We watched people come and go. Black and white, but mainly black. The estate was largely Afro-Caribbean, which is a problem when you’re perpetually accused of only stopping black people. A few of the pub-goers were known cannabis dealers. They saw our marked car and either sucked their teeth or pointed their fingers at us like pretend guns. “There you go,” said Stuart, nodding at a tall black man wearing a tracksuit. The man was leaving the beer garden, wreathed in sickly white smoke. “That’s my man.”

The thief-taker got out of the car and began reciting the catechism known to all police officers: “I can smell weed on you, mate. I’m gonna search you. Now, have you got anything in your pockets you shouldn’t have, anything sharp?” Then he continued with a heavily-abbreviated version of the information required under Section 1 of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984. The search led to the discovery of several wraps of crack and a quantity of cash. The man in the tracksuit was a dealer who the thief-taker had been keeping a beady eye on. And, yes, the scent of weed was the key to the door.

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I later tried the same trick myself. Stopping a suspect who smelled of weed, I searched him and found a car key. The suspect, who didn’t have a driving license, had “borrowed it”. Inside the car? A dozen freshly stolen leather jackets from a local motorcycle shop. I was no thief-taker, but then again the guy with the stolen jackets wasn’t exactly Moriarty, either.

The tactic is hardly a secret. London’s police are sanguine about cannabis use unless you’re — to put it bluntly — taking the piss. During my stint as a uniformed officer I was fairly liberal in my application of the law, but found it was a useful tool for catching bad guys. And, for some reason, petty criminals love weed. Sadly, such earthy truths offend the sensibilities of those in power. Which is presumably why Sadiq Khan’s recent review of drugs use in the capital recommends decriminalizing small quantities of cannabis for personal use. The review, which pompously treats London as an independent state rather than the UK’s capital city, was (of course) headed by an impeccably liberal lawyer and close friend of Tony Blair, Charlie Falconer. Falconer said officers use such tactics “disproportionately against black men”, and that the enforcing of drugs laws is an “incredible friction point between the police and black communities”.

The politics behind this review are typical of London’s mayor: performative, headline-grabbing, problematic for policing and designed to garner support from Labour’s base, especially younger voters. Unlike his predecessors, Khan’s support for the Met has been equivocal, despite policing being one of his only significant Mayoral powers (the other is transport).

Khan is the third London mayor since the role was created. I have been an officer under all three London mayors, of whom Khan has been the most unhelpful to policing. Ken Livingstone, despite his reputation as a Left-winger, understood the importance of robustly policing a capital city. Boris Johnson had the good sense to subcontract policing to his more capable deputies and, eventually, to get rid of the lackluster police chief Sir Ian Blair. What of Sir Sadiq? His opportunism is shameless yet instructive. How so? Delve into the small print and you’ll see how, practically, his proposals are unworkable. The Mayor said: “The report makes a compelling, evidence-based case for the decriminalization of possession of small quantities of natural cannabis, which the Government should consider.”

This is where the proposal falls apart, or perhaps the mask slips. Small quantities of natural cannabis? Patrol officers would be required to become mobile pharmacologists. All arrests for drug possession are usually “on suspicion of”, because, at the moment they seize the drug, officers can’t evidentially prove precisely what it is. Another difficulty is that, compared to other drugs, cannabis covers a wide spectrum, from brain-rotting psychoactive skunk to the sort of mellow, artisan weed smoked by surfer dudes on Cornish beaches. How, in the rain, at 2am, is a police officer meant to know the difference? This betrays the report’s likelier purpose: the police officer isn’t meant to stop and search in the first place. Just leave the kids alone! Perhaps I’m a natural cynic. Or perhaps I’m simply a keen student of Sadiq Khan’s approach to Ulez “evidence-gathering”, whereby his strident claims about air pollution and congestion were found wanting. Either way, this looks more like an attack on stop and search as a tactic.

What we should pay attention to is the direction of travel. Stop and search is a totemic issue for progressives, and always has been. Is it always fairly applied? No. Is it necessary? Yes. Is Sadiq Khan prepared to tackle the reasons why stop and search is so contested, or simply pander to his political base? I would, were I able, lock Sir Sadiq in a room and make him watch the third season of David Simon’s TV epic The Wire. Written by progressive creatives for a largely progressive audience, The Wire is nonetheless the best drama ever produced on urban policing. The episode titled “Amsterdam” concerns the consequences of an experiment in decriminalizing drugs in order to ease community tension and treat addiction as a health issue. The experiment goes badly wrong when gangs realize parts of Baltimore have essentially turned into a free-fire zone, a place where they can ply their trade unhindered by local officers.

As ever, though, British politicians trail their American counterparts by five to 10 years. American cities have experimented with varying degrees of drugs liberalization in cities such as Portland and Los Angeles, with predictably dystopian results. The criminal ecosystem, the real one as opposed to the one described by academics, thrives on weakness of any kind. A city weakening its stop-and-search policies for small amounts of drugs, as the Americans discovered, has a cumulative (if not intended) effect as users and dealers drag with them their associated social problems. Portland was transformed from an artsy, bohemian city into an open-air drug market and refugee camp for the addicted homeless. Los Angeles and San Francisco, with their lax prosecutors and defanged police, became lawless paradises for shoplifters and robbers.

Even San Francisco, America’s most liberal city, has had enough. Its Democrats have rediscovered the benefits of robust policing, prosecution and sentencing. The lax policing was an inheritance from the academic revulsion at the “Zero Tolerance” policies of the early Nineties, whereby law enforcement targeted minor offenses. The approach was viewed by criminologists as oppressive and ineffective, a verdict that ignored the “lived experience”, usually so respected by academics, of people living in communities blighted by criminality and antisocial behavior.

This light-touch style of policing is finally going back out of fashion. Naturally, the academics concerned have yet to admit they were wrong — just that their pet policies “haven’t been implemented properly”. Predictably, the milquetoast British College of Policing also reviles Zero Tolerance law enforcement.

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Alternatively, closer to home, Sadiq could simply Google Brian Paddick, the real-life police commander who posited legalizing cannabis in the interests of “community relations”. This isn’t to unnecessarily disparage Brian, who in my experience was a fundamentally decent man. Serving in Brixton in the early Eighties, he became evangelical about reforming stop and search. The results of his experiment in what I’ll call “Total Tolerance” are disputed, but like the Mayor’s review, it was about much more than implementing drugs laws. It was, again, about a direction of travel, part of the ouroboros of a debate between “robust” versus “soft” policing. The answers are, of course, situational, complex and uncomfortable. This reality is too often lost on policymakers.

My experience suggests that drugs laws are like speed limits. If you set the motorway limit at 70mph, invariably the police (although not money-grubbing cameras) will usually turn a blind eye until you hit 90-ish. Why? Resources. Discretion. Common sense. It’s the same with minor drugs offenses. Politicians like Sadiq Khan don’t really like stop and search. They don’t trust the police, either. Why doesn’t Khan simply say so? Or would that involve opening fresh cans of worms about police funding, training, recruitment and leadership? Including, of course, the Mayor’s. He is, after all, the de facto Police and Crime Commissioner for Greater London.

The wheel goes round and round… and where will it stop? We all know, actually, but that never deters progressives like Khan from trying another spin. In the meantime, the Mayor has his headline for the day. The quangocrats of his drugs review board will have been paid their stipends. The slow, inexorable creep of progressive policymaking continues, only ever heading toward one destination: failure.

Meanwhile, for operational police officers, the mood music is clear. It’s also clear to the activists seeking to undermine or even defund the police. All parties know that stop and search is something frowned upon by the powers-that-be. Should something go wrong, an officer is unlikely to be defended by those at the top. All this means that thief-takers like Stuart are no longer welcome in London’s police. Parts of London already resemble cannabis-stinking favelas. Perhaps, until Sadiq Khan notes the lessons from Portland and elsewhere, that’s where the city’s future lies.

I met this punter while investigating the sex trade in Auckland, New Zealand. It was said to be the gold-plated model for decriminalisation. While the men might have liked it, the women didn’t. “I have been raped more times and I can remember,” Lindsey told me. “Some of the bastards enjoy hurting us, the last one the punched me in the face after he’d finished and ran away laughing.”

Carly who worked in a large, busy brothel told me that even though there were house rules, all the punters ignored them: “What’s the pimp going to do? He just charges the men more for unprotected sex, because what they want, they get. Why anyone thinks that when you turn a pimp into a legitimate businessman that they will treat the girls better, I will never know. It’s made it much worse.” 

Most people assume that “decriminalisation” of the sex trade would make lives better for women in prostitution. It won’t. Along with its close relative “legalisation” it has made them worse. Which is why I am astonished that public money is going towards Decriminalised Futures, a highly politicised exhibition opening later this month at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA).

“Full decriminalisation of sex work is the rallying cry that unites the sex worker rights movement across the world,” reads the blurb on the ICA website. “Under this banner, sex workers and their allies have fought tirelessly for strong workers’ rights, an end to exploitation, an end to criminalisation, and real measures to address poverty.”

This “celebration of the ‘sex workers’ rights’ movement” features 13 artists from countries including the UK, France, Germany and the US,  and highlights the history of the campaign to decriminalise the sex trade. 

It is no surprise to discover that one of the major supporters of the show is the Open Society Foundation (OSF) — the world’s biggest financial backer of the pro-legalisation lobby. Also involved is SWARM (Sex Worker Advocacy and Resistance Movement) which “aims to highlight the ways in which sex workers’ rights are inextricably linked to struggles for racial justice, migrant rights, anti-austerity work, labour rights, trans rights, and many other movements and campaigns”.

The debate is weighted heavily on the ‘“sex work is work/legalise it” debate, as this is the commonplace liberal position, but it is based on fantasy rather than fact. Prostitution is not work, and every attempt to legitimise the inside of a woman’s body as a workplace has failed. 

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I know the global sex trade well. I have visited legal brothels and street toleration zones in the US, Germany, Switzerland and the Netherlands. I have spent time with the women selling sex, the punters, the pimps and brothel owners, and I know that the only benefit of decriminalisation for the women is that they are not arrested. And that pales somewhat when you realise the devastating effect of assuming that prostitution can ever be work, and that the punters are merely paying for a service.

The Netherlands, which legalised its sex trade in 2000, realised in short order what an unmitigated disaster that move had been. Dutch politicians began to publicly admit that none of the promised benefits had been realised: rather than tackling the illegal side of the market, such as trafficking of women across borders, underage girls, and associated criminality such as drug dealing, violence and murder of the women by pimps and punters, the opposite happened. Soon after legalisation, the US Department of State ranked the Netherlands as one of the top five countries of origin for trafficking victims worldwide.

Under legalisation, the illegal sector grew alongside legal brothels and street toleration zones, and pimps imported their human merchandise from other countries to meet the growing demand.  Something similar happened in Queensland, Australia, where it has been reported that up to four times the number of trafficked women have been discovered in legal brothels than in illegal ones. 

Neither decriminalisation nor legalisation will ever result in a reduction of or an end to prostitution. Instead, both approaches set in stone the idea that prostitution is an inevitability. And the gold standard today, according to pro-prostitution activists, including SWARM, is the New Zealand model that Lindsey and Carly are toiling within. 

In 2003, New Zealand became the first country to decriminalise its sex trade, passed by only a majority of one vote in parliament. The application form to open a brothel in New Zealand is just two pages long: three pages shorter than the form to apply to adopt a pet from the Battersea Dogs and Cats Home in London. 

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Freedom of information requests by anti-sex trade campaigners in New Zealand found that, despite the promises from local governments that legal brothels would be regularly inspected, there had been only 11 inspections between 2003 and 2015 across the whole of New Zealand, all of which originated from complaints from the public. Meanwhile, the women are getting younger and the men are demanding sex without condoms. 

Rachel Moran, author of the best-selling memoir, Paid For: My Journey through Prostitution and now actively campaigning to dispel myths about the sex trade is vehemently opposed to the ICA’s exhibition. 

“Art is its own thing, but there is a strong argument for it to be true to life when it’s presented in the service of a political objective and with public funding,” says Moran about Decriminalised Futures. “This exhibition warns that it contains ‘depictions of violence’ but there are no warnings about the exhibition’s political objective — to campaign for the full decriminalisation of brothel keepers and pimps. This unacknowledged agenda constitutes visually presented political propaganda.”

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The exhibition will doubtless be welcomed by the liberal feminists and the bearded dudes who chant “sex workers work” and “blow jobs are real jobs”, because they subscribe to a faux feminism that actually benefits men more than women. And it is telling that the majority of the artists whose work is featured in the exhibition identify as they/them, and at least one of the she/hers are trans women. The pro-prostitution and trans activists/queer identified activists have become so intertwined they sing from the same hymn sheet. 

But there should be no place for a sanitised, romanticised version of the sex trade in a city which is home to countless brothels full of abused women. While there is always room for debate about removing the harms from prostitution, a propaganda puff piece that legitimises and normalises prostitution is dangerous. In staging this exhibition the ICA is making a very strong, political statement about its acceptance of the world’s oldest oppression. It’s a shame the money wasn’t spent helping women out of the sex trade.

These deaths are the predictable result of political failure. For decades, politicians have been hooked on prohibition. They have pushed the idea that use of illicit drugs should be punished and persisted with suggestions they can stifle flows of heroin, cocaine and cannabis, rather than accepting there is strong demand and focusing on harm reduction. The absurdity of their stance is exposed by the failure to keep even top-security prisons free of drugs, while on the streets prices fall, purity rises and new synthetic drugs arrive. This is, after all, a country with 11,000 miles of coast that sees 500m tonnes of goods a year move through its ports — yet total annual consumption of cocaine could fit in a solitary shipping container.

The legacy of such political irresponsibility is seen in these grim fatality figures. Our leaders outsourced the drug markets to criminal gangs, which rely on violence and grooming of young recruits to dominate their lucrative trade. There is, of course, no quality control on the content or strength of their wares. So forget all that Tory talk of levelling up, given the devastating impact of these policies on poorer parts of society. In England, the highest rate of fatalities is found in the north east, three times higher than further down the coast before the pandemic. In Scotland, epicentre for this whirlwind of misery, hospitalisation rates for drug-related incidents are reportedly 16 times higher in low-income areas than more prosperous parts.

The data is even more dispiriting when you probe prohibitionist policies. It is 50 years since signing of the Misuse of Drugs Act, which banned possession, supply, manufacture, import and export of controlled drugs — arguably the most damaging piece of legislation passed by parliament in recent decades. Since then, the number of heroin users in England and Wales has risen 25-fold, according to analysis by Transform Drug Policy Foundation, while drug-related deaths have soared more than 30-fold. The fatality rate in Scotland is ten times the average across Europe — and it has more than doubled over the past five years. Half of our homicides are also linked to drugs (along with half the acquisitive crimes and rough sleepers).

Could there be a more damning indictment of failure than all these corpses? Yet politicians cut support for treatment centres, pushed abstinence and kept pandering to fear with disastrous consequences. In Scotland, much of the rise in fatalities is down to use of benzodiazepines. Media hysteria led to tightening of the rules on legal prescriptions, which choked the supply routes for people abusing these drugs and thus incentivised criminals to develop the market for ultra-cheap, high-potency street benzos − the “blues” behind much of the horrifying carnage north of the border.

Or take events in parts of northern England after police targeted the cutting agents used by cocaine dealers to pad out their products and hike profits. Yes, this led to successful prosecutions of people found in illicit possession of large quantities of benzocaine, a mild anaesthetic used by dentists. But the result was simply a sharp rise in the purity of cocaine sold on the streets of places such as Manchester. Prices also plunged at the same time from about £45,000 a kilo to £30,000 a kilo, according to the charity Release, due to increased production in Latin America. This is close to half the £55,000 cost of a wholesale kilo 12 years ago on official figures, indicating significant rise in supplies.

“The drugs market is resilient and increased money for policing, increased busts and increased prosecutions do little to disrupt the trade,” said Niamh Eastwood, executive director of Release. “Even when borders have shut across the world in the pandemic it had little effect on the supply chains. This is a business that adapts fast, so as the government lauds the success of law enforcement closing down so-called county lines, new supply models are developed. We need new thinking, we need to start exploring decriminalisation and we need regulation of these substances.”

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She is right. The war on drugs has been a dismal failure — as shown by the government’s own reports. These admit Britain has the highest number of cocaine and high-risk opioid users in Europe, disclosing that there has been rising cocaine use over the past decade with recent hikes “clear in most age groups” and purity at highest levels on record due to “increased availability’. A 2017 review of strategy revealed central government spent £1.6bn on enforcement, yet “drug seizures… had little impact on availability” although there were “potential unintended consequences…such as violence related to drug markets”.  Even the biggest of drug busts barely dent supplies or costs on the streets, as many cops will admit.

It is estimated the “harms” cost England an astonishing £19.3bn a year, mainly due to crime and health. Yet Boris Johnson, unveiling a package of rehashed crime policies last week to look strong for his red wall voters, misleads the public with continuing pretence that we can beat the “scourge” of drugs. His ministers talk of “tough law enforcement” and win headlines for “cracking down” on recreational use with more testing after arrests. They claim this will “challenge drug misuse, reduce demand and change the perceived acceptability of using illicit drugs”, while a cross-government summit will “drive down demand for illegal drugs”.

I doubt cartel bosses and drug barons are quaking with fear over Johnson’s drug bash. In truth, it is bordering on criminal to see politicians stick to their bungling stance as the death toll mounts. Yet there are signs that behind the tough talk, the state’s backfiring drug war stance is starting to crumble. Both Scottish and English governments are putting a bit more cash into treatment while two key parliamentary committees have called for drug decriminalisation. “We recommend a radical change in UK drugs policy from a criminal justice to a health approach,” said the health and social care committee. “A harm reduction approach would not only benefit those who are using drugs but reduce the costs for their wider communities.”

Many frustrated police forces, fed up with wasting resources, are simply pressing ahead with “diversion schemes”. Avon and Somerset, North Wales, Thames Valley and West Midlands were among the first to follow the successful lead of Durham in seeking to slash reoffending rates and save costs by offering drug education or treatment as an alternative to arrest, cautioning or prosecution for people caught in possession. At least eight more have followed suit, with Scotland among others developing schemes. “You could call this de facto decriminalisation,” said Steve Rolles, senior policy analyst for Transform. “But that word seems problematic for this government because of worries it is seen as being soft on drugs.”

Rolles pointed out, however, that these strategies are winning ministerial plaudits and were backed by this month’s Black review into drug strategies. But surely it is unacceptable to have a postcode lottery that sees one person caught with a small stash of drugs end up in prison with a criminal record, while another sits through talks learning about harm reduction? Not to mention the inflammatory racial bias seen in police stop and search efforts focused on drugs. “We need to stop people going to prison for drugs since it is the wrong place for those people with problems,” said Professor David Nutt, the former government drugs adviser.

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Nutt was sacked in 2009 by the New Labour government for daring to tell the truth about cannabis, ecstasy and LSD being less harmful to public health than alcohol and tobacco. Since then, cheap potent, synthetic drugs such as fentanyl and mephedrone have arrived on our shores. But both big parties remain terrified of talking honestly to voters about drugs, although the few MPs breaking ranks have found the public in a more progressive place than they anticipated. Meanwhile there is increasing interest in Portugal, which 20 years ago this month showed a way out of the drug morass under the leadership of António Guterres, now United Nations secretary general.

Portugal acted out of desperation at a rising death toll. It had high levels of heroin use at the turn of the century, hundreds of deaths, highest rates of HIV infection in the European Union and prison cells filled with people sentenced for drug offences.

“It was almost impossible to find a family in Portugal that did not have drug-related problems,” said João Goulão, architect of their reforms. So they decriminalised drug possession, focused on health rather than punishment, shifted from abstinence-based campaigns and flipped funds into treatment. The result is shown in the latest annual data for drug-related deaths: 62 fatalities in a population twice the size of Scotland.

This is a spectacular turnaround. Now Portugal has among the lowest drug-related death rates in Europe, along with some of the lowest levels of use among younger generations. There is still a bedrock of high-risk opioid users, although numbers have fallen significantly and habits tend to be less problematic. It remains illegal to deal drugs. But those found with small quantities for personal use are sent before a local commission — typically a doctor, lawyer and social worker — to be told about support services. “We do not focus on drug problems but any issues people might have in their lives that lead to drug use,” said Goulão. “This is the key to our success. No one ends up in prison with a criminal record and stigma.”

Other countries have also seen the light, such as the Czech Republic and Spain. If Britain had followed similar policies, thousands of lives might have been saved. And these deaths should not be dismissed: they are a symbol of collective societal failures as well as a sign of lethal political stupidity. It has been shown time and again how the hallucination of prohibition can have perverse consequences by fuelling death, innovation and sales rather than depressing demand. So let us stop pretending another bust, another crackdown and another poor sod with mental health struggles being sent to prison is going to stop the use of drugs. Portugal shows there is a path forward that is cheaper, kinder and safer for everyone — as well as more honest about human nature. So why not level up with the electorate?

Set up by West Yorkshire Police (WYP) and Leeds City Council (LCC), the rules look simple: women can ply their trade within a certain area, between the hours of 8pm and 6am, without fear of arrest. Men can openly solicit sex from cars or on foot, so long as they stay within the boundaries of the zone. The area is policed, and a well-funded service provides condoms, tea and support for the dozens of women who are probably prostituting in order to buy drugs, whether for themselves or their partners.

Several security cameras cover the area, and a number of yellow bins are visible, in which the women and their punters are encouraged to drop used condoms. Every day, cleaners arrive to remove last night’s debris — which usually includes needles and other drug paraphernalia, empty booze bottles, vomit and items of women’s clothing.

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There is ample evidence from residents and other sources that prostitution has bled outside of the zone and into surrounding areas, and that a number of houses on the outskirts have become brothels. There are regular sightings of punters having sex with women in public, including in residential gardens, and women are often heard screaming while being attacked. I have spent time on the zone since 2014, and have spotted pimps, traffickers and drug dealers in and around the area. Many of the zone’s residents, including some of the women who work there, disagree with the recent report that the Managed Approach has been a success.

Campaigners against the zone believe that police and other agencies care little for the safety of the women, now they are supposedly “contained”. Speaking to residents, police, the women and the punters, I have developed a bleak impression of the situation. The punters, many of whom travel from outside of the city, are able to buy a woman with the same ease with which they might pick up a burger, often treating them like meat. “Because they can’t get arrested, they think they can do anything they liked,” says Angel*, a woman who sold sex on the zone during 2018. “I’ve been raped, and one man pissed all over me once and took a photo.”

Sammy*, who was pimped on her 17th birthday straight into the zone by her “boyfriend”, tells me that the police “don’t give a fuck about the women”. She says: “One night I was screaming my head off when a nasty punter got really rough with me, but these two coppers just walked past. All they want is to shove us away from the city centre so we don’t put off the tourists and those going out for meals.” Established local business owners in Holbeck have reported that trade is down because many potential customers avoid the area.

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This zone came into being because pressure was mounting on the police and local council to do something about street prostitution in the centre of Leeds. Residents and workers, sick of stepping over used condoms and fending off harassment from kerb crawlers looking for business, had filed enough complaints to make the problem a headache for the authorities. Arresting the women was counter-productive: all that happened was that the courts would fine them, which led to the “revolving door” situation of the women going straight back on to the streets in order to pay up, because they had no money.

But LCC and WYP had a choice: the money spent on containing the problem could have gone into exiting and drug rehabilitation services, for instance. Instead, the authorities have made it easier for pimps and punters to exploit the women, abandoning the prostitutes to a life of hell — and making residents feel unsafe.

There have been a number of rapes and sexual assaults within the zone, and in 2015, a few months after it became operational, Daria Pionko was murdered by a punter there. Pionko’s murder thrust Holbeck firmly into the national spotlight and saw serious questions being asked about the long-term viability of the experiment. And yet it continued. A few years later, in 2018, a Holbeck woman was raped on her way home from work by a group of men who assumed she was a prostitute.

My most recent visit to the Holbeck zone was in February. I arrived at its border around 10am and saw several women braving the cold and looking for business, despite it being hours past curfew time. Walking around, I saw carnage: dozens of used condoms and some blood-specked needles, as well as human faeces and empty bottles of spirits.

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One group of local feminists, including sex trade survivors, set up Campaign to End Leeds Sex Trade (CELST) in 2018. They roundly reject the conclusion of the recent report, saying it reads “like a fairy tale” to those living and working in the area. “Criminal gangs will be celebrating if this zone is maintained,” says CELST founder Fiona Broadfoot, who escaped prostitution in the 1990s:

“The vast majority of women on the zone don’t even speak English and could well be trafficked. Drug dealers peddle their goods openly with impunity. The punters use their privilege and entitlement to pay a pittance to the most vulnerable women in society.”

I spoke to Paul* who lives next door to three young Romanian women. He said: “Men come to the house all hours of the day and night. I have only seen one of them leave the house in months and she was accompanied by a man. I worry that they are being trafficked.”

The report failed to mention that the sex trade has expanded in Holbeck as a result of the zone. Meanwhile complaints of sexual assault have doubled, and rates of gonorrhoea, syphilis and chlamydia have risen significantly in Leeds.

Leeds Councillor Sarah Field is one of the most vocal critics of the zone within LCC. Field is furious that the authors of the report have recommended that the zone continue and, like me, believes that the only possible way to reduce the harm of the sex trade is to help the women exit and to deter the punters from buying sex by threatening arrest.

“Once again we see academics enthralled by what they call ‘sex work’ while they would never live in Holbeck, nor entertain the idea of their daughters or wives ‘working’ there. Adequately funded exit strategies remains the only way to stop vulnerable women being sold by men to other men on the streets of Leeds, with our council calling it success.”

The founders of the Holbeck zone should have seen the warning signs coming from countries such as the Netherlands. Having set up zones in a number of areas since legalisation, Dutch politicians have since admitted defeat and closed down every single one.

The first tipplezone (tolerance zone) opened in The Hague in 1983, with eight other cities following suit over the next three decades. As with the Leeds experiment, the aim of tipplezones was to deal with complaints of residents in the areas frequented by street prostitutes, and to ensure safety for the women. But the tipplezones did not deter violence from the punters, and trafficking, including of underage girls, increased, as did rates of HIV.

In 2004, Job Cohen — the then mayor of Amsterdam, which is known as “the vagina of Europe” for its highly visible sex trade — announced: “We’ve realised this is no longer about small-scale entrepreneurs, but those big crime organisations are involved here in trafficking women, drugs, killings, and other criminal activities.”

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While those selling sex should be treated as victims, not criminals, decriminalising the pimps and punters is not the answer. A number of other states, including Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland, France, Sweden and Israel have adopted the Nordic Model, in which the pimps and punters are criminalised, while those selling sex are decriminalised and offered support to leave the sex trade.

That might include drug and alcohol rehabilitation programmes, counselling, access to safe accommodation, and, where necessary, parenting skills. Training and re-education can give some women the confidence and ability to access gainful employment — and because prostitution is not criminalised, those who exit it aren’t automatically hindered by criminal records in seeking other work.

The Leeds zone has been thought up and maintained by those who see “the oldest profession” as an “inevitability”. But the women of Leeds deserve better than a strip of industrial wasteland and a few condoms. They deserve jobs and a future. The Managed Approach is an open invitation to the most disenfranchised women with the least choices in life, to enter a life of hell; there is no justification for leaving these women to die of drug overdoses, HIV or even murder.

The legitimisation of prostitution, often referred to by the women involved as “paid rape” is morally reprehensible. And as for the men that fuel this vile trade: it’s high time they were given a loud and clear message that women are not for sale.

*These names have been changed.