Are the UK authorities letting down survivors of modern slavery?

The adoption of the Slavery Convention 100 years ago was a landmark moment for the international prohibition of slavery. It also laid foundations for human rights movements across the world. The United Kingdom played an important role in the global abolitionist movement and the development of human rights law. The centenary of the convention was therefore an opportunity to assess how effectively it is meeting those commitments today. International anti-trafficking law requires states to prevent and combat human trafficking, protect victims and their human rights and cooperate with other states. The term “modern slavery” is used to describe severe exploitation including human trafficking, forced labour, servitude and slavery. It is the product of multiple systems that can both prevent exploitation and, at the same time, create the conditions for it. It cannot be tackled effectively if the policies governing immigration, employment, business and criminal justice are considered separately. Immigration rules can create, intensify, or mitigate someone’s vulnerability to exploitation. Labour market regulation can either prevent poor working conditions from escalating into forced labour or allow exploitation to become entrenched. Criminal justice determines both how we hold exploiters accountable and how we treat people who commit offences as a result of exploitation. These systems are governed separately, whilst people experiencing severe exploitation encounter issues simultaneously. Labour exploitation illustrates this. It accounted for 45% of all adult cases of modern slavery referred to the national referral mechanism in 2025. More than nine in ten of these people were migrant workers. This points to challenges beyond those that the Modern Slavery Act 2015, a centrepiece of the UK’s laws in this area, is currently addressing. If migrant workers are disproportionately represented among those experiencing labour exploitation, we must ask how the immigration and labour market rules governing their recruitment and employment themselves create or exacerbate vulnerability. Social care provides an example. International workers have been recruited to meet serious workforce shortages, yet the government has acknowledged large-scale non-compliance and exploitation in the sector. Workers recognised as modern slavery victims will soon be able to change employer rather than remain tied to an exploiting sponsor. But that protection comes after a survivor is identified. More action is needed before exploitation becomes sufficiently severe to be labelled modern slavery. The UK has relied heavily on requiring companies to report what they are doing about modern slavery in their supply chains. Reporting alone is not enough, and the UK is falling behind other countries when it comes to regulating company activities. This risks this country becoming a “dumping ground” for goods produced with forced labour. When one policy undermines another Immigration enforcement and victim protection provide perhaps the clearest examples of policies working against each other. Human rights law requires states to identify potential victims irrespective of the victim’s conduct. Yet the recently introduced immigration and asylum bill requires delayed disclosure, omissions, and inconsistencies to count against a person’s credibility when making a claim about exploitation. Claims made by adults facing removal from the UK must be treated as made in bad faith, excluding them from protection. These measures shift responsibility for identification from the state onto individual victims, despite knowledge that people most in need of protection may be least able to recognise themselves as victims. They struggle to disclose exploitation promptly, or provide a complete and consistent account of their experience. Failure to identify victims also allows exploiters to escape investigation and punishment. The bill also removes recovery from physical or psychological harm caused by the exploitation as a basis for temporary leave to remain, despite recovery and protection being a precondition for a person’s decision to engage with law enforcement. This in turn risks weakening already low rates of prosecution. For people experiencing exploitation, these are not abstract issues. They determine whether someone is recognised and supported, can leave an exploitative job, or feels able to approach authorities without risking detention or removal. A ‘whole-systems’ response needs evidence A coherent response requires data, yet basic gaps remain in what we know about modern slavery in the UK. We lack data on labour exploitation by sector and occupation, repeat referrals, limiting understanding of re-trafficking, compensation received by survivors, or the prevalence of survivors within custodial settings in the UK. Most significantly, there is a glaring evidence gap around claims that the referral system is being abused. In 2025, 23,411 potential victims were referred, yet of 224 confirmed disqualifications, only six were on grounds of bad faith. Without robust evidence, we cannot know whether policies prevent exploitation, displace it elsewhere, or increase vulnerability. The Slavery Convention was initially signed in 1926 by 20 countries. Wikipedia One hundred years after the Slavery Convention, the UK has many of the tools needed to tackle modern slavery, but they are not working in sync. Today’s key challenge is to build a coherent “whole-systems” approach underpinned by robust evidence and informed by lived experience. Immigration, labour regulation, business accountability, victim protection, and criminal justice must reinforce rather than undermine each other.