More than 5,000 potential victims of trafficking and modern slavery were reported to UK authorities last year, the highest number on record.

For the first time, British citizens made up the highest number of potential victims, a shift driven by an increase in the use of child drug mules by criminal gangs. Overall, the number of possible child victims grew by two-thirds compared with 2016.

Will Kerr, the director of the National Crime Agency, said the figures were likely to underestimate the scale of the problem, and that the government was facing an evolving threat.

“The criminals involved in these types of exploitation are going into online spaces, particularly adult services websites, to enable their criminality,” said Kerr.

The rise in the number of young people being exploited for sexual purposes or drug trafficking was a concern, he said.

Almost half of the 5,145 cases reported – 41% – involved the possible exploitation of a child aged under 18. The figures show the number of reports made to the national referral mechanism, the system for identifying victims of trafficking.

Last year, 819 potential British victims were referred to the NRM, up from 326 in 2016, according to the National Crime Agency. The increase is due to a rise in city-based gangs using children to transport drugs to rural areas, allowing them to expand their operations.

Albania was the second largest national group recorded, followed by Vietnam, China, Nigeria and Romania. Albanian and Nigerian cases most commonly involved sexual exploitation, while the majority of Vietnamese cases involved labour exploitation.

The referrals included possible victims from 116 countries. A total of 2,352 cases, almost half of those reported, involved potential forced labour. A third of cases, 1,744, involved suspected sexual exploitation. The NRM was also alerted to three possible cases of organ harvesting.

Kerr said authorities had seen greater crossovers between slavery and organised immigration crime outside the UK. “Often the same criminal networks are involved in transportation, and migrants themselves are vulnerable to labour and sexual exploitation during their journeys and after,” he said.



Overall, the number of referrals grew by more than a third, from 3,804 in 2016 to 5,145 in 2017.

Last year, about 10% of individuals referred to the NRM were assessed to be modern slavery victims, while the majority of cases are still pending. Of the cases involving people from outside the EU, less than 3% of individuals were assessed to be modern slavery victims.

While cases involving EU or British individuals are dealt with by the NCA’s modern slavery human trafficking unit, non-EU cases are handled by the Home Office.



Patrick Burland, the senior project officer for the ‎UN Migration Agency IOM, warned of a “potential bias against recognising people as victims of trafficking if they are from countries where their right to residency in the UK is not pre-established”.

The government recently announced that UK visas and immigration will no longer make decisions on trafficking cases, with responsibility handed to a new expert body within the Home Office. But Burland warned there was still a potential conflict of interest. “The most effective way for the UK government to build an effective firewall between victim identification and immigration concerns is to move this process outside of the Home Office,” he said.



Victoria Atkins, the minister for crime, safeguarding and vulnerability, said the government was “leading the world in our response to this horrendous crime”, but added: “We know there is more to do, and we are working to improve the system for identifying victims and supporting them to leave situations of exploitation and begin to recover and rebuild their lives.”