Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what estimate he has made of the proportion of migrant detainees who were trafficked to the UK in each of the last five years.

The Home Office record the number of all individuals referred to the Na-tional Referral Mechanism (NRM) and this information is published Quarterly by the National Crime Agency. This information does not distinguish between those detained under immigration powers and those living in the community. The reason for this is two-fold, firstly because the NRM referral is not an immigration route by which individuals should regularise their stay in the United Kingdom and, secondly, because a person’s status in immigration detention is not permanent and can change.

Data taken from the NRM would not accurately reflect the numbers of those who had been trafficked into the UK, as a number only get exploited once they have arrived, and their journey to the UK can be entirely unconnected to the trafficking. Further a number may be victims of trafficking, but it relates to events in a third country and is not necessarily connected to their reasons for coming to the UK.

Providing the information requested would require a manual check of individual records which could only be done at disproportionate cost.