FORMER SNP leadership candidate Ash Regan has said that her efforts to introduce a Nordic model-style ban on the purchase of sex was blocked by the Scottish National Party’s Green coalition partners.

Ms Regan, who defected to Alba last year, served as community safety minister under former first minister Nicola Sturgeon. She announced plans to curb male demand for prostitution in her 2021 programme for government, in line with the SNP’s position adopted in 2017 that prostitution is a form of violence against women.

But in 2021 the SNP went into government with the Greens, who were committed to “decriminalisation of sex work.”

Ms Regan said the Greens wouldn’t sign up to rules penalising buyers of sex, so they stalled, something she regrets.

“If you look in detail at what the SNP-Green coalition government has pursued, it’s the areas where there is more policy alignment,” she told Holyrood magazine.

A Scottish government spokesperson said that pilots of a new strategy to enable an “exit from commercial exploitation” would begin this summer, adding: “Lessons learned from the strategy will help inform any future legislative considerations, including whether to criminalise the purchase of sex.”