Kevin Hyland expressed frustration many of his 2017 anti-slavery recommendations have not been adopted

The former anti-slavery commissioner Kevin Hyland has described the UK’s system for preventing people-trafficking into the country as “failing” and called for urgent reform.

Hyland said he felt devastated and angry when he saw news of the deaths of 39 people in a refrigerated container last week, and is concerned the tragedy could happen again because of police failures to adequately investigative the criminal networks responsible.

The UK is still failing to treat human trafficking as a serious organised crime, and views it instead primarily as a “social issue”, he said. Although the Modern Slavery Act of 2015 was “groundbreaking”, insufficient resources had been allocated to investigating the trafficking networks.

“We are looking at this in completely the wrong way. Where are the resources to fight this? This is organised crime and it needs to be tackled by hard-edged police forces,” Hyland, who now advises the Council of Europe on anti-trafficking, said.

He was scathing about some of the UK government’s recent anti-slavery initiatives, such as lighting buildings including 10 Downing Street and the Home Office up with red floodlights to mark Anti-Slavery Day.

Trafficked Vietnamese and the lure of UK nail bars and cannabis farms Read more

“What good is lighting up a building if there’s a nail bar or a car wash with trafficked people a few streets away? Wouldn’t it be better to spend all the effort on shutting them down? There needs to be a wholesale reordering of how we tackle it.”

Officials should be focused on scouring the interviews given by people rescued from slavery for information that would help identify the individuals running the trafficking networks.

“The priority should be looking at the evidence. We need to carefully examine what the approach has been with modern day slavery to make sure that opportunities haven’t been missed, and to assess what is in place to stop this happening again.”

He was frustrated that clear recommendations in a report he published two years ago on the trafficking of people from Vietnam had not been implemented.

Hyland, who was appointed as an independent commissioner in 2014 by Theresa May when she was home secretary, resigned from his role last year, complaining of government interference in his work. He had been formally rebuked by the Home Office in 2017 for being “disproportionately critical” of law enforcement agencies when he published his report, called Combating Modern Slavery Experienced by Vietnamese Nationals En Route to, and Within, the UK. He publicly criticised police forces for failing to tackle the issue of enslaved Vietnamese teenagers and young people being trafficked to the UK to work in illegal cannabis farms.

Quick guide Modern-day slavery Show Hide How many people are living in modern slavery worldwide? Across the world, 40.3 million people are living in some form of modern slavery. More than half of the victims are in forced labour. Sex trafficking is a form of modern slavery that involves the use of coercion, abduction, fraud or force to profit from someone’s sexual exploitation. 99% of the estimated 4.8 million sex trafficking victims across the world working in the sex industry are women and girls. 13,000 people are estimated by the UK government to be the victims of modern slavery in Britain today. 70% of the world’s 4.8 million sex trafficking victims are in the Asia and Pacific region. $150bn is generated by the modern slave trade every year, according to UN estimates. Sex traffickers can earn up to £29,000 per victim.

“The Home Office said they thought this was disproportionate criticism; they told me that in writing,” he said, pointing out that it was his job to be critical and offer recommendations for making the system more effective. “The report highlighted so many things that should have been adopted and haven’t.”

Hyland was concerned that people identified as possible victims of trafficking and entered into the national referral mechanism (NRM, the mechanism for identifying victims of human trafficking, and ensuring they receive protection), were waiting for months and sometimes years for a decision on their cases.

Evidence provided by victims was not being mined methodically for information that could lead to prosecutions. “There is a backlog of thousands. The decision-making is very slow. There is poor identification of victims, and poor support for victims,” he said, adding that he was concerned that the Home Office was responsible for the NRM, meaning that victims of trafficking were often dealt with by Home Office staff, whose primary focus is on controlling immigration.

“These are victims of a very serious crime; you don’t want the Home Office coming in to dictate what level of care the victim should have.”

Over 1,400 Vietnamese potential trafficking victims were handed to the NRM in 2017 and 2018, but there have been very few convictions of those smuggling them into the UK and exploiting them for forced labour. “We’re seeing very low levels of prosecutions. The system is failing,” he said.

A Home Office spokesperson said: “We are constantly reassessing our response to this vile abuse and commissioned an independent review of the act which reported this year.

“We have accepted the majority of the recommendations in that review and will continue to work to ensure our response to modern slavery is world-leading.”

