The Crime and Policing Act 2026 received Royal Assent on 29 April. That ended more than a year of parliamentary passage, and the Minister for Crime and Policing called it the biggest overhaul of Britain's crime-fighting powers in a generation. The bill covered everything from anti-social behaviour to terrorism. Somewhere inside it, one group of proposed changes turned into a real fight: a set of amendments that would have changed how England and Wales treat commercial sex work.

What Was Actually Proposed

Backbench MP Tonia Antoniazzi tabled three linked new clauses during the bill's committee stage in early 2025. The first would have made it a criminal offence to enable or profit from another person's sex work, explicitly including running a website that hosts adverts for sexual services. The second would have criminalised paying for sex outright. That's the approach usually called the Nordic or Swedish model, in place in Sweden since 1999. The third went the other way: it proposed repealing the offence of loitering or soliciting for the purposes of prostitution under the Street Offences Act 1959, a law that today applies only to the person selling sex, not the buyer.

A Rare Alliance Against the Advertising Clause

The plan to criminalise adult services websites was opposed by an unusually broad group. The National Police Chiefs' Council's own guidance says most listings on these platforms come from independent providers, not trafficking operations. Police witnesses told the committee that shutting the sites down would make intelligence-gathering harder, not easier, and pointed to what happened in France after a similar law there. Sex worker safety charities including National Ugly Mugs and the English Collective of Prostitutes argued that online advertising lets independent providers screen clients and work without a manager. They pointed to the US after the 2018 FOSTA-SESTA law, when a wave of platform shutdowns was followed by sex workers reporting lost income and less safety.

The Client-Criminalisation Question

The demand-side clause split people along more familiar lines. Groups including CARE and the APPG on Commercial Sexual Exploitation argued that criminalising buyers, together with exit support, would shrink the market that drives trafficking, and pointed to public support for the approach in France. Opponents cited a 2019 review commissioned by Northern Ireland's own Department of Justice, which introduced client criminalisation in 2015. It found that reported assaults against sex workers had risen sharply in the two years afterward, with no clear evidence the law had reduced demand or trafficking.

Where the Clauses Ended Up

MPs voted on the advertising and demand clauses at report stage on 17 June 2025, together with the proposal to repeal street soliciting offences. The Act that came out of the Lords' final review in April 2026 has well over a hundred sections, and they come into force in stages over several years, not all at once. So the practical scope of any prostitution-related provisions that survived is still becoming clear as secondary legislation gets published. If you're a provider or client trying to keep track of what's actually in force in England day to day, our guide to English escort law is still the clearer place to start, and we'll update our coverage as the relevant sections of the Act formally come into force.

The Bottom Line

Whatever these specific clauses end up looking like, the debate shows a real split in how Britain thinks about sex work. One side sees advertising platforms and paid companionship as tools that help independent providers work more safely. The other sees the same tools as infrastructure for exploitation. Both sides point to real evidence from other countries, and neither case is settled. Keep watching this one, don't assume it's over.