Conservative Party Human Rights Commission Inquiry into the Reform of Prostitution Law (2018)
The ECP’s written and oral evidence focused on the intolerable poverty and increase in prostitution faced by women as a direct result of Conservative austerity cuts, as well as highlighting how destitution and criminalisation makes women and young people more vulnerable to exploitation and violence.
In 2019, the CHRC published its report ‘The Limits of Consent’ recommending the increased criminalisation of prostitution in the form of criminalising clients, despite overwhelming evidence that this would put sex workers at greater risk of attack. Throughout the whole 20,000-word report, austerity is not mentioned once. The word “poverty” appears just a single time.