Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what information her Department holds on the correlation between smuggling rings which bring people into the EU and human trafficking gangs which exploit migrants for sex and slavery.

Organised crime groups are known to be involved in smuggling and trafficking operations, and in some cases both. We are working closely with operational partners including the National Crime Agency, Border Force and Immigration Enforcement, as well as partners across Europe and Africa, to develop the intelligence picture on both of these crime types.We will continue to monitor the development of links between these two crime types.

We are working with partners across Europe and Africa, including through the Organised Immigration Crime Taskforce to identify and disrupt organised crime groups facilitating irregular migration in source and transit countries.