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Plenary, 28 Feb 2007

28 Feb 2007 · S2 · Plenary

Item of business

Prostitution (Public Places) (Scotland) Bill

MacDonald, Margo Ind Lothians Watch on SPTV

The bill should be quietly voted down. The Executive admits that the bill in front of us is radically different from the one bearing the same name, introduced last year and based on the report produced by the expert group convened by Sandra Hood. The group produced a balanced, sensible approach to the management of street prostitution. It was even-handed in exercising a duty of care towards vulnerable sex workers and towards the general community, particularly those people whose privacy or sense of well-being and security is adversely affected by the behaviour of either the buyers or the sellers of sex. I put that on record because that was the original intention—certainly, my original intention—but as I have only two minutes, I must answer some of the points that have been made.

The Hood group report also advised that the Executive should require councils to produce a local plan to ensure that support and services were accessible for street sex workers, including advice and help to exit prostitution. That would have allowed the councils in Aberdeen, Glasgow, Edinburgh and Dundee, in partnership with the police, health authorities, voluntary organisations representing sex workers, drugs services and residents, to produce a local plan to manage prostitution according to the different situations in our four big cities.

David McLetchie said that that would simply institutionalise prostitution. I think not. We had a tolerance zone, as it was called, in Edinburgh for almost 20 years and it did not institutionalise prostitution. We can point to statistics that show that the number of prostitutes working on the streets in Edinburgh fell during the period of the tolerance zone. The same cannot be done in Glasgow, where Routes Out is quoted as providing instances of best practice. Yesterday, my office tried to obtain up-to-date statistics from Routes Out on how many women had exited prostitution using the money that had already been made available by a previous minister. As always, we were given no figures at all.

Therefore, although I welcome the proposed funding, I am concerned about how the money that is going to be spent on helping vulnerable women will be apportioned and how the services will be delivered. I ask the minister to take into account what Ewan Aitken, the leader of the City of Edinburgh Council, said this week. He said that it is better to manage prostitution in a humane and sensible way, trying to moderate the harm that is done by it, than to adopt the sort of measures that are proposed in the bill.

I am convinced that we will put the safety of the women in jeopardy by driving prostitution underground. The examples in England show that violence has risen in areas where strict kerb-crawling measures have been introduced. It is not that I oppose measures against kerb crawling, but the bill does not meet the needs as regards how kerb crawling is affected by changes such as those that are proposed. I ask members not to pass further bad legislation today, but to vote against the bill.

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Plenary, 28 Feb 2007

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