From nail bars to car washes: how big is the UK's slavery problem?

Does slavery exist in the UK?

More than 250 years since the end of the transatlantic slave trade, there are close to 41 million people still trapped in some form of slavery across the world today. Yet nobody really knows the scale and how many victims or perpetrators of this crime there are in Britain.

The data that has been released is inconsistent. The government believes there are about 13,000 victims of slavery in the UK, while earlier this year the Global Slavery Index released a much higher estimate of 136,000.

The only recorded crime statistics on slavery are from the National Crime Agency, which notes the number of people passed on to the government’s national referral mechanism (NRM), the process by which victims of slavery are identified and granted statutory support.

While this data gives a good snapshot of what kinds of slavery are most prevalent and who is falling victim to exploiters, it doesn’t paint the whole picture. For every victim identified by the police, there will be many others who are not found and remain under the control of traffickers, pimps and gangmasters.

There are also many potential victims who don’t agree to go through the mechanism because they don’t trust the authorities, or are too scared to report their traffickers.

“The only figures we have are adult victims who have chosen to engage with the authorities or kids who have been correctly identified as victims by social services,” explains Andrew Wallis, chief executive at UK anti-slavery charity Unseen.

What does UK slavery look like?

While the slavery of the transatlantic trade was visible, modern slavery is often harder to identify. The physical shackles of the past have often been replaced by forms of coercion and control such as debt, fraud and false promises, as well as violence and physical intimidation.

The industries identified as most at risk in the UK are:

• Construction

• Agriculture

• Hotel and restaurants

• Care homes

• Car washes

• Nail bars

Victims are also kept in domestic servitude behind the closed doors of private residences.

Convictions under the UK’s Modern Slavery Act last year included a gang who trafficked Vietnamese women into nail bars and a Slovakian family who forced people with mental health problems into working for them without payment.

Last year, the Modern Slavery Helpline received 493 reports of potential cases of labour exploitation in hand car washes across the country with 2,170 potential victims. Of these, 401 were referred to law enforcement. Of these referrals, only one case led to an arrest.

Wallis has advice on the tell-tale signs that a business may be employing slave labour.

“If the cost is too good to be true, payment is only accepted in cash and English might not be spoken, you need to ask yourself: ‘Why is this so cheap and what might I be contributing to here?’” says Wallis. “For example, the true cost of a hand wash for the average vehicle is £20. If you’re paying less, you have to ask why and how.”

Who are the victims?

In 2017, 5,145 potential victims of slavery were referred to the NRM, a 35% increase on 2016 figures.

They included people from 116 different nationalities. Of the total number of victims identified, 207 were found in Scotland, 193 in Wales and 31 in Northern Ireland. The other 4,714 were reported in England.

The most recent snapshot of slavery in the UK is provided by the number of victims identified between April and June this year. In these three months 1,658 victims were identified from 81 different countries; 58% (955) were adults and 42% (703) children.

As with the data from 2017, the figures show a spike in the numbers of child slavery victims identified. Last year there was a 66% leap in children going into the referral mechanism.

This was largely to do with the fact that children are starting to be identified as victims of county lines drug trafficking and other forms of criminal exploitation, and also that more unaccompanied child asylum seekers are being recognised as having faced trafficking or modern slavery.

“However,” says Wallis, “this is likely to be the tip of the iceberg and the real number of children being exploited in the UK is likely to be much higher because we still don’t have any specific training for social and children’s workers to recognise and identify victims of trafficking.”

Data from this year shows that this trend in child slavery referrals is continuing.

British children were by far the largest number of child slavery victims found between April and June this year, with 223 identified, more than four times as many as any other nationality. As was the case last year, they had been largely subjected to forced labour and criminal exploitation. Most were boys, although 102 girls were also found to have been the victims of sexual exploitation.

The majority of the other child slavery victims came from Vietnam, Sudan, Eritrea and Albania. Those from Vietnam had also largely experienced labour exploitation, most likely trafficked into cannabis cultivation or nail bars.

Albanians were the largest group of adult victims, followed by China, Vietnam, Romania and then the UK. Most Albanian victims were women who had been sexually exploited. Adult victims from other countries were most likely to have faced forced labour or other forms of labour exploitation.

There has also been a rise in the exploitation of homeless people. The London charity Hestia found that of the 218 male slavery victims it had helped this year who had been forced to work in farms, construction sites and cannabis farms, 54% had slept rough after escaping their traffickers and 92% had mental health issues.

Outside of the NRM statistics, frontline charities say the numbers of people they believe to have been enslaved or trafficked is on the rise. Hestia, a London organisation, says that last year there was a 30% rise in the number of victims it helped; two-thirds were women who had been forced into prostitution. In 2017, this one charity supported 624 victims of modern slavery.

In the two years since it launched, the Modern Slavery Helpline has also received more than 10,000 calls, tip-offs and reports of potential slavery cases from the general public.

Where is it happening?

Slavery occurs in every part of the UK but, according to government data, the majority of victims referred to police between April and June this year were in London, West Yorkshire, the West Midlands, Scotland, Merseyside and Essex.

Prosecutions

Between 2010 and 2017 there have been 1,671 prosecutions for slavery offences, resulting in 1,109 convictions.

The average slavery case takes the police three years to bring to trial and costs the taxpayer an estimated £330,000.

Between 2017 and 2018 there was a 27% rise in the number of police prosecutions of slavery and trafficking crimes with 239 suspects charged. There were 185 modern slavery and trafficking convictions in the same time period. Yet these represent a fraction of the cases reported to the authorities.

How does slavery affect us?

We are also all likely to consume or use goods that may have been produced with slave labour as we go about our daily lives. Billions of pounds’ worth of laptops, mobile phones and clothing likely to be made by slave labour are being bought by UK consumers, according to the Global Slavery Index. In a report, it found the UK had imported £14bn of goods from countries with a high risk of slavery in 2017.