RE Official Information Act request CDHB 10144, WCDHB 9323 and SCDHB
I refer to your email dated 25 June 2019 sent to the Ministry of Health which they subsequently transferred to us on 8 July 2019 requesting the following information under the Official Information Act from Canterbury DHB, West Coast DHB and South Canterbury DHB regarding Prostitution Act 2008 Compliance. Specifically:
Could you provide the statistics of:
- How many inspections have been carried out of a) establishments and b) homes in respect of sections 24 to 29 of the Prostitution Reform Act from 2003 until 2019, by year? To avoid doubt, these are inspections of licensed brothels or home-based sex work to ensure that Health and Safety standards are adhered to.
- Can you provide statistics on how many investigations or prosecutions of breaches of health and safety have resulted from the above inspections for the same period, by year
- Of the number of investigations, please provide data on what proportion of investigations and prosecutions relate to owner-operators versus licensed brothels.
Canterbury DHB’s Community and Public Health division is the public health service for all three District Health Boards. As such, the powers to act as an inspector under section 25(1) of the Prostitution Reform Act (2003) are held by the Medical Officers of Health for these districts or persons they authorise under section 25 (2).
Canterbury
There was only one case where an inspector visited a brothel to investigate a complaint and that was in 2005. No prosecution resulted. Staff have dealt with a few complaints by phone between 2004 and 2010 and there have been no complaints since then. None of these complaints resulted in any prosecution.
South Canterbury
No inspections of any brothels have been carried out and there is no record of any complaints being received.
9(2)(a)
West Coast
No inspections of any brothels have been carried out and there is no record of any complaints being received.
By way of explanation, it is difficult to carry out systematic inspections of brothels (unrelated to complaints) for two reasons:
- Public health services do not necessarily know about what the Act refers to as ‘small owner-operated brothels’ (home-based sex work) unless they receive a complaint, as these premises are not required to be registered and seldom advertise.
- It is also difficult to know about licensed/registered brothels as the register is held by the Auckland District Court and it doesn’t necessarily have the address of the brothel as it is the owner’s details that are registered. Public health services would need to rely on public advertisements to identify these premises.