Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what steps her Department is taking to reduce the number of victims of modern slavery.

The Government is committed to tackling the heinous crime of modern slavery. We are identifying more victims of modern slavery and doing more to bring perpetrators to justice than ever before.

The Home Office works with a range of partners to deliver effective prevention activity and to stop exploitation from occurring in the first place. These include:

• Providing dedicated funding to policing to drive forward work to increase modern slavery prosecutions.
• Requiring large business to report on steps they have taken to tackle modern slavery in supply chains.
• Providing training for frontline responders to better prevent and spot the signs of modern slavery including ensuring operational colleagues such as Border Force recognise signs and are equipped to step in.
• Establishing a Modern Slavery Prevention Fund to fund organisations to deliver targeted prevention interventions and build up the evidence base on what interventions are most effective.
• Working upstream with international partners to reduce vulnerability to exploitation and strengthen law enforcement approaches.

We are also working to tackle abuses in the system and make sure foreign national offenders or those who arrive here illegally and have no right to stay in the UK are not able to misuse a system intended to protect genuine victims in order to avoid justice.