Human Trafficking: Children

(asked on 17th December 2020) - View Source

Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what the average number of days taken was to make conclusive grounds decisions in National Referral Mechanism cases relating to children, in each of the last five years.


Answered by
Victoria Atkins Portrait
Victoria Atkins
Secretary of State for Health and Social Care
This question was answered on 15th January 2021

The Home Office publishes statistics on referrals into the National Referral Mechanism (NRM) on a quarterly basis, as well as a yearly summary.

Published statistics include the average time taken by the Single Competent Authority (SCA) to make Conclusive Grounds decisions. There is no target to make a Conclusive Grounds decision within a specific timeframe but the decision should be made as soon as possible after the 45-day Recovery and Reflection period has ended, and only when sufficient information has been made available on the case. The average time for a Conclusive Grounds decision to be made was 344 days for the third quarter of 2020.

Between now and March 2021, over 350 new staff will join the Home Office to work in the SCA. The vast majority of these staff will be decision-makers, with the remainder of the new staff working in case preparation, workflow management, technical specialist and management roles.

Recruiting in these numbers will give us the capacity to make significantly more Conclusive Grounds decisions than we are currently able to do with existing resource, and therefore we expect to bring down decision-making timescales for victims.

The latest published NRM statistics can be found here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/modern-slavery-national-referral-mechanism-and-duty-to-notify-statistics-uk-quarter-3-2020-july-to-september/modern-slavery-national-referral-mechanism-and-duty-to-notify-statistics-uk-quarter-3-2020-july-to-september.

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