Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how much funding her Department has allocated for campaigns to promote awareness of human trafficking in the 2014-15 financial year; how much of that funding was spent sponsoring an article in the Daily Mail; and whether her Department has placed sponsored articles placed in any other newspapers.

The Home Office has allocated a budget of £2.3 million to raise awareness of Modern Slavery in the UK and promote a new Modern Slavery helpline and website. The objective is to increase reporting of slavery so that more victims can be supported and protected and more perpetrators of this heinous and hidden crime are brought to justice. We have paid for a number of sponsored online and print articles in the Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday to raise awareness of the issue and encourage reporting at a cost of £154,000. We are unable to give a cost for individual articles because of commercial confidentiality. We have also placed a number of sponsored articles in The Daily Telegraph and The Sunday Telegraph at a cost of £125,000.