There has been another year-on-year substantial rise in the number of potential victims of modern slavery in the UK, highlighting the huge scale of this issue.
Home Office figures published today show there were 19,125 people referred into the National Referral Mechanism (NRM) – the UK Government’s system for formally identifying and providing support for victims – in 2024, up 13% on the previous year.
A 78% increase in the number of conclusive grounds decisions that were made compared to the previous year shows that the Government is keeping its pledge to deal with the backlog of NRM decisions. However, Hope for Justice is very concerned by the number of negative initial decisions being made by the Home Office, meaning that potential victims cannot access the support they need to recover. This year they made the lowest proportion of positive reasonable grounds decisions in any given year since the NRM began.
Photo credit: From the series Invisible People © Rory Carnegie for National Crime Agency
Reasonable grounds decisions are a gateway into further support for survivors of modern slavery. This initial decision gives potential victims access to a safe house, legal aid, financial support and a support worker, under the Modern Slavery Victim Care Contract (MSVCC).
It is important to highlight that people are only entered into the NRM system by First Responders – authorised agencies who are equipped to identify potential victims, gather information and make referrals. Responders include the police, UK Border Force, Home Office Immigration and Visas, social services and certain NGOs, including The Salvation Army. First Responders enter people into the NRM because they believe they have been exploited or trafficked. They are often a first point of contact for survivors seeking help.
In 2024, the Home Office made 20,090 reasonable grounds decisions and 17,304 conclusive grounds decisions; of these, only 53% of reasonable grounds and 56% of conclusive grounds decisions were positive (compared to 55% and 65% in 2023).
This high number of negative initial decisions leaves survivors who the Home Office fails to identify as victims unable to access specialist support and at risk of further harm, including homelessness and re-exploitation.
If only 53% of potential victims of modern slavery receive a reasonable grounds decision, that is 47% of people – who are believed to be a potential victim by a First Responder – who are not getting access to support. Hope for Justice believes there will be huge ramifications to this.
Euan Fraser, Hope for Justice’s Senior Policy and Research Advisor, said: “Again, we have seen a significant increase in the number of potential victims of modern slavery identified in the UK. It is vital that our response to modern slavery puts survivors’ needs first as it is only by offering survivors protection and assistance that we will break cycles of exploitation.
Last year the Home Office committed to clearing the backlog of people waiting for a decision on whether or not they will be recognised as a victim of modern slavery. We welcome efforts to make these decisions more swiftly to avoid potential victims being held in limbo for long periods of time. However, the statistics published today confirm that almost 50% of people referred to the Home Office, by First Responder organisations (law and immigration enforcement, local authorities and expert NGOs), are deemed not to be victims and therefore denied access to support. This follows changes to law and policy in recent years, which raised the threshold for who should be considered a victim.
Swift decision making is helpful, but it must be done within a framework which offers meaningful protection to people often in very precarious situations. The increase in negative decisions has undoubtedly led to many survivors of modern slavery being excluded from support services, which can have a detrimental impact on their recovery, as well as reducing the likelihood of them being able to engage with criminal processes and helping to hold traffickers to account. Sadly, again we are also seeing a large proportion of people choosing not to enter the NRM, which indicates that trust in the system is not particularly high.
We would urge the Government to work with people with lived and learned experience to reconsider how survivors are identified and supported in order to help ensure they can achieve a sustainable recovery and to see traffickers held to account.”
The impact of the Nationality and Borders Act and changes to the guidance for First Responders and Home Office decision-makers have raised the threshold for survivors to be formally identified and to receive a positive initial NRM decision. The threshold for a positive reasonable grounds decision was revised in January 2023, July 2023 and again in January this year. It would suggest that these changes are the reason for the huge drop in the number of potential victims receiving positive decisions.
It is important to note that, whilst the UK’s NRM statistics provide an indication of the scale of the number of victims in the UK, it is not a good estimate of overall prevalence. The Global Slavery Index, 2023, suggests the number of modern slavery victims in the UK could be as many as 122,000. You can read our briefing document on modern slavery and human trafficking in the UK here.
The new figures also show the highest number of referrals under the Duty to Notify (DtN) process, overtaking the record from the previous year. This is a separate system for suspected adult victims of modern slavery who do not consent to sharing their details and going through the NRM process. In 2024, there were 5,598 reports of adult potential victims, compared with 4,929 in 2023. The rising number of people who choose not to enter the system raises questions about what the NRM offers to survivors and their faith in the system.
Whilst the NRM statistics do not present the full picture, the demographics of those who were referred to the NRM offer important insights for where we can target our efforts to prevent further exploitation. For example, 74% of referrals were male, suggesting we should consider what interventions are necessary to offer protections for men and young boys. Also, many of those referred to the NRM are from countries impacted by crises such as climate change and conflict: how can the UK’s international response to these issues reduce the risks of human trafficking?
