Question to the Home Office:

To ask His Majesty's Government what recent assessment they have made of the number of people in modern slavery in the UK.

The hidden nature of modern slavery makes producing an accurate measure of its scale difficult.

In March 2020 the Office for National Statistics noted that there is no definitive source of data or suitable method available to accurately quantify the number of potential victims of modern slavery in the UK.

The Government is, however, committed to improving its understanding of the nature and scale of this complex crime. Since 2019, the Government has invested £10 million in the creation of the Policy and Evidence Centre for Modern Slavery and Human Rights to transform our understanding of modern slavery. The Home Office will continue working with the Centre and other partners to strengthen the evidence base underpinning our policy and operational response to modern slavery and to develop more robust ways to assess prevalence.