During the day the Holbeck industrial zone looks pretty innocuous. Perched on the southern edge of Leeds city centre, it backs on to residential streets peppered with betting shops, newsagents and takeaways.

Yet at night this industrial zone becomes something very different. It transforms into the UK’s first designated red light zone where, between the hours of 8pm-6am, street prostitution operates openly with neither the women nor the sex buyers facing prosecution.

Prostitution is not illegal in the UK but related activities, such as soliciting in a public place, pimping and kerb crawling, are unlawful. By suspending these laws and creating a wholly decriminalised market for prostitution, this radical approach – known as the “managed zone” – has transformed a banal square mile of industrial buildings and scrubland into an ideological battleground, revealing the bitter divisions over the response to prostitution in the UK.

Five years on, as Leeds city council faces a firestorm of opposition and an inquiry is opened into the future of the zone, I went back to Leeds to see how the managed zone has affected the lives of those who live and work around Holbeck.

For the women who work in the zone at night, the biggest change is that they no longer face the prospect of arrest. Sarah* worked the streets of Holbeck “three or four times a week” until last December to fund her and her boyfriend’s heroin and crack cocaine use.

The designated safe passageway through the Holbeck area. Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian

She says that before the managed approach was introduced, things were awful. Now she doesn’t have to worry about the police.

“I was constantly looking over my shoulder, worried about getting picked up by police,” she says. “I was arrested something like 20 times in the five years I was doing it, and I could never pay the fine, so they would come looking for me and I’d sometimes get arrested again.”

The managed approach was launched by Leeds city council in 2014 after research found that efforts to reduce prostitution weren’t working.

Those who support the managed zone passionately believe that what is happening in Holbeck is an opportunity to make life safer for the women working there. Equally fierce opponents – of which I am one – believe it has created an open street market for sex buyers and promotes trafficking and exploitation in one of the UK’s biggest cities.

I ask Sarah if she feels safer working in the zone as opposed to outside of it.

“I don’t know about safe, but I hate being arrested. It makes me feel like dirt,” she says. “The punters are just the same, they’re pretty horrible, but I don’t see any other way it can be done. I don’t want to get arrested, and a lot of the girls say that the police used to pick on them because they just thought they were scum. To be honest, I don’t think the zone can really do anything other than keep it contained for a while.”

‘We see condoms and needles all over the place,’ says one Holbeck businessman. Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian

Basis Sex Work, a pro-sex work NGO receiving funding from the city council to provide services to women on the zone, believes the approach has helped women report violent punters to the police. One report claims that since the launch of the zone, women are now six times more likely to report violent crime than they were in 2013.

Its chief executive, Gemma Sciré, says that the zone has made a crucial difference to their work, helping them reach women who are in desperate need of essential services and support.

“We give out alarms, we take crime reports and make sure when it’s cold or hot that they have the basic human necessities of food, drink, warm clothes,” she says. “We help them navigate the legal system.”

Leeds city councillor Mark Dobson, who was one of the main champions of the zone when it launched. Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian

Sciré and I fundamentally disagree on what is happening in the zone. She doesn’t consider the work that the women are doing to be exploitation and insists that from their experience those in the zone are working freely and without coercion. Yet she demurs when I ask her whether the managed zone is working out the way she thought it would.

“I can’t give you a yes or no,” she says. “It works in some ways, but it needs more work.”

Others who were involved in designing and launching the zone are less circumspect.

Mark Dobson works for Leeds city council and was one of the main architects and champions of the zone when it launched.

But now he’s changed his mind. He was badly shaken by the murder of Daria Pionko, a Polish woman working in the zone who was battered to death by a sex buyer just a few months after the zone became operational. He says he is dismayed by what he has seen unfold on the streets of Holbeck since, including reports of increased sexual assaults and rapes.

“People told me that we were supporting the women, and moving away from a very draconian system where the women were being punished by the police,” says Dobson. “In fact, what’s happened is the amnesty has clearly been there for the men, but I can’t see anything tangible that’s been done on the other side of the equation to take women out of prostitution.”

Leeds city council has also failed to stem the rising tide of local anger towards the zone.

Ian Staines set up a flooring business 1993, in the heart of what would become the managed zone. When I visit him at his place of work, he says that the impact of the zone on him and other residents has been traumatic. He says after a local woman was raped in 2018 on her way home from work by a group of men who assumed she was soliciting, many don’t consider their community a safe place to live.

“Murder, serious assault, and rapes have all taken place on the zone. We see condoms and needles all over the place, and even human faeces,” he says.

Discarded needles in Holbeck. Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian

There have been no arrests or investigations for sex trafficking or pimping since the zone opened. Yet despite this, Staines says that he, like many other locals, are worried about what might be happening to the women working there at night. One woman who used to work in the zone told me that she saw busloads of Romanian women brought into the zone at night and picked up in the morning. Nigel Perry, another Holbeck resident who has lived in the community 50 years in a small terrace house a quarter of a mile from the zone, is also alarmed by what he is seeing.

“Next door to me there are two or three young Romanian women. I have only ever seen one of them leave the house in months, and she was accompanied by a man. I worry that they are trafficked. Men come to the house all hours of the day and night. I don’t think the women can speak any English.”

Supporters of the zone point to the lack of arrests of pimps or traffickers as evidence that no criminality is occurring in the zone. But Kevin Hyland, the former anti-slavery commissioner who headed up the Metropolitan Police anti-trafficking unit, says this doesn’t mean it’s not going on. According to an all-party parliamentary group on prostitution and the global sex trade in 2018, sex trafficking is happening on an “industrial scale” across the UK, going undetected by police officers and ignored by punters.

“There’s plenty of evidence – I’ve seen it firsthand myself – that taking a hands-off approach, and effectively removing law enforcement increases the flow of trafficking,” he says. “If demand is not challenged, then sexual exploitation will continue and will increase.”

Basis, a pro-sex work organisation, says the zone means women are no longer arrested and stigmatised. Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

I ask Gemma Sciré about rumours of trafficking. She calls it a “very difficult term” and says that in their experience, the majority of women working in the zone are doing so of their own free will. Sciré says there are “migrant sex workers” in the zone who come from countries such as Romania and Poland and says they don’t have much contact with them because “clearly they are fearful of authorities because of previous experience in their own countries”.

For Basis, the benefits of the zone are that women are no longer being arrested and stigmatised, has better access to its services, and can be helped to find alternatives to prostitution. But what about the punters?

On a street just outside of the zone, a lone man sits in his car, hazard lights on. I asked if he would be happy to talk to me about coming to the zone to pay for sex. I explained I was a journalist, and he agreed to talk.

“I get lonely,” says Henry*, “but I’m too selfish to put up with somebody 24-hours a day. I like female company so this is a good arrangement. They get money for their drugs or whatever, and I can release some frustration. Mind you, some of the girls don’t make any effort at all.”

I asked Henry if any of the women have pimps. “Most have a pimp or a boyfriend who’s sending her out for his drugs,” he says. He tells me that he has witnessed a lot of violence on the zone from “angry, drunken blokes”. I asked if he often sees police in the area, and he tells me “no”. “They ride around sometimes just so they are seen, but other than that, we can do what we like. That’s how it should be, it’s a free country.”

Does it work, I ask Henry? “It works for me,” he says.

*Names have been changed to protect identities