Newham Council’s Cabinet has approved a 10-year Newham Sex Work Strategy (2025-2035), alongside a one-year action plan.
- Strategy to be brought in from 2025 to 2035, alongside Y1 action plan
- Aims to protect vulnerable sex workers and support wider community
- Reduction in anti-social behaviour following existing efforts
Newham Council’s Cabinet has approved a 10-year Newham Sex Work Strategy (2025-2035), alongside a one-year action plan. The approach supports key priorities featured within the Council’s ‘Building a Fairer Newham’ corporate plan. It is evidence of efforts to meet the ambition to ‘develop a Tackling Sex Work strategy’, and aligns with the commitment to ‘reduce the stigmatisation and exploitation of street and off-street sex workers’. The approach also builds upon work carried out by the Council and its partners and provides the framework and shift required to adopt a Public Health whole borough community response to sex work. The desired outcome is to protect vulnerable sex workers and support the wider community.
Five high level outcomes will be used to measure effectiveness every quarter. They include crime; anti-social behaviour; perceptions of safety on estates; the number of sex workers engaging with services and the outcomes of that engagement. The strategy follows current efforts and existing work which has resulted in a reduction of reports of anti-social behaviour experienced by Newham residents. The borough has also seen an improvement in the information, advice and tools offered to sex workers, resulting in a rise in those individuals engaging with services.
Councillor Neil Wilson, Cabinet Member for Health and Adult Social Care said: “The approval of a 10-year Sex Work Strategy is a significant development for our borough. The strategy and accompanying action plan indicate our commitment to developing and improving the response to sex work in Newham.
“A ‘One Council’ approach has been taken, with officers from across the Council providing valuable insight. The strategy also builds on existing work which has taken place in the borough and was formulated in partnership with multiple organisations involved in this systemic approach to Sex Work.
“I would like to thank the women who took part in our sex worker engagement, which has ultimately helped shape the strategy. It was also developed in partnership with residents and people with lived experience and through a trauma-informed engagement approach. This highlights how much we value co-production. It is also worth noting that while all of the sex workers who engaged with us were women, the approach is also designed to address the needs of male and transgender sex workers.”
The local authority will be measuring changes in data but also hopes the strategy provides residents and sex workers with comfort and the understating that their local Council recognises their needs, lived experience and concerns.
The strategy considers how all crime and anti-social behaviour can impact residents’ sense of safety and wellbeing in their community. It has been developed with the understanding that all individuals, including sex workers, have the right to expect to feel safe when they are out in the community and in their own home. Street-based and indoor-based sex work has a detrimental impact on residents who are impacted by seeing sex work take place, by noise disturbances, associated litter and the activities of the buyers of sex.
The same consideration has been applied to sex workers and their health and wellbeing. For example, there are strong links between Modern Slavery and Trafficking and sex work. While not all sex workers have experienced this, it calls on partnership approaches to include consideration of policing and other methods to identifying and prosecuting the criminals behind this exploitation of sex workers.
