More on Prostitution along the Romford Road

The Order, pictured above, is what Newham officers recommended to curb prostitution along the Romford Road. It might be what residents demanded, but it is not what the mayor wanted.

It is agreed, there is a problem. Unfortunately, it is not agreed what the problem is.

For the mayor and the Greens, the ‘problem’ seems to be that vulnerable women are being put at risk by working as prostitutes on the street. Nonetheless, these vulnerable women should be allowed to continue to ply their trade.

For Newham Independents, some of the Labour councillors and residents, the problem is that this trade is having a detrimental impact on the local area, particularly with girls and women being propositioned on the street.

Although no-one raises the point in public, we suspect that there is also a large degree of moral outrage at prostitution, as it were, on the doorstep.

Newham have been kind enough to clarify their response to our FOI.

It appears that the officer recommendation was to use enforcement measures to allow the police to move-on women working on the streets. This would not preclude other approaches, indeed, the use of additional approaches is supported by the Home Office (see p9 onwards). The work of Open Doors in Hackney suggests that as many as 78 women left prostitution (para6.22), though this is not entirely clear and the report is silent about whether they were replaced by others.

Eighty four women were ‘diverted’ from the criminal justice system, following arrest in Tower Hamlets by the Safe-Exit organization, but again it is not entirely clear how many of these actually left prostitution, (para6.38).

However, these actions were in addition to police enforcement. The section in the report which deals with this is short, but important, so we reproduce it in full, below.

As we have noted, the communities along the Romford Road DO expect the police to enforce the law. It is the mayor and the council who oppose this. When a senior councillor took a different view, she was shifted and then resigned.

Mayor Fiaz (and by extension her cabinet member Cllr Neil Wilson) have promised a new strategy to deal with prostitution. In fact, the mayor promised that it would be delivered months ago. It wasn’t.

We still don’t know what she wants the policy to do, beyond ‘taking a public health approach’. As we have noted above, there was nothing to prevent a public health approach being taken alongside enforcement.

So we have to ask, who is the mayor working for? Residents or the ECP?

This comes from the Newham Recorder, just before Cllr Lee-Phakoe was moved.