Modern Slavery Act 2015: 10th Anniversary

Chris Murray Excerpts

Thursday 27th March 2025 Commons Chamber

[Mrs Sarah Russell (Congleton) (Lab)]

I thank the right hon. Member for Staffordshire Moorlands (Dame Karen Bradley) for securing the debate; I know she is a great champion for these issues.

The Global Slavery Index estimates that 122,000 people are living in conditions of slavery in the UK, and over 19,000 victims were referred to the national referral mechanism in the last year alone. My constituency of Congleton is absolutely beautiful, and most of it has a low crime rate by national standards, but this problem is so widespread that it will be occurring in my constituency, because it is occurring everywhere. The figure of 122,000 people is significant; that is roughly one and a half times the number of people in my constituency.

We often talk in this Chamber about violence against women and girls. That subject is extremely important, and I will talk about it in the context of modern slavery, but of those who were referred to the national referral mechanism last year, 72% were men. The people most common referred were UK nationals. Children constituted about 31% of referrals. In 48% of those cases, the referral was for criminal exploitation, and about 78% of those referred were boys. It is crucial that we keep up the pressure to reduce and remove violence against women and girls, but it is critical that we are aware of how much violence there still is in society against boys and men.

There are lots of different ways in which modern slavery occurs in the UK, and its diversity makes it more difficult to tackle. For men, it often occurs in the agricultural and building sectors, and in takeaways. The growth in the takeaway sector in the UK means that large numbers of takeaways are operating from warehouses, where the workers are completely unseen. Many of them are earning incredibly little. If people can order a takeaway for less money than it would cost to cook the same meal at home, the chances are that that has come about through modern slavery.

[Chris Murray (Edinburgh East and Musselburgh) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend is making an important point about industries such as takeaways being sites of modern slavery. In my local council, East Lothian, there has been a pilot scheme looking specifically at the takeaway industry, and at what regulations local authorities can put in place to allow them to enter premises to see what kind of modern slavery is taking place. It is an interesting pilot, and I wanted to draw her attention and the attention of the House to it.

[Mrs Russell]

I thank my hon. Friend for drawing that to my attention; I am very interested to hear about it. I am pleased to report that the overwhelming majority of takeaways in my constituency remain physical premises that also operate as restaurants, but I am aware that that is not necessarily the case in the whole of my local authority area, and certainly not across the whole country.

I was shocked when I found out about the large number of children, especially boys, who are being referred, and about what is happening. Often, older gang members find vulnerable young boys, some as young as 10 or 11, and ask them to “look after” some drugs for them for a little bit—“Could you just hold them for me, very briefly?” Those gang members will then arrange for those boys to be viciously beaten up. Those boys will then be told that they have lost the drugs and now owe the gang members a whole load of money, and they will be put to work as county lines drug dealers from an incredibly young age. It is an absolutely horrific means of exploiting young boys, particularly vulnerable children, and we need to be as aware of it as we are of the way in which grooming gangs operate around girls.

I will move on to how this issue particularly affects women and girls. I will say one thing: I really, really wish that men—it is predominantly men—would stop using prostitutes. Could they just stop? The number of women being brought to the UK under false pretences and believing that they will do a different form of work, then being put to sex work against their will, kept in physically confined situations that they are not allowed to leave and having their passport taken away from them is really significant. The other thing that happens is that some women come here knowing that that might be an element of their work. If they then complain about it or want to stop, they are told that their children back home will be harmed if they do, so they are unable to go to the police when they are being systematically raped. I say to men: please, please stop using prostitutes.

I know that Cheshire police are taking all these issues very seriously and doing their best, but the best way to stop us having a market for criminal activity is for people to stop buying criminally traded goods, whether that is vapes, tobacco, drugs or women.

The final element of human trafficking I will talk about is in the care sector. Many people in the Chamber have heard me talk about this topic before, so I do not want to labour it, but the Gangmasters and Labour Abuse Authority licensing scheme does not extend to the care sector, so agencies and sponsors are seizing opportunities to exploit other people for their own financial gain. A lot of people in my community receive care paid for either by the local authority, and therefore by the taxpayer ultimately, or with people’s life savings. They would be absolutely horrified if they realised the number of people doing that work who had been trafficked here in the first place.

Other hon. Members have mentioned the various organisations working in this area, one of which is Unseen, which talks about regularly speaking on its helpline to members of the care profession who have paid somewhere between £11,000 and £30,000 to get here, when they should not be paying anything other than their own travel expenses. Some 4% of victims have been threatened with either direct personal harm or harm to their family members. Actual, physical harm was reported in 2% of the cases that came to that helpline. Nearly half of victims described confinement or restricted movement.

The list of things that have gone on is genuinely, absolutely horrendous. I suggest that when the Fair Work Agency takes over the GLAA’s responsibilities, we ensure that licensing is brought into this sector or otherwise look at how the visa regime can be changed, so that people can transfer between employers, and how we can generally stamp out the level of exploitation in the care sector.

I thank everyone who has participated in this debate. I know there is a lot of strong feeling across the House that we can and should do a lot better for vulnerable people in this country.

[Chris Murray (Edinburgh East and Musselburgh) (Lab)]

I pay tribute to the right hon. Member for Staffordshire Moorlands (Dame Karen Bradley), both for securing this debate and for her legacy in this field. As the Chair of the Home Affairs Committee, her ongoing commitment to the issue is palpable, and I look forward to working with her on it in the years ahead.

We are 10 years on from the Modern Slavery Act. While I am not in the habit of praising the Home Office under the previous Conservative Government, I am not so nakedly partisan that I cannot break that habit on this occasion. It is true that the UK’s Modern Slavery Act was world leading. Its Scottish counterpart, the Human Trafficking and Exploitation (Scotland) Act 2015, which is also 10 years old this year, was equally groundbreaking. While we recognise that, we must also admit that although the Act took us two steps forward, we have undoubtedly gone one step back.

The terms “modern slavery” and “human trafficking” strike fear into our hearts and capture our attention. They sound like the stuff of a TV drama, and frequently they do involve the most horrific, vivid crimes in society and the worst of humanity, but we must not let that fool us into thinking that modern slavery only happens at the extremes, or only in the big metropolitan city far from us—it happens everywhere, in every community and every constituency. As we have heard from several hon. Members today, it affects men as well as women; its victims are children as well as adults; it affects British people as much as foreign nationals, and indeed more than foreign nationals; and it is labour exploitation as much as it is sexual exploitation.

[Ms Julie Minns (Carlisle) (Lab)]

On my hon. Friend’s point about modern slavery happening everywhere, Carlisle is the most northerly city in England. On 3 October 2018, officers from Cumbria police, the National Crime Agency, and investigators from the Gangmasters and Labour Abuse Authority freed a man who had been kept in captivity on the outskirts of Carlisle for 40 years. He was vulnerable because of his learning disability, and had variously “lived”—been kept—in a horse box and in a disused caravan. When he was found, he was in a damp, rotten garden shed with neither heating nor lighting. The window did not close, the water poured through the door, and his makeshift bed was congealed with vomit.

Does my hon. Friend agree that the fact that someone could be kept in such a circumstance for 40 years on the outskirts of one of England’s cities should shame us all, and that we should recommit ourselves to ensuring that every single person who might still be in that circumstance is found and freed in the same way that that gentleman was?

--- Later in debate ---

[Chris Murray]

I thank my hon. Friend for making that really important point. I remember reading about that case; it is one of the most horrific ones, but there are so many horrific cases of modern slavery. It is taking place on every high street in Britain, and we have to be completely vigilant about finding it everywhere.

Today, I want to talk about the public policy response to this appalling crime. Obviously, it is a dramatic, wicked crime; we have the blandly named national referral mechanism as our tool, and to be honest, that tool is currently all but broken down. In the words of the Home Secretary when she came to the Home Affairs Committee before Christmas, the NRM

“has become a bit stuck”.

There are huge delays in victims getting a decision on the national referral mechanism. We heard evidence this week that the mean waiting time is 831 days. That is beyond unacceptable: it is systemic dysfunction.

To be clear, that is not just a number; it has a real cost. The real-world implication of that number is re-trafficking. Women who are trafficked for sex and then come to the state for help end up back in the hands of their traffickers because of our delays. Children who are locked in houses and forced to farm cannabis in appalling conditions, who then manage to escape and come to us for help, end up back with their torturers because of our sheer incompetence. We should not be congratulating ourselves today on the passage of historic legislation; we should be hanging our heads in shame at what is happening on our watch. I hope that today, the Minister will set out a clear plan to clear the backlog, and will also recognise that doing so will not be some huge step of progress, but will just get us back to the baseline that we should be at.

I draw the House’s attention to the child trafficking pilot that has been running for the past five years; I am so glad that my hon. Friend the Member for Worcester (Tom Collins) referred to it. I should probably declare an interest, as I was involved in setting up its Scottish iteration, but it is worth our attention, because it has devolved decision making in the NRM to a panel of local stakeholders—people from social work and from education, the police, psychologists and others who know the child’s case—and empowers them to adjudicate whether that child is a victim of trafficking or not. It has been extremely successful, with decisions taken more quickly and with higher quality, because the people who know that child’s case are better placed to make a decision than an official in Whitehall.

Before coming here, I worked on preventing human trafficking for five years. I know that the issue is complex and difficult, but I also encountered some of the most effective public servants I have ever seen in my time, such as the Trafficking Awareness Raising Alliance in Glasgow, led by Bronagh Andrew, which cares for women trafficked into Scotland for commercial sexual exploitation; and Joy Gillespie, who advocates for survivors of trafficking in Scotland. The most impressive programme I have seen in five years of anti-trafficking is this pilot in Glasgow. The Minister and I have corresponded on the pilot previously, and I strongly encourage the Government to look at rolling it out more broadly.

I make two final points about the steps that the new Government are taking on modern slavery. First, on labour exploitation, the Employment Rights Bill—a landmark piece of legislation that I could not be prouder to support—scraps the Gangmasters and Labour Abuse Authority and establishes the Fair Work Agency, as many have said. That is all to the good, but the Fair Work Agency has a mammoth task enforcing the minimum wage and employment rights across the whole workforce. Are we sure it will have the focus and resource to tackle modern slavery, too? Will it have the right relationships with the police, because that will be critical to ensure enforcement? We must remember that this crime is everywhere and in every community.

Moreover, when the FWA is up and running, the Home Office will lose sponsorship of the GLAA, and the responsibility will be subsumed into the Department for Business and Trade. Is that the right place for modern slavery responsibilities? From my experience, I remember the GLAA being significantly under-resourced. In order to inspect all of Scotland’s fisheries, agriculture and farming, it had only one inspector. That clearly was not enough. Will we have more now? What plans do the Government have in place to ensure that modern slavery is not deprioritised?

Secondly, on the panoply of new developments that we have had as the new Government have hit the ground running, there have been some that I have been particularly pleased to see. Not only is there the new Fair Work Agency, but cuckooing will be made a specific offence; grooming will be an aggravating factor in child sex offender prosecutions; and a range of new measures will be introduced to halve violence against women and girls. I could not welcome those steps more, but is there a coherent strategy to ensure they are being fully deployed to tackle modern slavery? Are we marshalling the power of Government to target these new measures at the perpetrators of these crimes?

When can we expect to see that robust modern slavery strategy? I ask that because this issue needs ministerial grip. Without clear ministerial direction, law enforcement cannot put resources into it. Without law enforcement prioritising the resources, there are no investigations. Without investigations, there is no justice. We should think of the woman who came to the British state and asked for help, only for our administrative incompetence to mean she is back in the hands of her traffickers, being pimped out to be raped multiple times every day. We have failed her once already. We need a strategy to ensure that we do not do so again.

Will that modern slavery strategy take account of new developments in modern slavery in the last 10 years? I am pleased that the hon. Member for Wimbledon (Mr Kohler) and others mentioned the exploitation of visas in the care sector, but we are also seeing that with student visas, the EU settlement scheme and elsewhere. Will the new White Paper on legal migration be fully modern slavery-proofed so that we do not allow new routes to open up? I note that the Scottish Government have finally got around to refreshing their human trafficking strategy. I would argue that is a long overdue step, but it is also a good opportunity to ensure we get coherence across the whole UK.

As we mark 10 years since the Modern Slavery Act was passed, it is clear we still have our work cut out for us. I, for one, am willing to work with anyone inside or outside this Chamber to get it done.