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As I said earlier, the bill addresses in-person prostitution only, but it is a good place to start. I will probably not be here in the next parliamentary session, so if we pass the bill into law, which I hope we will, it will be up to the new parliamentarians to continue with the work and look at other ways of working against violence against women and girls in the area of commercial sexual exploitation. I am starting here because it is where we see the greatest amount of harm to women in prostitution and we have the powers to do something about it, which is also important.

I think that the proposed legislation is enforceable. That has been echoed back to me by our justice partners. However, I accept that, if we pass the bill into law, we as a country might have to go on an iterative journey on enforcement, as other countries have done.

I have read that. Was it to do with safety?

It would be up to the Government to decide how it would design and implement that. I have suggested, based on engagement with stakeholders in Scotland, that the cost for support would be about £1 million a year. I suggest to the committee that it would be a case of spend to save: if you spend the money, you will save further money in justice, health, social work and so on over time. We have international examples, too. Ireland spends €1.9 million a year on its support services, which suggests that there are comparable international examples that converge on that amount of money.

It is important that we address the fact that very few support workers are working specifically on the challenges that prostituted women have and are able to work effectively with them. I suggest that it is very important that, in Scotland, we move away from the current fragmented approach to a consistent national picture of support.

The costs are set out in the financial memorandum, but the bill, as primary legislation, is not the appropriate place for the details of a delivery model to be set out. The right thing will be for the Government to set that out in regulations, and the bill gives it the opportunity to do that.

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.

I had a meeting with representatives of National Ugly Mugs. They put that perspective to me, and I asked them to show me the evidence for it, but there is none.

No.

Mr Kerr’s question cuts to the heart of the issue on which the committee is deliberating. I want to be clear on this point: the committee has not been presented with any verifiable evidence that the Nordic model does not work. A lot of statistics have been thrown around, and small samples of qualitative interview data have been presented to the committee, but that is not verifiable, state-level, Government-level research information.

Governments and Parliaments need to make decisions on policy frameworks and legislative approaches based on the evidence. The evidence that is coming from countries that have implemented the model is that, even if the law is changed and not robustly enforced, it will still have some effect. We have seen that in Northern Ireland and in Ireland. Yes, it is not having the full effect that we might anticipate, but it is having some effect. In a moment, I will go on to discuss how we judge whether it is having a good effect.

I know that the committee is concerned that it seems to have been presented with almost completely contradictory pieces of evidence, so we are developing, in the office, a paper that goes through, in extreme detail, all the evidence that has been given to the committee. I am happy to share that with the committee if it would help with your deliberations.

Turning to how we would decide whether the Nordic model is working, I think that there are a number of key issues that we would look for. We would be looking at what happens to demand and to the market size of prostitution; at trafficking inflows; and at culture and attitudes to buying sex. We need to look at those key things. In order for evidence to be verifiable, we need baseline data, and we need to be able to observe trends. That is why I am suggesting that much of the evidence with which the committee has been presented that appears to undermine the Nordic model does not, in fact, undermine it, because that evidence does not address those key things.

We can look at Sweden. After the buyers were criminalised, the share of men paying for sex fell by almost half, and Sweden now has one of the smallest prostitution markets in Europe. That can be contrasted with what we would call commercialised systems, because there is a bit of debate about whether those systems are regulatory models or decriminalisation models. Those models exist in countries such as Germany and Netherlands. They have some of the biggest markets—they have the highest numbers of men who are buying sex and the largest numbers of women who are in prostitution—and the largest trafficking inflows.

I have to say to the committee—it is disturbing to tell you this—that Scotland, under those measures, sits much closer to countries such as Germany and the Netherlands than it does to a country such as Sweden. We might think that our laws on prostitution are perhaps somewhere in the middle of the models, but the data that I am seeing shows that Scotland is much closer to the latter model.

I can give you the rates of people in prostitution by legislative framework. The data has been adjusted for population size, so it is comparable. To give you a starting point, in Sweden, the rate of people in prostitution per 100,000 is between 6.6 and 15 people. We can compare that to Germany, where, per 100,000, it is between 185 and 493 people. I hope that the committee can see the difference there.

I can read out all the other figures, but I expect that the convener will not like it if I do. Just for context, and for the committee’s information, the rate for Scotland, under our current legislative model, is between 108 and 144 per 100,000. When I saw those figures, I have to say that I was shocked. I think that there is definitely a problem in Scotland that we need to address.

I hope that this evidence session will speak to that. I am doing as much engagement with the media as possible, where I continue to try to get the message out. The murder rate in various countries by legislative approach might be illustrative in this respect. In the UK, between 1990 and 2016, 180 women involved in prostitution were murdered. The most widely referenced statistic on the risk of homicide that women in prostitution face concludes that they are 18 times more likely to be murdered than a woman of similar age and race who is not in prostitution—that was from a US study. Twelve of the 180 women in prostitution who were murdered in the UK since 1990 were murdered in Glasgow or the surrounding areas.

I remind the committee that Germany has a commercial model; there are no laws preventing prostitution and it has the largest prostitution market in the whole of Europe. From 2002 to 2017, 75 per cent of the 86 murders of prostituted women in Germany occurred indoors, and many of them were in legal brothels. I just want to put on the record the fact that, under these other models, women are dying—they are being murdered in legal brothels.

Let me clear that up: the sale of sex is not online. We are talking about prostitution, which is separate to talking about porn or OnlyFans, because this is a targeted and narrowly defined bill that is only four and a half pages long and covers only in-person sex acts. That is what the bill covers.

It is right to say that the advertising is online. The bill does not cover that because it is my understanding that regulating that would be a matter reserved to the UK Government, which I know is also looking at this issue. However, my bill is an attempt to make a difference to violence against women and girls in an area in which this Parliament has the power to make a big difference.

It will not make women more unsafe. No evidence has been presented that suggests that the Nordic model makes women more unsafe. That was one of the key notes that I took from Professor Jo Phoenix’s evidence. She has been a researcher and criminologist in this area for more than 30 years, and she said that there was no causal relationship, and no evidence had been presented for it, between the Nordic legislative model and making women more unsafe. I can state that categorically to the committee.

I turn to what we all agree on. People on my side of the argument who want to adopt the Nordic or equality model, and those who suggest that we should be pursuing another model, all agree on one fact: prostitution is inherently dangerous, violent, abusive and exploitative. The reason for that is the behaviour of the buyers, or punters. That is what makes it unsafe. I put it to the committee that, if prostitution is unsafe, dangerous and violent—I will give the committee the murder rates by country in a minute, to illustrate my point—that means that the larger the prostitution market in the country, the more women are going to be dragged into that and harmed, and possibly murdered. The smaller the prostitution market, the smaller the number of women who are going to be harmed.

I will not say to you that you can ever make prostitution safe. You can never, ever make prostitution safe—it is violent and abusive. What you can do, by using the Nordic type of legislative approach, is shrink the market down as much as possible, and the better you enforce the legislation, the smaller your market will be, as we have seen in countries where they follow robust enforcement.