It’s ok for social services to facilitate the use by a client of a sex worker!

Here at Law Answered we have a weekly routine of looking through legal trackers to find new cases and any changes. We log anything interesting to update our guides annually and sometimes we blog about changes too. This is painstaking work, demanding close attention to detail and (let’s face it) sometimes some resilience, not all the updates are that interesting!

But, well, sometimes an update that might not be strictly relevant to anything in the guides really raises our eyebrows and makes us sit up. A Local Authority v C was just one of those cases and we thought you might want to read about it too.

The Court of Protection was asked to consider the case of a man suffering developmental delay and social communication difficulties who had capacity to engage in sex and wanted to use a sex worker for the purpose, because he was pessimistic about his chances of finding a girlfriend. His care workers needed (quite understandably) to know whether they could facilitate his contact with a prostitute without committing an offence under the Sexual Offences Act 2003 (“SOA”), particularly in relation to the s.39 prohibition on “intentionally causing” or “inciting” the sexual activity.

The court held that no offence would be committed. The purpose of the legislation was to protect the vulnerable not to prevent autonomous sexual expression. In this case the latter option was the correct one.

In the light of the finding the court did not have to go on and look at the ECHR to consider whether it applied and whether a declaration of incompatibility should be made in relation to the SOA. This was pleaded and it would have been interesting also to see the court’s response to that pleading.

This is probably not of much use to use in essays and it won’t make our updates tracker but it’s still quite interesting! Worth noting that the Secretary of State for Justice wasn’t so keen on the decision and sought permission to appeal – that was granted so we may still get the ECHR point.