Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what assessment her Department has made of the adequacy of the number of Immigration Enforcement Officers on preventing human trafficking.

Immigration Enforcement work in partnership law enforcement agencies and NGOs in responding to modern slavery and human trafficking offences

There are 1240 frontline officers within the crime and financial investigations teams (CFI) and immigration, compliance and enforcement teams of Immigration Enforcement, all of whom are trained to identify the indicators of modern slavery and human trafficking.

Immigration Enforcement are putting in place modern slavery champions across frontline enforcement who will receive enhanced training in this area.

CFI officers receive a number of Modern Slavery training products including e-learning through the National Centre for Applied Learning Technologies (NCALT) (from the College of Policing) and HO products through Discover.

They receive a half day first response face to face delivery in their induction programme and a further face to face delivery around the National Referral Mechanism and indicators within Professionalising Investigation Programme ( PIP1) classroom.

They study further for the national investigators examination ( NIE) and are questioned on Modern Slavery Act offences in the exam. On PIP2 they undertake a full week covering the College Public Protection Learning Programme covering the 13 strands of Public Protection but IE also focus heavily on Modern Slavery. Further to this the Hydra exercise in week 4 is based on a Modern Slavery scenario.

All modern slavery operations conducted by CFI are debriefed fully. Any issues identified are dealt with and fed into the assurance and training teams.

CFI has a business assurance framework which provides a formal structure to assurance activity to ensure we adopt a consistent approach across all areas of operations.