Tracy Gilbert

I wholly agree. In my Edinburgh North and Leith constituency, our local councils want to tackle some of these issues, which is very hard to do without funds. They also want to support and provide services for women who are trying to exit prostitution. I wholeheartedly agree with the points that the hon. Gentleman makes. Since the 2017 inquiry, past and present members of the APPG, along with organisations such as UK Feminista, have consistently and repeatedly called for these platforms to be closed down. Yet, time and again over the years, the response from the Government, the National Crime Agency and the National Police Chiefs’ Council has been the same: pimping websites, which they have referred to as “adult service websites”, are legal and we should continue to allow them to operate. The Government and police have even engaged in public partnerships with these massive prostitution businesses. Freedom of information requests conducted as part of research by Kat Banyard at the University of Durham revealed that Vivastreet has been delivering training sessions to police officers. The same pimping website enjoyed what they billed as “quarterly catch-ups” with Home Office officials. The FOIs show that the Home Office gave pimping website regulators regular access to Government officials and privileged opportunities to input into policy. To give an idea of the closeness of the relationship, after Vivastreet gave evidence to the Home Affairs Committee in 2023 as part of the Committee’s inquiry into human trafficking, a Home Office official reached out to it by email to say, “the Committee did not give you an easy time – which hopefully didn’t come as too much of a surprise to you, but nonetheless it’s never a nice feeling – so I do hope that you were ok afterwards.” I strongly support the Home Affairs Committee findings that collaboration between the Home Office, the National Crime Agency and pimping websites was “inexplicable, particularly given the total absence of evidence that it has led to a reduction in the scale of trafficking facilitated by these websites”. Since the inquiry, I am pleased that that collaboration with Government seems to have stopped. I am firmly of the view that Government and the police should not be collaborating with pimping websites. We should be banning those websites and using the full force of the law against them—that is the only way to keep women and girls safe. Scotland’s law on human trafficking is different from the law in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. I will explain how pimping websites including Vivastreet and AdultWork constitute human trafficking operations under the Human Trafficking and Exploitation Act (Scotland) 2015.