Room for improvement: Our submission to the Home Office's consultation on the identification of victims of modern slavery
We’ve submitted evidence to the Home Office demonstrating how the identification of victims of modern slavery, specifically sponsored migrant workers who have been affected by labour exploitation, is in need of improvement.
Despite in theory being eligible for support through the UK’s National Referral Mechanism (NRM), sponsored migrant workers are often overlooked in the identification process because of conflicting ideas about their agency and victim status, while successfully navigating through the NRM does not provide the security in terms of right to work and immigration status that our clients desperately need.
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What is the consultation about?
As part of broader efforts to reform the UK’s modern slavery system, the Home Office launched a consultation to understand the ways that the UK can have a more effective identification system for victims of modern slavery. In particular, the government wants to ensure that future systems recognise victims early and accurately so they can be protected and provided with appropriate assistance and support towards their recovery from exploitation.
Our consultation response has focused specifically on the identification process for exploited migrant workers who were subject to the UK’s sponsorship regime. In recent years, sponsored migrant workers have been subject to labour exploitation in many sectors, but perhaps most notably in social care, horticulture, construction, hospitality and more.
As a migrant-run organisation, the Work Rights Centre is well-suited to give evidence in this area. Our work over the last few years has focused on identifying the structural drivers of this exploitation, as well as assisting many affected individuals with employment and immigration advice, including navigating the NRM. Our response aims to highlight the particular nuances that affect exploited migrant workers in the identification process.
What is the experience of exploited migrant workers in the identification process?
When it comes to the NRM, our response identifies that the two-step process can be slightly problematic for migrant workers in practice. For example, we highlight how our engagement with some first responders suggests that a reasonable grounds style assessment is being made at a pre-referral stage, essentially producing a shunting effect in the fill identification and assessment process.
Generally, we identify a hardening in the assessment process for reasonable grounds decisions, which we believe to be a misunderstanding of the two-step framework in place. For sponsored migrant workers specifically, misunderstandings around their immigration status, the agency that they have to leave exploitative situations and their eligibility for support all contribute to an inconsistent pattern of identification, which makes it difficult to advise clients and build confidence in the NRM as a protective mechanism.
In addition, we note that while support following a conclusive grounds decision can be helpful for some of our clients who are destitute, there needs to be much greater certainty around this in terms of timeframe and how long support will be available for.
Similarly, our experience is that a conclusive grounds decision does not seem to carry much weight with the police in terms of further criminal investigations. We have had some cases quickly dismissed despite the client in question having received a conclusive grounds decision in their favour.
What needs to change to improve the identification process?
Our submission makes a number of suggestions to improve the identification process for sponsored migrant workers affected by labour exploitation. For example, we have suggested greater use of case studies and real-life examples in the Modern Slavery Statutory Guidance so that first responders are better able to interpret listed indicators.
Similarly, additional detail for first responders on what behaviours and stereotypes to avoid when making decisions about whether to refer someone as a potential victim of modern slavery e.g. avoiding making decisions purely or mainly on the basis of someone’s immigration status.
Given the ongoing demand for migrant workers internationally and the innovative techniques used to facilitate trafficking, we have encouraged the government to revise whether new trends around labour exploitation are being properly interpreted as falling within the scope of the Slavery and Human Trafficking (Definition of Victim) Regulations 2022.
We are particularly concerned that migrant visa workers, who were duped into paying unlawful and extortionate recruitment fees as part of their labour migration journey only to arrive in the UK to find no working opportunity at all (as opposed to being given reduced amounts of work), are not being properly considered for referral into the NRM.
The main example of this has been in the social care sector, where this dynamic arose for many sponsored migrant care workers who arrived under the Health and Care Worker visa - many of these cases were initially dismissed as being not suitable for the NRM, which we contest.
Finally, we suggest that there needs to be a more positive case being made for reporting potential victims of modern slavery within police forces specifically, as our experience suggests forces are operating with stretched resources and sometimes a more limited understanding of modern slavery as an issue more generally.
Overall, the benefits of a conclusive grounds decision being made in favour of individuals need to be much stronger if the NRM process is to afford the type of protection that would encourage greater victims of modern slavery to come forward in the first place.