
09:30Other countries are not having trouble with enforcement. The latest statistics that I saw from France, which has not had the law in place for nearly as long as Sweden has, show that it has convicted 5,000 men. I know that France is a large country in comparison with Ireland and Scotland, so the context is different, but it shows us that enforcement of these offences is possible.
It can be an iterative approach. Ireland is looking at how it is enforcing the law and at ways to change it to make it better. Sweden has been on a very long journey, during which it has changed the way in which it enforces its legislation. I have been to Sweden and spoken to its prosecutors and its police forces, and to its anti-trafficking commissioner. I spent several days in Sweden looking at the situation with my own eyes. The police told me that, when they first started to enforce the law, they were using a surveillance approach. They would find the adverts online, go to the location and observe, and then, when the men were coming out, they would arrest them.
That is obviously a different context, but because of the way in which the culture has changed as a result of the law, there was an interesting public discussion. The public were saying, “Hang on a minute—if we think that this is violence against women and a crime is being committed here, why are the police waiting for the crime to be committed before they take action?” The police in Sweden have now changed how they police. They have moved from the surveillance model to what they would describe as a welfare model. That is very similar to the way in which Police Scotland police prostitution, and the convictions have gone up—