16
Examination of witnesses
Sir Bernard Silverman, Dr Rowland Seymour and Olivia Hesketh.
Q115 The Chair: Good afternoon and welcome to the House of Lords Modern Slavery 2015 Act Committee. We have a number of witnesses for our first panel this afternoon. We have Sir Bernard Silverman, who is emeritus professor of statistics at the University of Oxford; Dr Rowland Seymour, who is assistant professor in mathematics at the University of Birmingham; and Olivia Hesketh, who is director of policy impact at the Modern Slavery and Human Rights Policy Evidence Centre. Thank you all for coming to give evidence today.
Modern slavery, as we have heard many times on this committee, is a hidden crime and can be difficult to quantify. What methodologies can be applied to measure it? I guess you could apply them to the practical example of the number of victims in the UK and the assumptions underlying that, or indeed to the reliability of the estimated figure, produced by the Global Slavery Index, of 50 million victims worldwide.
Sir Bernard Silverman: I should explain that we have parcelled things out among ourselves to talk about, and I got this one.
I will give some background. You probably know that, when we were both in the Home Office, Olivia and I worked together on the estimate of the number of victims in 2013 when the strategy behind the Act was being worked out. We did that using a method called multiple systems estimation, which is that you collect the numbers of victims on various lists and try to collate those lists and use a mathematical approach to estimate the number that you did not see.
That was all based on the national referral mechanism, because in those days the number of cases on the NRM was 2,744—not like now. So we reckoned that the 2,744 cases came from a population of 10,000 to 13,000. That figure was bandied around at the time and is quite famous. That will not get you the whole picture, because there will be all those cases that would never have got on to the mechanism, and so on. So, naturally, that is probably quite an underestimate, but in the context it was a good idea to give an estimate that you could be sure about rather than one that contained all sorts of other notions.
There are lots of different ways of measuring, but none of them are all that reliable—let us be honest—because they all have assumptions, drawbacks and so on behind them. Normally, when you measure crime, you do it by victimisation survey and ask people whether they have been burgled or even attacked. With modern slavery it is very difficult to do that.
So various different methodologies have been used. The short answer is that a number of different methods can be used. There is an active research community in this, but there is an enormous amount that we do not know, and better data, as we will talk about later, would be very helpful in getting an idea of the scale of the problem.
As for the estimate of 50 million, that is produced by Walk Free, which does the Global Slavery Index. It uses different methods. I have written about this, and my view is that the individual country estimates that it produces are very, very inaccurate. In fact, it itself has a publication that tells you how inaccurate they are, but it does not say very much about that publication; it is rather hidden away. You cannot take any individual country estimate very seriously, because it is done by surveys in a few countries which you then extrapolate to everywhere else, for example.
On the other hand, the overall estimate—adding everything up together—is probably about right, but it must be understood, for example, that no data is collected in China and very little is collected in India. These are countries that, first of all, represent a large proportion of the world’s population. Secondly, each has specific factors special to itself which means that extrapolating from elsewhere will not do it very well for you. So it is a ballpark figure.
The way I look at it, it means that there are not 5 million victims and there are not 500 million victims. So the 50 million has, as a statistician would say, a lot of statistical variability around it. Walk Free never produces upper and lower confidence limits, because, if it did, they would be quite wide.
The figure is useful in drawing attention to the problem. To some extent it has a rhetorical value rather than a numerical one. That is not wrong, but we should understand that it is not all that accurate.
The Chair: I understand the global figure and that extrapolating from that to the UK is unreliable, but is there a range that we can nail down for the UK?
Sir Bernard Silverman: Yes, I think it is. For example, the figure they give for the UK is three times as high as for Germany. It is just not credible. We know that things are not quite the same here and in Germany, but they are not three times different. That is just an example.
If you are asking me to hazard a guess about the actual number, I am afraid I am not going to do that, because I do not think we can. Figures like a quarter of a million are bandied about. I do not think that is at all realistic. It is not going to be that high. On the other hand, the 10,000 to 13,000, which is the figure we came up with, seems to be me to be pretty low, but I am going to be a bit reticent about actually pinning a figure.
The Chair: We might try to push you a bit.
Q116 Lord Watts: Can I ask about the German model? It seems to me that the German economy is far more regulated than the economy in the UK. Is that not a major factor?
Sir Bernard Silverman: It is not very clear. They use various figures. Do you remember what they use, Rowland?
Dr Rowland Seymour: Yes. Several different factors influence their estimates. The one where there is a significant difference between the UK and Germany is what they call disenfranchised groups, which are made up of three things: LGBT acceptance, social group equality, and whether employers prefer to prioritise their own nationals when they are hiring. Those three scores were quite different between the UK and Germany, which meant that there was this three times difference in the overall estimate of modern slavery. But it is quite hard to work out exactly which variables to choose, which is where this uncertainty comes from.
Sir Bernard Silverman: I have a funny feeling that it is this thing about the preference for employing your own nationals. Quite simply, the reason is that Germany has to employ with equal status nationals from 26 other countries. So it is a completely artificial difference. We tried to reverse-engineer the figures to understand what was going on, but it is not straightforward. On LGBT rights, we score better on their scale, so something very odd is going on in their methodology. The methodology behind the index is not very transparent, which is a pity. It is the best show in town—they work very hard to do what they do—but it is not always clear exactly why they have come to each figure.
Q117 Lord Kempsell: I will jump in on the China and India stats. They are obviously very populous countries—the two most populous countries in the world—so they are very significant if you are talking about the world’s total population. What is the reliability of data from those countries? Is it zero, is it fairly good, or has it just not been included properly?
Sir Bernard Silverman: The way they work is that they do surveys in various countries, and they just did not do any in China, so there is no figure for it.
Lord Kempsell: But it has nearly 18% of the world’s population—nearly one-fifth.
Sir Bernard Silverman: Exactly. Furthermore, there are particular things in China, like the Uighurs and so on, that are not quantified in the estimate at all. This time around, there was no survey for India, which has the phenomenon of enormous internal labour migration. A lot of work is done within India to try to stop internal labour migration being captured, so all they do is take various variables about those countries and use them to extrapolate from other places. To be honest, you and I are probably on the same page about how reliable that would be. “Not very”, is an answer.
Lord Kempsell: How does this methodology or metric compare to similar attempts to understand the global prevalence of crimes or negative social factors?
Sir Bernard Silverman: I am not an expert in what is done in other areas, so I cannot speculate. There are also social things in India that are not true elsewhere.
Q118 Lord Randall of Uxbridge: Going back to the UK, our knowledge of modern slavery in 2013 was different from what it is today. Would it therefore be correct to say that the figures are not comparable?
Sir Bernard Silverman: Yes, that is correct.
Lord Randall of Uxbridge: So, if you looked at bare figures, you could say that it has gone up hugely, or you could say that we just did not know enough. You could also say that new forms of modern slavery are occurring—cuckooing and county lines—that potentially were not around in 2013. So is the use of statistics helpful for, say, Governments to say that it is reducing or increasing? Can we really be sure about what is happening?
Sir Bernard Silverman: This is true of crime statistics generally. It used to be said that police-recorded crime is a measure of the activity of the police, not the amount of crime. In this case, it is very encouraging that our figures have gone up, because that means that what was previously hidden has been brought to light. I would be very surprised if there were any underlying increase in the number of actual incidents, because some things will go up and some will go down. There are probably fewer people in illegal car washes thanks to the work that has been done on that. The enormous increase demonstrates that the problem is now taken seriously by the authorities, the general public and so on.
The Chair: I will make one last push on the UK. The West Midlands Police study suggested that, even so, a huge proportion—90%—of crimes that could be classified as modern slavery were not being. That gave it the figure of maybe 100,000.
Sir Bernard Silverman: It was enormous—it was more than that. I was a bit surprised by that study, and it is a pity that it did not continue. It claimed that “slavery” appeared in the notes in 90% of cases but had never been pursued. You want to dig further into this to find out what is going on, and it is a shame that it did not. I am a little sceptical that it is as many as 90%, but that is what it reported.
Q119 Lord Whitty: Is part of the problem—the difficulty in establishing the overall numbers nationally and, comparatively, internationally—that modern slavery covers a multitude of situations? One area is a form of illegal employment, but it is not that difficult, if you have the resources, to count the number of people employed in, say, nail bars, agricultural work or even car washes. But in areas like domestic service, forced marriage and sex work, it is very difficult to identify it. Should there be some categories? Is it difficult to establish any equivalent figures across all of that? Are the different agencies pursuing different types of modern slavery, and do they therefore not have a compatible aggregate themselves?
Sir Bernard Silverman: I will hand over to Rowland in a minute, but I just want to say that, even for things like car washes and nail bars, it can be difficult to establish the difference between what you might call exploited labour and modern slavery. If someone chooses to work for £2 an hour washing cars but is free to leave if they want to, that is not desirable or pleasant, but it is not modern slavery.
Lord Whitty: It is illegal, though.
Sir Bernard Silverman: The issue of whether people are under coercive control is more difficult. Rowland knows about different areas, so I will hand over to him.
Dr Rowland Seymour: Going back to forced marriage and domestic servitude, those are often family driven—they happen within the family. That is a quite a different circumstance from, for example, car washes and nail bars. A different method is needed to look at the prevalence of forced marriage and domestic servitude. I worked with the Home Office over the past year, and it commissioned a report into how it could estimate the prevalence of forced marriage. We submitted that earlier this year, and it is now up to the Home Office to decide what to do next.
Victims of forced marriage and domestic servitude often do not realise that they are victims. When things like that come out, that might not be tagged as modern slavery or forced marriage; it might come up as forced marriage or in some other form. We have found some information about the relationship between care—people who need care and adult support—and domestic servitude and forced marriage. About one in five local authorities we spoke to said that they had a case of forced marriage where someone had cognitive impairment or reduced mental capacity.
Those come out in a different way, so they do not appear in the modern slavery statistics or get tagged as modern slavery. So these things sometimes come up and people are aware of them, but they just do not happen as modern slavery.
Q120 Lord Watts: I am fascinated by the fact that someone being paid £2 an hour is not regarded as modern slavery, when it is below the national minimum wage and is illegal. No one chooses to work for £2 an hour. They obviously have reduced choices and are being abused because those are the only jobs they can get. So I do not see the distinction.
Sir Bernard Silverman: I am sorry. I perhaps used a figure of speech. Imagine you lived in a country in which the prevailing wage was 50p an hour and someone said, “You can come to Britain and work for £2.50 an hour”—do not take these numbers seriously. You might say, “I’ll do that”. We really do not like it and it is wrong, but, as I understand the law, it becomes modern slavery only if the person is not free to leave. Someone could enter the country legally or illegally, work for very low wages for a few months and then go again. They would not be a victim of modern slavery; they would be a victim of exploitation and doing something that is no doubt illegal, but they would not be a victim of modern slavery. If you take their passport away from them and say, “You have to give all your money to us and you can’t escape”, and so on, they have been trafficked. I am not a lawyer, but that is my understanding.
Lord Watts: I am fascinated that these people are not, I suspect, entitled to benefits, so the only payment they receive is £2 an hour. That is not free will but a compulsion to work to eat and clothe themselves.
Sir Bernard Silverman: Imagine that, hypothetically, they have entered the country illegally on a tourist visa, done this work for a while, lived in very frugal conditions, ended up with some money in their pockets and left. I am not saying it is right, but it is not modern slavery. That is all I would say.
Lord Whitty: It is modern slavery in the sense that the employer—or whatever you call the exploiter—might say, “You’ve got to work for that money. That’s all you’re getting. If not, I’ll tell them you entered the country illegally and the police will come round”.
Sir Bernard Silverman: That becomes different. This is a hypothetical situation—although I suspect it is not a hypothetical situation—and it is a way of thinking about it. The minute you say, “If you don’t carry on, I’ll report you”, you cross the line. But if you say, “You’ve been here for three months. There’s £100. Go home”, they might think, “Oh, I’ve got £100”. I do not know.
Lord Whitty: Do you think this lack of a common definition is inhibiting the work of the various enforcement and prosecuting agencies, or does it not matter whether something is wrong?
Sir Bernard Silverman: That is a legal question. One issue with this law is that it has been around for only 10 years. Rowland will talk about this more. It is not always clear whether a prosecution for modern slavery will succeed and whether, as a result, other legal instruments will be used to prosecute people. Therefore, the apparent number of prosecutions for modern slavery may underestimate the number of people prosecuted for it.
The Chair: I have a list of people who want to speak. You have obviously provoked something. Baroness Barker?
Q121 Baroness Barker: Dr Seymour, could you send us a note about that issue with familial social care and vulnerable people? Could you specifically address how you went about getting the information from local authorities?
Dr Rowland Seymour: Yes, I am happy to.
Lord Randall of Uxbridge: For the benefit of my colleagues, I was going to say that, in my position as a deputy chairman of the Human Trafficking Foundation before Brexit, I remember an NGO intercepting flights from Romania that were coming into Gatwick. It spoke to people who were coming to work in a car wash and told them that they would be working for a wage certainly well below the minimum wage—I do not know whether it was £2 an hour—and they said, “Yes. It’s a darn sight better than we get wherever else, and we’re doing it willingly”. As you say, that is a problem, because although it is exploitation and against the law, they were doing it willingly, and they were not coming in illegally either. So I take your point.
The Chair: I am tempted to provide a counterview to that in terms of freedom of economic choice.
Baroness Shephard of Northwold: I will not provide a counterview. I think Sir Bernard is explaining—perhaps it is just me who is getting this impression—that definitions are enormously difficult. We are in receipt of evidence as a result of our call for evidence last week, and so many of the people, groups and companies that responded made exactly this point that it is the definitions that are difficult. However, given that there are other offences that might be being committed, I do not think we should hang our heads in shame, because so much about the Act is already effective and will already have preventive uses. This is a comment, and it does not seem to have turned into a question. I apologise.
Sir Bernard Silverman: Please do not apologise.
The Chair: You are not the only one, Baroness Shephard.
Q122 Baroness Hamwee: I will pursue the different amounts of data relating to different sectors. Lord Whitty asked about this, but I will ask about the police. You may not feel that this is within your area of experience, and I might ask the subsequent witnesses about this, but does this affect how resources are deployed in looking at, say, nail bars?
Sir Bernard Silverman: You should ask one of your next witnesses that question, but one reason why I am always keen that we have more data and information out there is precisely in order to encourage more police activity, because they can use that to justify the effort they will make. So that is why, however imperfect the figures are, I am keen to get them out there and to get them better understood.
Q123 Baroness Hamwee: For our purposes this afternoon, that is exactly the answer I was hoping to get on the record.
I turn now to what the Government have to say about data. We hear an awful lot about how the system is being gamed, and I wondered what your take on that is.
Olivia Hesketh: Thank you for the opportunity to be here today. I should declare that I am a civil servant. I have been seconded to the Modern Slavery and Human Rights Policy and Evidence Centre for the last three and a half years, and I will be responding today in my capacity as director of policy impact at the centre.
In response to your question, the analysis by the policy and evidence centre has found that the available published evidence does not indicate widespread abuse of the national referral mechanism system by migrants or any other group. The Office for Statistics Regulation, the former Independent Anti-Slavery Commissioner and others have also found that the available evidence does not indicate widespread abuse of the system.
Baroness Hamwee: What information is published—I should probably know the answer to this—or is in any way publicly available that might suggest that the Government have an argument? Do they dive into the weeds in a way that is publicly available and, if not, should they?
Olivia Hesketh: The Nationality and Borders Act introduced something called the bad faith disqualification into primary legislation. This enables the Home Office competent authorities to disqualify people from the protections of the national referral mechanism if it is felt that they or somebody on their behalf is knowingly lying about their victim status. The Home Office publishes data on the number of bad faith disqualifications, and this shows that, in 2023, there were zero requests for disqualification on bad faith grounds and, therefore, zero disqualifications were made.
One data point that has been stated as possibly indicative of misuse of the national referral mechanism system is the increase in the proportion of people who have been referred to the NRM after they have been detained awaiting removal. That increased from 6% in 2019 to 73% in 2021. The data shows that the rate of positive reasonable grounds decisions for that group is broadly in line with the rate of positive decisions for the population as a whole in the national referral mechanism. The evidence suggests that a number of different factors might have driven that increase, and it is not possible to ascertain whether it is abuse or these other factors, such as increased awareness of modern slavery.
One data point that may help to shed more light on this issue, and which the policy and evidence centre has suggested it would be helpful for the Government to collect and publish, is data on the reasons why people receive a negative decision through the NRM, whether that is a negative reasonable grounds decision or a negative conclusive grounds decision. Under the statutory guidance, there is a range of reasons why people might receive a negative decision, including not meeting the definition of modern slavery, not meeting the threshold or there being concerns about the individual’s credibility. If that data were available and if, for example, it showed that a high proportion of cases received a negative decision because of concerns about credibility, that may shed some light on the question about abuse of the system.
Baroness Hamwee: Ministers always say that every application is considered on a case-by-case basis, but presumably there is nothing publicly available that would, for instance—I might be showing my prejudices here—show that it has taken a particular applicant or case some time to become able to disclose background. I imagine that none of that sort of thing is available.
Olivia Hesketh: No, I am not aware of any published data on those points.
The Chair: So is it right to say that there is no published data that would support that contention that the system is being abused?
Olivia Hesketh: That is the finding of the analysis by the policy and evidence centre.
Q124 Lord Watson of Invergowrie: It has been two years since the Government introduced their registry for modern slavery statements concerning companies’ supply chain management. I understand that you, Sir Bernard, carried out a survey soon after that and noticed that the way in which the data was posted made it very opaque, to put it mildly. Further to that, you said that, for the 150 registrations you checked to see why the information was not clearer, companies suggested that they did not have websites when, in fact, quite a few of them did. What could the Home Office do to make companies provide information in an understandable and accessible form?
Sir Bernard Silverman: Both Olivia and I have things to say on this matter. Thank you for reading my paper and reminding me what was in it. The issue was that we looked at a number of statements, and some were not accessible or were dead links, while in many cases you got referred to a phone number that you had to ring up, and so on. Of course, some were extremely informative. It would really help if there was a standard template that companies were expected to use. They could produce all sorts of nice singing and dancing websites as well, but it would be good if there was something, even a free text box, that they could fill in so that the data would be easily readable and produced in a standard way. It would be much easier to read it and it would be available for research.
Olivia’s organisation has produced an excellent and interesting brief about, for example, using artificial intelligence to read these and gain a bigger understanding of them. It is very difficult to do that now, because for AI to work you need a big and unbiased dataset to start with. If every company filled in a standard pro forma that was available in a standard way, you could begin to get a bigger picture of what was going on. This should be more mandatory than it is now. I know that is an extra burden on business, but I hope that it would not be an onerous one.
Secondly, it would be much better if there was a much more standard way in which the statements were asked to be produced, and if this was done according to a standard template.
Lord Watson of Invergowrie: On that last point, even AI would not elicit much information from what is provided at the moment, because it cannot see what is not there.
Sir Bernard Silverman: It would just get lost. It will not make a phone call to someone and it will not read a dead link. The other trouble is that it stands to reason that the companies that take their responsibilities extremely seriously are more likely to produce data in a way that enables you to get to it. So if we want to level the playing field and get things to work, that would be much better.
Q125 Lord Watson of Invergowrie: I will ask Miss Hesketh a question about the policy and evidence centre, which provided evidence to the committee with advice to the Home Office. I know you are a civil servant, but I do not know whether you are at the Home Office. You advised that the Home Office should provide, analyse and publish some of that data. How might that be done? If you are from the Home Office, do you think that is likely to get support? It seems that the Home Office is not doing as much as it might to bring this information into the public domain. I hope that does not put you on the spot too much. It is not meant to.
Olivia Hesketh: I welcome the introduction of the modern slavery statements registry. It is very helpful to have one place for hosting modern slavery statements, making them easy to find. It is also helpful that there is the ability for users to download spreadsheets that include all the key information. One challenge that the registry presents for data analysis is that it is not currently mandatory for businesses to upload their statements to the registry. That would require primary legislation, and it was slated for the modern slavery Bill in the Queen’s Speech 2022, which was not introduced. So without it being mandatory it is challenging to measure overall compliance, in addition to the challenges of knowing, in any one year, exactly how many businesses are in scope of the legislation.
The statements in the registry can tell us about the effectiveness of the actions that businesses are taking only in so far as the statements themselves capture this information. I know the committee heard from witnesses in a previous session on supply chains that there are some challenges with the information contained in those statements. Some analysis, led by Professor Young at Lancaster University, manually reviewed 100 statements and found that, of the six areas that the Home Office recommends businesses report on, businesses tend to report mostly on the policies that they have in place. Often, there is very little reporting on the due diligence and risk assessment that they are undertaking and the metrics and KPIs—key performance indicators—that they are using.
On additional data that the Home Office could publish to make the registry even more user friendly, it would be helpful if there was some kind of summary dashboard on the front page of the registry to pull out the key headline figures straightaway—for example, the number of statements that are contained in the registry and the number of statements that have been provided by organisations that are in scope of the legislation, compared to those that have been provided voluntarily. Organisations like public sector bodies can put their statements in the registry even though they are not currently covered by the legislation. It would also be helpful to break down the statements in the registry according to the business sector that they operate in. Those kinds of summary statistics would very much aid users in understanding the information contained within the registry.
Sir Bernard Silverman: We do not know how much benefit there will be, but I think there will be more benefits than we imagine. The very action of producing a statement forces a business to think about it, and the totality of information that would be available if the statements were more transparent and more standard would then lead other people to do research on it and to understand things. So there will be a multiplier positive effect.
Q126 Lord Kempsell: We have spent most of this session talking about the difficulty of measuring the prevalence of modern slavery in terms of victims. We have other data. Prosecutions are one set that is more reliable—I am sure you would agree—because we have a standardised source. I am also interested in outcomes, in whether this legislation has delivered the desired effect and how best to measure that. So perhaps, thinking about it the other way around, the best word is evaluation rather than estimation. What is the evaluation landscape like in this area? What work, that is of high quality scientifically, has been done to measure the actual impact of this legislation?
Olivia Hesketh: Given some of the challenges that we have heard around the numbers for modern slavery and the challenges of applying existing prevalence methodologies, it is important to look at a wide range of data to understand this crime, not least because of some of the discussion today about the complexity of it.
At the policy and evidence centre, we have focused on trying to improve understanding of the nature of modern slavery. Over the last four years, we have funded over 50 research projects that have explored different forms of modern slavery, how they manifest, who is affected and how the policies and systems that are in place to address modern slavery are operating in practice. It is fair to say that the majority of those projects have looked more at the nature than the scale side, because we recognise that behind every number there is a person who has been exploited and often experienced significant harm. So it is important to look at qualitative data to try to understand what is behind the numbers, to unpick some of the trends and to add that important nuance and richness.
On evaluation, some of the interesting methods of the research that we have funded have tried to centre the voices and the perspectives of those directly affected by modern slavery. For example, a project that we recently published, led by Dr Anna Skeels at Cardiff University, looked at the independent child trafficking guardianship service, which is provided by Barnardo’s. That evaluation centred the voices of children who have been in receipt of the service and involved a young persons’ advisory group. It found some positive outcomes for the children who received that service.
I know we might come on to data that the Government could collect, but it is welcome when the Government commission evaluations of policies, and it is welcome that the Home Office has committed to publishing evaluations of a couple of policies. At the modern slavery policy and evidence centre, we would always encourage publication of those evaluations to understand how policies are working on the ground.
Q127 Lord Kempsell: Picking up on that last point, I do not discount for a second the importance of qualitative approaches, which are crucial for understanding the experience of victims. But could the Government do more, in terms of the quantitative data they publish, to help organisations such as yours to conduct quantitatively robust evaluations of whether that spending—I am thinking about this from the perspective of public spending, I am afraid—is value for money in delivering the outcomes that it is trying to achieve? What would be on your wish list of data that is currently not available for you to publish or use in this way?
Olivia Hesketh: We could all probably say a lot about that question. Since 2015, when the Modern Slavery Act was introduced, there has been a welcome improvement in the amount of data that the Government have made available. Notably, the Home Office has published the national referral mechanism detailed breakdowns on the UK Data Service platform, which researchers can access. That has been beneficial for the Nationality and Borders Act, for example, and the significant changes to the national referral mechanism that it made. The fact that that data is available on that platform now means that researchers can try to dig in and understand the impact that the Act is having on different groups. Only this morning, IOM UK published an interesting briefing that used that data to dig into what was happening. Having that available on that platform has been very helpful.
On outcomes, some of the research that we have funded and supported has found that outcomes of success can be different for different survivors of modern slavery and that people can understand recovery quite differently. It is important to have a broad conceptualisation of what success might look like, because it will differ for different people.
Dr Rowland Seymour: An example of evaluation and monitoring is that I undertook a project to map where forced marriage was happening in Nottinghamshire. The county council was enthusiastic about that and turned it into a whole training programme for safeguarding professionals. We have now trained about 130 professionals and, as a result of that, the feedback we got is that people feel much more confident and know what to do, because they were not aware of the law on modern slavery and forced marriage in the first place. Now they are more aware, so hopefully that is some evidence, although not much—it is just in Nottinghamshire—showing that that law has helped.
When you started your question, you mentioned prosecutions. You are right to say that prosecutions are definitely happening under the Modern Slavery Act, but from cases I am aware of we have heard that the CPS prefers to prosecute cuckooing, for example, as a drugs crime, because modern slavery prosecutions are much more complex to construct. So, again, we have heard that not all the cases that are prosecuted involving modern slavery will come under the Modern Slavery Act.
Q128 Lord Kempsell: That presumably also works the other way around: there are criminals who are being prosecuted for other offences who may have engaged in behaviour that constitutes a modern slavery offence, but the CPS does not think that it is worth while pursuing that, because it is easier to prosecute other offences.
I know we are slightly pushed for time, but I cannot resist asking a question about the knotty issue of the Government’s position on abuse of the immigration system, because it is such a hot potato. How have Ministers come to this conclusion? There must be something that the department or the policy world is saying or detecting that has led Ministers to the conclusion that the immigration system is somehow being gamed.
I understand that, in the study and analysis that you have produced, you are saying that there is no evidence per se, but is it robust to say that a lack of evidence is evidence of absence of that behaviour? Does that link? I am making a distinction here. This is a difficult area that is difficult to measure. We are starting from the position that this is incredibly difficult to measure robustly. So from a purely open-minded perspective, where do the Government get this idea from, if it is completely unevidenced? What is causing this? I understand the politics, but I am talking about the policy approach—
The Chair: I think you may have answered your own question.
Lord Kempsell: I understand that, but if we are being robust about the policy, we are saying that there may very well be no great objective evidence in your study, but that may not necessarily result in the conclusion that that behaviour is not happening, because we so poorly understand the behaviour.
Olivia Hesketh: One of the challenges with trying to measure abuse or misuse of the system is that there is no clear definition of abuse and misuse.
Lord Kempsell: Right.
Olivia Hesketh: I do not know on what basis Ministers have drawn that conclusion. I do know that the Home Secretary and Ministers have pointed to case studies that they have suggested are indicative of abuse. The analysis of the available data is really about whether there is widespread abuse. The number of case studies that have been published is very small compared to the number of people who are referred into the NRM in any given year. Around four or five case studies have been published by the Government, but that compares to 17,000 people referred into the NRM. So the challenge is understanding how widespread any abuse might be.
Lord Kempsell: You would agree that, just because the Government have published a small number of case studies, it does not follow that this behaviour is not more widespread in the system, as Ministers claim. It may just be that the Government have chosen to publish a small number of case studies, as far as we know.
The Chair: There is certainly no evidence to suggest otherwise.
Sir Bernard Silverman: It is absolutely true that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, or the other way round.
Q129 Lord Watts: I will come at the previous question in a different way. It seems to me that the Home Office has spent quite a lot of money in 50 research projects, and it is doing completely the opposite to what some of the research findings are suggesting. Can you give us any indication of how the 50 reviews that have been done and carried out have impacted on any government policy?
Olivia Hesketh: Perhaps I can use this to clarify the modern slavery policy and evidence centre’s own funding. We are publicly funded, but we are not funded by the Home Office. We are funded through UK Research and Innovation, which is an arms-length body of the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, and we are funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, so we are independent from government.
Lord Watts: Is that money not from the taxpayer?
Olivia Hesketh: It is public money, yes, but not the Home Office.
Lord Watts: They are all dependent on each other, so yes.
Olivia Hesketh: As a policy and evidence centre, we have very close dialogue with civil servants in the Home Office and we share the findings of that research. The 50 or so projects that the centre has funded have covered a wide range of different topic areas, including supply chains, survivor support, prevention, and legal enforcement, and are very much focused on trying to improve our understanding of how modern slavery manifests. A key priority for the centre has been trying to meaningfully involve people directly affected by modern slavery across all the research that we have done.
Lord Watts: I am looking for some practical conclusion from those 50 reports.
Olivia Hesketh: The reports have made hundreds of recommendations across them. We understand impact in lots of different ways. In some cases, a recommendation has been directly taken up. In some ways, we are trying to build policymakers’ understanding of what the evidence base shows, and bring together different people in the research process, including survivors, as I have mentioned, but also NGOs, civil society, and academics.
Lord Watts: But it is not working.
Olivia Hesketh: In terms of some of the recommendations that have been taken up, we have made recommendations over the last four years on improved data that we think the Government could publish. We have seen the Government take that on and publish more data, which has been very welcome.
Q130 Lord Hope of Craighead: This is a question for Dr Seymour. Going back to the question of prosecutions and the fact that the CPS is not using the modern slavery offences but other offences, is there any hard information about this? It is not the first time we have heard about it. Can you give any more specific details as to which particular offences have been sidelined in that way, and if so, is there something wrong with the definition of the offence?
Dr Rowland Seymour: The one that I can tell you about is cuckooing, which we have heard has come up as drugs instead of modern slavery. That is partly because, in that area at least, there are lots of different laws at which people can take action. There is safeguarding legislation, the Care Act, the Modern Slavery Act, domestic abuse legislation, antisocial behaviour orders and closure orders. The evidence I have there has come from interviews with people in local councils and in police and law enforcement. I am happy to follow up with written evidence, if you would like.
Lord Hope of Craighead: It would be interesting to know how far you can give the details about this. Our question might be: is there something wrong with the way the Modern Slavery Act has defined its offences? Are they too complicated, or is it simply doubling up on something that was already in the law before that Act was enacted?
Dr Rowland Seymour: The evidence I have had is that the modern slavery prosecutions are much more complicated. It may also be to do with people just acting on the path that is easier to follow. The drugs Act path might be much easier to follow, because that has been done before, whereas modern slavery is much newer legislation.
Q131 Baroness Hamwee: The question that has just been asked is one that I was hoping we can pursue when we see the CPS. The one I am going to ask might also be. Has the policy and evidence centre done any quantitative or qualitative work about how many applications there are for slavery and trafficking risk orders and prevention orders, whether they are used because going any further would be difficult, and their success in prevention? Possibly beyond the policy and evidence centre, are any of the witnesses aware of other work that has been done that we might be looking at?
Olivia Hesketh: The centre has not funded or supported any research specifically on those orders, but I am aware that the former Independent Anti-Slavery Commissioner and Nottingham University Rights Lab have both done some research, and I would be very happy to pass that on.
Data published in the UK annual report on modern slavery showed that, between July 2015 and March 2020, 147 slavery and trafficking prevention orders and 60 slavery and trafficking risk orders were issued. The annual report was published most recently in 2021. The Government have agreed to resume publication, and it would be very welcome if the number of figures about the orders could be included in the next update to the annual report.
Q132 Baroness Shephard of Northwold: This is a simple question to end with. If you could make one recommendation to the Government about the Modern Slavery Act, what would it be? It is just worth saying that in this evidence there is a lot of desire for better definitions, better quantification and more sharing of information. One of the most common requests is that there should be more first responders and better training for them, but of course the better training begs the question on the earlier point.
Olivia Hesketh: My one recommendation would be that the Government publish a refreshed modern slavery strategy that prioritises prevention of modern slavery. The evidence shows that it is a particularly underexplored area. It is really important that any strategy looks at the full range of levers that the Government have available to them, and considers how decisions made in other policy areas, such as labour market regulation and immigration policy, may increase the risk of modern slavery or could be protective factors against modern slavery. Any strategy refresh should be informed by meaningful engagement with survivors and those affected.
Dr Rowland Seymour: Mine would be better geographical and topographical granularity or data, so that people in local councils and police forces can take actions based on what is happening around them.
Sir Bernard Silverman: My recommendation is what I have already said: there should be mandatory modern slavery statements, and these should be in a standard and compatible form, so that we can then really understand something.
Baroness Shephard of Northwold: Thank you so much for your practical suggestions.
The Chair: Thank you very much indeed. You have been incredibly helpful to our work. We have taken note of the promises of further information that you may be able to supply to us, but thank you very much indeed.
Sir Bernard Silverman: If there is anything that Members would like to come back to us with, even if they have not mentioned it now, I am sure any of us will be very pleased to give you more information as required.
The Chair: Thank you. I wanted to ask a bit more about reparations and whether we have any data, because that is something else that has come up, and thoughts about prevention and what that looks like in practice. Thank you very much indeed. That has been brilliant.
