Putting victims first: Renewing the UK commitment to the safety of victims of trafficking and modern slavery.

Introduction:

These recommendations set out future looking proposals from Modern Slavery experts to help ensure that victims of human trafficking and modern slavery are once again put first. These recommendations are designed to deliver long term transformational changes.

They will significantly improve how this country protects victims of modern slavery and human trafficking, and punishes the criminals of such crimes over the course of a new Government and into the future.

About the authors:

All the contributors are providers of support to victims under the Modern Slavery Victim Care Contract. This includes The Salvation Army and 12 other subcontractors. Together we form the collective of professionals who interact and engage with all potential adult victims in the National Referral Mechanism. Since 2011, we have supported a total of 21,824 recovering survivors of Modern Slavery. This puts us in a unique position to see how the sector has evolved over the last 13 years and how this has been experienced by survivors we support.

We represent the views of the people we support, and are advocating for an environment that places psychological and physical safety of victims above all else. We have drawn on our professional knowledge and expertise in both primary and secondary legislation to suggest small changes, that would have significant impact on supporting victims and reducing the cadence of this terrible crime in the UK.

Recommendations:

1. Suspend the application of Sections 22-29 of the Illegal Migration Act 2023, and assess the impact of the Nationality and Borders Act 2022.
2. Undertake a comprehensive review of the National Referral Mechanism (NRM).
3. Introduce the Right to Work for all survivors.
4. Conduct a thorough impact assessment into the legal aid crisis in the UK and invest in the legal aid infrastructure.
5. introduce more specialist police investigation teams, invest in victim navigators, and consult CPS and relevant law enforcement bodies, to increase the number of prosecutions for perpetratorsEnsure the lived experience of victims of human trafficking and modern slavery is used to inform future policy.

Read further details here.