A NEW survey has shown that Britons are sleeping with more sexual partners than they were 10 years ago and that risky sex is on the increase.

The study, charting the sexual behaviour of the nation, shows that overlapping relationships, homosexual experiences and visits to prostitutes are all more common.

According to the second National Survey of Sexual Attitudes And Lifestyles, co-ordinated by the Medical Research Council, one in 23 men have paid for sex in the past five years and this figure rises to one in 11 men living in London.

By comparison, only one in 48 men across the UK admitted to paying a prostitute the last time the survey was conducted in 1990.

In addition, around 5 per cent of both sexes reported ever having a homosexual relationship this time around, compared to 3.6 per cent of men and just 1.8 per cent of women a decade ago.

The average number of heterosexual partners for men in the past five years has increased to four (from three in 1990) although for women the number has stayed static at two.

After quizzing 11,000 people, aged 16 to 44, for the new study, the researchers further found that half of all people with a new partner in the past year had sex within a month of meeting. A quarter of the men and nearly a third of the women questioned had sex before they were 16.

Not surprisingly, one might think, there has been a boom in sexually-transmitted infections too with one in 10 adults having suffered this problem.

This tallies with figures which have just been released by the Public Health Laboratory Service (PHLS), which show that STDs have rocketed in the past five years, while HIV is showing no sign of decline.

Diagnoses of gonorrhoea, syphilis and chlamydia in England, Wales and Northern Ireland have more than doubled between 1995 and 2000, according to the PHLS statistics. The year 2000 also saw the highest number of HIV diagnoses yet in the UK.

The impression given by these two reports is that people in Britain are leading increasingly promiscuous lives and to heck with the consequences.

So have we become a more selfish nation and is modern life in some way to blame for a shift in sexual attitudes?

Dr Kevin Fenton, a senior lecturer in epidemiology at University College, London and one of the researchers for the National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles, says attitudes have probably altered.

There is more discussion about sexual topics on television, he points out, and sex is used by advertisers to sell more products now.

It is a changing social environment, I think, which is facilitating greater discussion about sexual matters," he said.

"Whether this is forcing behavioural change, it is difficult to say, but what we can say is that it is certainly not opposing it. It is creating an environment where people feel much more safe to experiment.

People have become more tolerant of different types of relationships, Dr Fenton says, and the social barriers which were previously in place are being removed.

It is because of the changing role of religion in our lives and changing demographic patterns, so we are getting married later and having children later.

Therefore we have more opportunities to have sexual relationships without some of the constraints we had many years ago.

However, Dr Fenton does not feel this increasing openness is necessarily a bad thing and nor does he think we are behaving more outrageously or selfishly than we did in the past.

I don't think we are becoming worse. I think we are becoming more honest about what we want and what we actually do and how we are actually feeling about that," he said.

However, Dr Fenton does stress that the increasing freedom we have carries increasing responsibilities to have safe sex.

Dr Ros Branwell, a reproductive health psychologist at the University of Liverpool, says people are not necessarily more promiscuous than they were say in the 1950s.

It is very easy to get into disagreements about people's sexual behaviour in the past, she said.

Certainly there have, in the past, been some very promiscuous people and people have always tended to make comparisons with the generation before and say that younger generations are behaving more badly than they ever used to.

But how would you know? It's very difficult to even know about people's sexual behaviour when you ask them right now.

Dr Branwell points out that people often lie. Sometimes they pretend they have less sex than they really do and sometimes they pretend they have more.

Even Robert Whelan, director of the charity Family & Youth Concern which promotes the traditional family based on marriage, does not think the nation is now filled with selfish people who are happily sleeping around.

He says there are and always have been a small proportion of people who are promiscuous and never think twice about it but: "The majority of people in the country have quite traditional views about relationships. All the opinion polls show that most people want to get married, have kids and stay married.

For a large number of people, he says, this doesn't happen. Things go wrong and they end up becoming single parents, getting divorced or cohabiting but that doesn't mean it was their first choice".

Mr Whelan, in fact, believes that the National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles, suggests that Britons are not all having a good time sexually.

One of the interesting things that did emerge is the increase in the number of men using prostitutes. That to me is not an indication of a society where people are having lots of jolly sexual encounters, it is a sign of loneliness.

By this view, modern society may be to blame for an increase in sexual partners. But it is caused by our increasing isolation and failure to achieve the marriage ideal that many still people want rather than the fact that we are all selfishly happy.