Women involved in street prostitution in Bradford are to be encouraged to join a drugs intervention programme in a bid to curb the vice trade in the city.

The move is part of a strategy to tackle prostitution which aims to get vulnerable women out of the cycle of selling their bodies to pay for their drugs habit.

Nine out of ten street girls in Bradford are addicted to class A drugs and police see treatment, rather than fining prostitutes at court, as the answer.

Top level talks, involving police, Bradford Council, health bodies, voluntary sector agencies and the Drugs Intervention Programme, are under way to develop a strategy for dealing with vice in the district.

It aims to use the Government's long-term strategy for reducing prostitution, announced yesterday.

Detective Chief Inspector Simon Atkin, who is in charge of policing the vice trade in the district, said a lot of the suggestions by the Government were already in use.

He said: "We have been successful in many of the things we have been doing. It is a case of pulling all these lines together, but the vast majority are in place in Bradford."

The Government strategy calls for increased policing of kerb-crawling, with greater enforcement of penalties such as removing driving licences from repeat offenders.

It also plans to create a new penalty for soliciting for prostitution so courts can direct women into treatment for addiction.

Det Chief Insp Atkin said a key theme was to help prostitutes escape from prosecution as a way of life and get into treatment.

"We are looking at the means of getting them to enter the Drugs Intervention Programme, which would ultimately reduce the numbers involved in prostitution. It is already being used to good effect in Leeds in assisting working girls to exit prostitution."

He said police had been successful in Bradford in the use of Acceptable Behaviour Contracts to men caught kerb crawling, a ground-breaking scheme which has won praise from the Government.

If the contracts are broken the offenders can be given an Anti-Social Behaviour Order. But only two out of 57 men issued with ABCs have breached the contracts.

The scheme, called Operation Garrowby, could now be rolled out across the country, according to Ministers.

Police in Bradford have also been working closely with help organisations, like the Streets and Lanes and Working Womens projects, health workers and the Council to address the vice issue, as well as clamping down on saunas or massage parlours working as brothels.