PROSTITUTION complaints are down in Southend but officers need to be constantly vigilant to keep the problem at bay, the town’s police chief has said.

District commander Simon Anslow discussed the issue with Essex Police and Crime Commissioner Nick Alston at a public meeting held at Chase High School on Thursday.

He said the number of calls the force received about prostitution, which mainly centred on the Kursaal area, had reduced significantly since the introduction of Operation Tressle in 2009 when the force received 179 calls in just three months.

By contast, only four calls were made in the last two months of 2014, he said but this was only because of a constant intensive focus on the problem.

He said: “It’s a really deep, intractable problem that’s been in the area for a long while.

“I’m not satisfied with it and we will continue to work to put it down because, when we put resources in, it comes down but when we divert them elsewhere, it goes up.

“So we will continue to tackle it.”

However, he added although reports of street working prostitutes had gone down, there had been a general increase in the number of premises reported as brothels in 2014.