Modern Slavery Act Ten Years On: Many Victims Still Going Unprotected

Forbes

26-03-2025

Britain's then-Home Secretary Theresa May on August 29, 2014. (Photo credit should read LEON ... More NEAL/AFP via Getty Images)
The United Kingdom's Modern Slavery Act, enacted on March 26 2015, has turned ten years old. The legislation, which nominally introduced and strengthened protections for people who survived situations of trafficking and modern slavery in the country, has been both praised and criticized ever since and remains a controversial topic to this day.
'Modern slavery is a brutal crime which knows no boundaries and does not discriminate on gender, age, creed, culture or race,' said then-home secretary (the U.K. minister for immigration and other interior affairs) Theresa May in 2013.
The Modern Slavery Act (MSA) was introduced and passed into law under May's stewardship, and she has been a vocal defender of it since. The law introduced and brought together a number of different measures designed to protect survivors and punish offenders. It also introduced more stringent requirements for large British businesses to say what they were doing to prevent forced labor and exploitation in their own operations and supply chains. The legislation was praised at the time, and has been seen as a model for other countries to follow. But, in practice, many have observed that it has often failed the vulnerable people it in theory seeks to protect. One of those critics in recent years has been Theresa May herself.
'10 years ago, 200 years after the abolition of slavery, the U.K. led the world with the Modern Slavery Act,' wrote May - who went on to become Prime Minister - on Twitter on the day of the anniversary. 'But as the numbers enslaved increase and protections for victims are watered down, we must ask: why we are showing less compassion today than we did two centuries ago?'
After May was ousted as PM by her own Conservative party, the new government under subsequent leaders began to attack the MSA, arguing that it was being abused by people fraudulently claiming to be survivors in order to circumvent asylum procedures and stay in the country. These claims have been roundly debunked - not least because the government's own figures establish the veracity of the overwhelming majority of claims, and a large part of trafficking victims are in fact already British citizens or residents.
Nonetheless, in 2022, the government quietly changed the rules on how much evidence would be needed for a person to be entered into the protection system within the MSA (specifically, the National Referral Mechanism, which technically predates it).
As a result, far fewer people are being recognized as survivors, being left without protections as they try to rebuild their lives. At the same time, far more survivors are choosing not to be entered into the system at all, for fear of prolonged periods of destitution with minimal protection and support, a general distrust of the authorities, and even a well-founded fear of being themselves prosecuted for the crimes they were forced to commit by captors. Prosecutions of traffickers and exploiters have been virtually unheard of, with only 2% of survivors seeing their traffickers prosecuted, according to the Modern Slavery and Human Rights Policy and Evidence Centre (PEC) at the University of Oxford.
'Ten years on, the Modern Slavery Act's promise of justice remains unfulfilled, says Professor Alex Balch, Director of Research at the Modern Slavery and Human Rights PEC. 'Thousands of people referred every year suggests the U.K. failed in its prevention efforts."
The numbers do indeed suggest that prevention efforts are failing to stop people falling into situations of extreme exploitation and slavery, with 2024 seeing a record high of people referred into the NRM - 19,125 people. At the same time, in recent years there have been myriad reports of people forced into slavery across the country, including at some of the country's biggest employers such as McDonald's, as well as major supermarket chains Asda, Marks and Spencer, Sainsbury's, Tesco and Waitrose.
Other parts of the U.K.'s immigration system have been criticized as well, including the Seasonal Worker Visa scheme, which NGOs say leaves people open to various forms of exploitation, debt bondage and forced labor.
Advocates and modern slavery experts argue that a more coherent, proactive and ambitious strategy is needed to prevent slavery in the U.K., one which goes further than just nominally offering protection for survivors and prosecutions for offenders, and takes into account the larger socio-economic structures which see people put in states of vulnerability in the first place. They argue that any strategy based on a view of trafficking and slavery as being simply individual incidences of 'bad actors,' rather than the product of socio-economic inequality and power imbalances, will always fail.
'To truly tackle modern slavery, we need a clear strategy focused on prevention that focuses on addressing conditions that put people at risk of exploitation, such as poverty, exclusion or lack of opportunities to provide for their families," said Alex Balch.
In response to concerns raised over perceived failures in the U.K.'s modern slavery system, government minister Jess Phillips previously said: 'Modern slavery is a cruel, barbaric and totally unconscionable crime, and I have witnessed firsthand how it dehumanizes its victims. That's why I am using every lever at my disposal to identify and protect survivors, and ultimately punish their abusers."