Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what the average processing time is for cases referred to the National Referral Mechanism as of 22 March 2022.

The National Referral Mechanism (NRM) is the UK’s system for identifying and providing access to support for potential victims of modern slavery/human trafficking.

The Home Office publishes quarterly statistics regarding the National Referral Mechanism (NRM) which can be found at: https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/national-referral-mechanism-statistics.

The average processing time and the outstanding cases referred to the National Referral Mechanism can be found in Table 17 in the Modern Slavery: National Referral Mechanism and Duty to Notify statistics UK, end of year summary, 2021.This shows the average time to Conclusive Ground decision (CG) for Conclusive Ground decisions (CG) made each quarter which can be found at https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/modern-slavery-national-referral-mechanism-and-duty-to-notify-statistics-uk-end-of-year-summary-2021

Table 18 shows the number of pending Reasonable Ground and Conclusive Grounds cases as of 7 January 2022. Which can be found at: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/modern-slavery-national-referral-mechanism-and-duty-to-notify-statistics-uk-end-of-year-summary-2021