HURRAY. Here come ministers with a “tough approach” to prostitution. They are going to tighten up child protection guidance, create a guide for schools to be aware of the risks and “early signs” of prostitution, and have “an increased focus”. There will be cheering in the streets from Latvia to Lewisham. Prostitutes will hang up their stockings; pimps hand in their stash. If the consequences weren’t so tragic it would be hilarious. What is a school supposed to do when it spots an “early sign” of prostitution? Turning teachers into pseudo social workers, along with the rest of the “Prostitution Strategy” announced yesterday, is an abrogation of responsibility.

They are all cowards this week. Look what Ruth Kelly is announcing: in response to the paedophile frenzy, responsibility for vetting teachers will be removed from experts in her department to experts outside it. So the Secretary of State cannot be held responsible in future for the decisions. What a cowardly shift of authority, and in the face of the merest hint of a scandal in the gym pants department.

The Home Office has been equally cowardly over prostitution, but it will be to rather sadder effect. The most thorough review of the law in 50 years has come to the conclusion . . . that we must encourage the police to crack down on kerb-crawling; offer prostitutes more help; let them work in pairs; and, inevitably, train a few more social workers. The “five key aims” of the “Prostitution Strategy” are:

1. Prevention — “awareness-raising” and early intervention with children. Well that’s gonna work isn’t it, especially with the growing trade in trafficked women from abroad.

2. Tackling demand — “responding to community concerns by deterring those who create the demand”. I’d love to see the strategy paper on how to stop men wanting sex. The number paying for it has doubled in a decade, and is now one in ten, according to research by a respected sexually transmitted infections journal.

3. Developing routes out — very good. Lots of help there already.

4. Ensuring justice — aren’t we supposed to be doing this already?

5. Tackling off-street prostitution — “targeting commercial sexual exploitation, in particular where victims are young or have been trafficked”. See 4, above.

A serious way to protect trafficked women would be to sign up to the Council of Europe’s convention against trafficking human beings, as Denis MacShane, the former Europe minister, has argued. This offers protection to trafficked sex slaves by treating them as victims not criminals and offering them protection and shelter if they escape their owners, ultimately helping them to return home. But Britain won’t sign it, for the really revolting reason that the Home Office fears some women working in the sex industry might use it to pretend that they have been trafficked and therefore claim that they are allowed to stay here; not a concern of the 24 countries that have signed up, including the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, Belgium and Sweden. “We don’t want it to be a pull factor,” as one Home Office official charmingly put it yesterday.

Nor, “tough” as they are, do ministers want to go to the trouble of outlawing the use of prostitutes. Instead of threatening the men who use them, prostitutes are to be challenged with antisocial behaviour orders, acceptable behaviour contracts, drug rehabilitation and all the state panoply of bullying injunctions. Why not blame the men instead? Sweden made it an offence seven years ago to buy or attempt to buy a temporary sexual relationship. Campaigners for and against the criminalisation of prostitute-use argue about the efficacy of the Swedish law: it has caused some prostitution to go underground, but there there has been a decline in the overall amount of prostitution and trafficking.

Since the Wolfenden Committee reported in 1957, the last time the law on prostitution in Britain was comprehensively reviewed, there has been an assumption that the argument against criminalising consenting behaviour between two adults outweighs the case for protecting vulnerable women. But Wolfenden based his conclusion on the assumption that the “great majority of prostitutes . . . choose this life because they find in it a style of living which is to them easier, freer and more profitable than would be provided by any other occupation”.

Even if it was true then, things have changed in the past 50 years. Research today finds that seven in ten pimped prostitutes say they have been coerced through violence or intimidation, and many of the thousands of illegal immigrants working in the sex trade have been sex-trafficked.

Yet I can see a case for legalised brothels. Given that the purpose of the law should be to protect the most vulnerable — the young, drug addicts, trafficked women — let us try to keep them out of the business while offering to those who genuinely choose to be prostitutes as much support as the law can provide. Let those who wish to work in brothels be individually interviewed and licensed. Let them prove that they are over 18, and not addicted to drugs. Then have the brothels regularly inspected, with good working conditions, and if relevant, fair pay and all the employment rights enjoyed in other jobs. It doesn’t matter whether there are two or 22 or 222 women in a brothel. What matters is that they should want to be there; to have made an informed and free choice. There will be those men drawn only to the illicit, and legal brothels will not satisfy them — but we are talking about making the world better here, not making it perfect.

The Evening Standard front page screamed yesterday about “Brothel on your Doorstep”, because the Government has said two prostitutes will be allowed to work together in “mini-brothels”. What does it think is on most city dwellers’ doorsteps in any case? Does anyone really not know what goes on in the massage parlours? The world is a dirty place — but this “prostitution strategy” is an absolutely filthy compromise.

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