Modern Slavery Act 2015 Committee Report

Lord Kempsell Excerpts

Friday 28th March 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Kempsell (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord and all my fellow committee members in this debate. I add my thanks to all of them and to everyone involved with this post-legislative scrutiny work. I particularly thank the noble Baroness, Lady O’Grady, for her work chairing this committee. On the Conservative side, we now know that we need trade unionists to chair committees really effectively.

This was a committee which had to examine some very difficult and troubling material. It had to deal with some issues in immigration policy which are very divisive. All the way through the committee’s deliberations, it was carried out in the best spirit of your Lordships’ House, so thank you. Before I go any further, I also put my thanks on record to the staff and our expert adviser, whom I am not sure we have yet mentioned, and for all the help the House provided in putting together our report.

I would also like to record just how affecting and moving I found much of the evidence to be. We have heard of so many ways to think about modern slavery; it is a complex topic. Perhaps one very straightforward way to think about it is through the prism that it is a crime. It is a crime which is having a terrible impact on some of the most vulnerable people in the United Kingdom and in communities more widely.

I want to highlight some of the findings of the evidence in our report about the links between modern slavery and other forms of offending, including the running of county lines drugs gangs, which previous Administrations tried very hard in various iterations to tackle. The impact of modern slavery runs far beyond its immediate victims into the economy, into standards in employment, into healthcare and into many sectors. That is why we must do everything we can to redouble our efforts to eradicate this crime.

That leads us to the difficult question: how? Even as this post-legislative scrutiny exercise found, legislation alone is never the full picture; enforcement is key. Our committee heard repeated evidence about a lack of resources, a lack of focus and uncertainty about best practices and priorities in the enforcement architecture. I have to say—perhaps I am not alone among noble Lords—that I found the overlapping domains of different agencies quite confusing. Perhaps it is a prime example of the incoherence of some of the modern British state. Despite the great minds that we had assembled on the committee, I found it difficult to keep track of just which enforcement agency was responsible precisely for what. In the design of the Government’s new enforcement architecture, it will be important to keep in mind the findings of this committee that those overlapping and unclear areas of aegis and remit can slow down and impact enforcement.

On the brighter spots in the enforcement landscape, I was delighted to read recently that in my home county of Hertfordshire police are now using slavery and trafficking prevention orders to tackle gangs which exploit children to distribute drugs. There are powerful civil orders in this Act, as the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, referred to. These orders can be used to ban foreign travel, ban criminals working with young people and place restrictions on them contacting vulnerable individuals. They are also being well deployed by Essex Police, one of the first forces in the country to deploy the slavery and trafficking risk order. That is why I was pleased to read in the Government’s response to our committee report that the further deployment and more effective use of those orders is a priority for the Government.



Given my noble friend Lord Smith’s reference to the low prosecution rate of just 1.8%, it is no wonder that people are asking whether the measures available to law enforcement under the Act are being used to their full potential. That statistic brings me to another area of concern I had when I was working on the committee: data or the lack of it. I was particularly struck by the evidence of Sir Bernard Silverman, the former Chief Scientific Adviser to the Home Office, who pointed out that there are many different ways of measuring these crimes, but none is inherently reliable because they all have assumptions built into them and various drawbacks. Modern slavery is a hidden crime in many ways; you cannot measure it as you would other offences. Therefore, I urge your Lordships’ House to consider the recommendations we make about data and improving the Government’s understanding of that field.

I realise that I may very well be in the minority in saying this, but I would use the same caution when coming to a fixed view about whether the modern slavery architecture is open to abuse by bad actors, who themselves are not victims of modern slavery but are trying to exploit the asylum system. That claim cannot be immediately dismissed out of hand; we simply do not have the necessary evidence. That is why I am pleased that the committee concluded in its report:

“The Government should develop a sound evidence base to inform policy … Data should be sought as to whether and, if so, in what respects and by whom the modern slavery system is being abused”.


Importantly, it says that that data should be published, rather than just being held by the Government.

Overall, after engaging in the work of the committee, I have concluded that, at the heart of fighting modern slavery, we need tougher policing and a more effective immigration system. With that in place, we would be better equipped and in a better position to crack down on this crime. I know that, across your Lordships’ House, there is a consensus that we must do all we can to fix that.