MSP proposes tolerance zones for prostitutes across Scotland

TOLERANCE zones for prostitutes could be made legal in communities across Scotland after an MSP suggested she was ready to bring forward a parliamentary bill.

Margo MacDonald, a Lothians list MSP, led a delegation including community and health workers to Edinburgh City Council yesterday. The meeting was an attempt to resolve difficulties over the location of the city’s red-light zone.

A newly-designated tolerance area in Leith, where police had traditionally allowed street prostitutes to work, was announced in August. But just weeks after the switch from Coburg Street to Salamander Street, police announced it would cease to recognise the zone from the end of November after complaints from residents and businesses.

A working group, including representatives of prostitutes, residents, businesses, police, politicians, health and social workers, was established to find a new site.

Yesterday, the delegation told councillors there had been no known HIV transmission within street prostitution in the city since testing was offered to the women more than a decade ago, while there was a lower level of sexually transmitted infection among prostitutes attending outreach clinics than among the general public.

The council meeting also heard that no under-16s were found to be working in street prostitution in Edinburgh in the past two years.

Ruth Morgan Thomas of the Scottish Prostitutes Education Project said a new zone was needed “urgently”.

She said: “We wanted to highlight the benefits of the pragmatic approach of the last 20 years and also to highlight the consequences of losing the toleration zone. If that was to happen all the controls which keep out the criminal elements – the drug dealers, pimping, protection racketeers – would be lost.”

Ms MacDonald said: “There seemed to be wide agreement among councillors as to the desirability of having a tolerance zone, but they’re obviously sensitive to the charge of aiding and abetting unlawful acts.”

She said her “immediate concern” was the imminent end of Edinburgh’s current tolerance zone, but she hoped to bring forward proposals for a change in the law, allowing local authorities to operate a zone for soliciting in designated areas.