Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what assessment her Department has made of the potential impact of the removal of funding from the Modern Slavery and Organised Immigration Crime Unit on dedicated national policing funding for modern slavery activity.

We understand concerns about the lack of dedicated funding for the specialist Modern Slavery and Organised Immigration Crime Programme from April 2026, which has historically sat under the National Police Chief Council’s Modern Slavery and Organised Immigration Crime Lead.

The modern slavery programme was established in 2017 as a transformation programme, with the long‑term intention of embedding modern slavery expertise and best practice into policing as business as usual. It has been instrumental in improving the law enforcement response to modern slavery, with more investigations and more prosecutions now than when the programme began.

As with all transformation programmes, it is appropriate that it concludes once core objectives have been achieved. It is owing to the success of the programme, with forces better equipped to tackle modern slavery, that we must now ensure a consistent and standardised response to modern slavery across all forces to drive performance and hold the police accountable. This is in line with the Government’s wider ambitions to reform policing as set out in the White Paper, "From Local to National: A New Model for Policing".

In its final year of funding, under the Ministerial Modern Slavery Action Plan for 2025/26, the modern slavery programme has developed a framework for investigating modern slavery, capturing the expertise and lessons learnt from the past eight years of the programme. The framework and related guidance material will be made available to all officers in England and Wales through an online knowledge hub and has been incorporated into the College of Policing’s Applied Professional Practice on Modern Slavery. This will ensure that policing retains a nationally consistent standard for modern slavery investigations and a clear basis for sustaining capability once the programme concludes.

The department will continue to work with police forces across England and Wales to support a strong, coordinated approach to identifying, disrupting, and tackling modern slavery, and to oversee an orderly transition as the central modern slavery policing capability comes to a close.