Crime and Policing Bill

Baroness Featherstone Excerpts

Tuesday 9th December 2025 Lords Chamber

We cannot in conscience allow this to continue. Camming sites such as OnlyFans are profiting from trafficking, exploitation and violence against women and girls. Women are not commodities to be bought and sold. They are living, breathing human beings. As well as my Amendments 316A and 316B, I support those in the name of my noble friend Lady Goudie.

[Baroness Featherstone (LD)]

My Lords, I speak against Amendment 310 on the prohibition of pimping. According to the Member’s explanatory statement, it would

“make it a criminal offence to enable or profit from the prostitution of another person, including by operating a website hosting adverts for prostitution”.

Specifically, the amendment would create the offence of assisting or facilitating another person to engage in sexual activity with another person in exchange for payment or other benefit, where the assister or facilitator knows or ought to know that payment for sexual activity is taking place, whether or not the person assisting or facilitating gains in any way. It would also criminalise the publishing or display of any digital advertisement for sexual activity.

The amendment conflates consensual sex work with sexual exploitation and trafficking. Adopting it would cause significant harm to sex workers. In seeking to criminalise those who facilitate the exploitation of victims of forced prostitution, which is already a crime, it would instead make sex workers’ lives more difficult and dangerous by removing their ability to advertise their services online and seek assistance or support from others in carrying out their services.

I will take those two separate elements in turn. First, on criminalising those who assist or facilitate another person engaging in sexual activity for payment where the assister or facilitator knows or ought to know that such activity is taking place, the impact of this would be disastrous for sex workers and the organisations that support them. It would mean that anybody acting to help sex workers work safely, including safety service operators such as National Ugly Mugs, would be guilty of an offence. I am sure that the intention of Amendment 310 was not to catch that, but it does.

I launched National Ugly Mugs when I was a Home Office Minister to reduce the violence that sex workers experience. The principle behind the scheme was not controversial. When a sex worker experiences violence or a threat, they can report it anonymously online. Other sex workers are therefore warned about a dodgy punter. That information, often the only line of defence, has saved lives, prevented repeated attacks and encouraged people who would never otherwise go to the police to start trusting them again. The ability to post online about a dangerous client is invaluable but would be caught by Amendment 310.

Since I launched it in 2012, National Ugly Mugs has disseminated more than 1.17 million alerts to sex workers warning of risks. Whatever one’s view of prostitution, no one should be assaulted, raped or murdered for the work they do. National Ugly Mugs was never about endorsing prostitution. It was about reducing harm and preventing homicide. The evidence is clear that where harm reduction schemes exist, sex workers are better able to report violence, share intelligence and access justice. Where they are removed, people go underground and the violence gets worse, not better.

The argument often put forward is that the Nordic or buyer criminalisation model would make the scheme unnecessary. But if you look honestly at the evidence from Sweden, Norway and France, you will see that violence did not disappear. It went into the shadows and underground. Sex workers in those countries report being more isolated, less able to screen clients and more fearful of the police. We should not repeat those mistakes here. It is a dangerous illusion to think that by abolishing the tools that keep people safe, we abolish the reality of prostitution. We do not. We simply make it more dangerous.

Amendment 310 would also criminalise family members and the extended support networks that many sex workers rely on in order to carry out their sex work, and it would criminalise the many sex workers who support other sex workers in carrying out their services. It would criminalise any business—such as banks, mobile phone providers, taxi services or web hosting providers—that knew or ought to know that it was providing services to sex workers and was thereby assisting them in carrying out their activities.

Sex workers are already among the most discriminated-against groups in the UK, suffering appalling stigma. To take just one of the examples set out above, the Financial Conduct Authority recently warned financial institutions not to close the bank accounts of those they suspect or know are carrying out sex work because of the significant harm caused by doing so. Providing a sex worker with a bank account enables them to receive payment for sexual services, and this would clearly be caught by the Bill because it is facilitating or assisting the sex worker in carrying out their work.

The amendment would compel banks to close sex workers’ accounts and would perpetuate such harm. The net result of the amendment would be to shut sex workers out of the economy and prevent them accessing the services and support they need to work safely, pushing them into more dangerous and more difficult working environments. The displacement of sex workers away from the support services they rely on would make it more difficult for sex workers to survive and make it more challenging for those who care about and serve those communities to locate and to help them.

My second issue is the move to criminalise the publishing or display of any advertisement for sexual activity. This section of the amendment seeks to criminalise the operations of the adult service websites, ASWs, and make it impossible for sex workers to advertise online. In the modern world, most sex workers do use adult service websites to advertise their services, and working in that way means that sex workers remain in control of the services they offer and the environment in which they work, and can take steps to screen the clients they are planning to meet in advance of doing so. For example, they can take ID information and/or prepayment, and use online checking tools such as the National Ugly Mugs scheme, which I launched, to see whether the phone number or email address contacting them has previously been linked to violent or abusive behaviour.

Supporters of the amendment will argue that because traffickers also attempt to use these platforms to advertise those they are criminally exploiting, they should be outlawed. However, outlawing the means for sex workers to advertise would not remove the sex workers themselves. They would instead be forced to adopt new approaches to sourcing clients, and that would have four main effects.

First, as evidenced by outcomes in other countries, online advertising for sex work would still exist but in a different form. Rather than sex workers advertising themselves openly as providing sexual services, they would instead advertise non-sexual companionship or massage services in such a way as to give the website proprietor grounds to demonstrate that they do not know that sexual activities are being advertised. This would make it harder to identify and provide outreach and support to those who are, in reality, carrying out sex work, and harder for law enforcement to screen adverts and assess risk.

Secondly, it would mean that advertising would be pushed to less visible areas of the internet, such as private messaging groups, social media and the dark web, where it would be out of sight of law enforcement and those seeking to provide support services to sex workers. UK national policing agencies have made clear that for this reason they do not support the outlawing of adult sex websites.

Thirdly, some ASWs would instead move offshore and carry on business out of reach of UK policing. They would also stop providing evidential materials to UK law enforcement, making it harder for police to investigate and prosecute genuine cases.

Fourthly, it would increase the levels of danger facing sex workers by forcing them off the internet and on to the streets. On-street work is universally acknowledged as being far more dangerous than online. In this scenario, sex buyers would hold all the power in negotiations and those who seek to harm sex workers would have greater opportunities to do so.