A cruel legal paradox is blocking victims modern slavery from justice

After the Home Office confirmed that Amir* was a victim of modern slavery, he was given two options for work. Return to the employer he had fled in the middle of the night, who brought him from Bangladesh to enslave him in a restaurant, forcing him to work exhaustingly long days for very little pay. Or he could not work at all. 

When Amir requested a temporary immigration status for Victims of Trafficking or Slavery (also called VTS leave) that would allow him to work for a different employer, recover and rebuild his life, the Home Office refused. In the Home Office’s eyes, Amir already had a perfectly valid visa. It didn’t matter to the Home Office that the right to work on this visa was unusable.

The Home Office was acting in line with a clause in the Nationality and Borders Act 2022 that has created a perverse situation where the Home Office will not grant a new immigration status - VTS leave - to a victim of slavery if they still have a visa, even if that visa ties them to their exploiter. 

Of course, Amir could not go back to the employer he reported to the police on multiple occasions for threatening him and his colleagues, who had been forced to live in squalid conditions above the restaurant. Denied the right to work anywhere else, Amir has been trapped in a limbo status for 18 months -unable to rebuild his self-confidence through work, or earn the money needed to hop on a bus, join a sports centre, or engage with the world around him. 

Shut out from the normalcy of a job, his interactions limited to police investigators or other residents of the safe house, his PTSD spiralled. To make matters even worse, his Skilled Worker status was eventually revoked, despite him actively supporting the criminal investigation against his enslavers until an immigration solicitor from the Work Rights Centre stepped in. 

VTS leave and Section 65(1)(b): a legal paradox failing migrant victims of modern slavery

Introduced by then Home Secretary Priti Patel under Prime Minister Boris Johnson, the Nationality and Borders Act 2022 fundamentally reshaped the UK's asylum landscape. Tucked within that sweeping ( and highly criticised) legislation was the introduction of VTS leave: a “temporary permission to stay for confirmed victims of human trafficking or slavery”. It was ostensibly created to provide a lifeline for victims of human trafficking, assisting in their physical and psychological recovery.

Because it comes with the unrestricted right to work and claim public funds (though it is not a path to settlement), VTS leave provides victims of modern slavery with a critical lifeline to recovery. Importantly, it also offers them the basic security they need to aid police investigations against the perpetrators, and seek compensation through the tribunal service. 

It is in the interests of every single person in the UK that perpetrators of modern slavery and human trafficking are caught, prosecuted, and put behind bars. At the time, campaigners fought incredibly hard to include this modicum of protection for migrant victims of modern slavery.

But a clause in the Nationality and Borders Act severely limits the efficacy of the legislation to achieve this end. Section 65(1)(b) means that foreign nationals who already have a valid immigration status are excluded from VTS leave.

This works if a person is already undocumented, for example, they were trafficked into the country by clandestine means, such as concealed in a lorry, or their previous visa expired while they were being exploited. But if the individual still holds a valid immigration status, most commonly the worker visa that ties them to their exploiter, this protection is denied. 

By excluding migrants with valid leave from VTS, Section 65(1)(b) fails on two counts. It betrays migrant victims of slavery, denying them the security of a new immigration status; and it creates an extraordinary, perverse incentive to become undocumented to become eligible for leave. 

This is fundamentally against the purpose of reflection and recovery underlying modern slavery legislation. In the NRM, a “conclusive grounds” decision acts as a finding of fact that an individual is a confirmed victim of modern slavery. This means that having looked at all the evidence, the Home Office’s Single Competent Authority agrees there are conclusive grounds to believe this person is a victim. This alone should be grounds for temporary protected immigration status. 

To deny a person VTS leave even after a conclusive grounds decision has been made, our Head of Immigration, Luke Piper explains, undermines the finding that they are a victim of slavery or trafficking. For many people who have been trafficked to the UK for domestic servitude, forced labour or abuse in the sex industry, accepting that they are a victim is the crucial first stage of recovery. If they cannot accept this, they are vulnerable to the same forms of manipulative control or abuse, which can lead to re-trafficking. 

The clause also flies in the face of Article 14 of the Europe Convention on Action against Trafficking in Human Beings (ECAT), which states that victims of trafficking should have their immigration status renewed to support their personal recovery and support official investigations.

Section 65(1)(b) must be revoked 

We urgently need a policy change. Keeping migrant victims of modern slavery in legal limbo is not only betraying them and their recovery, but also undermining authorities’ abilities to crack down on exploiters. 

Home Office officials seem to quietly agree. On six occasions our immigration team has brought this legal paradox to the Home Office’s attention, and they have agreed to change course, granting our clients the VTS leave they desperately need. 

It is time for ministers to learn from this practice and update the policy. Granted, VTS is far from perfect - it’s often granted for too short a period, and the evidential threshold is prohibitively high. But until the government introduces an alternative leave for victims of modern slavery, VTS is the only lifeline they have.

How might we achieve this? A coalition of civil society organisations including Amnesty International, ATLEU, FLEX and the Helen Bamber Foundation, as well as political allies, have long warned that the Nationality and Borders Act is failing victims - we know there’s widespread appetite for reform. 

Last year, Liberal Democrat MPs championed an Amendment to the Border Security and Immigration Bill to repeal sections 12 to 65; and sections 68 and 69 of the Bill. Unfortunately, that amendment was not considered, but that’s not the only route to reform. 

We believe the Home Office can change its internal guidance to address this issue. In the longer term, the legislation must be revoked. The more time that passes without action, the greater the risk that perpetrators of modern slavery or human trafficking evade justice.

*Name changed for safety reasons