It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Murray; I think for the first time, but I am confident not for the last.
I thank my hon. Friend the Member for North East Bedfordshire (Richard Fuller) for raising the matter in this afternoon’s debate. As he said, we will have the pleasure of discussing it twice in two days. He is an assiduous campaigner on these issues and I am very pleased to have the opportunity to discuss them with him today, and, I am sure, on future occasions as well.
As a starting point, it is important to understand that the United Kingdom’s commitment to looking after victims or even potential victims of modern slavery is resolute. We enacted the Modern Slavery Act 2015, which has some very substantial protections for victims of modern slavery. We launched a modern slavery strategy back in 2014 and we are assiduous as a country in upholding our obligations under the ECAT treaty—the Council of Europe convention on action against trafficking in human beings—to which my hon. Friend referred. Indeed, many more modern slavery claims are made and accepted in the UK than in comparable European countries; I think that we had around 10,000 last year, which was many times higher than in countries such as France and Germany. I think our record on identifying and protecting victims of modern slavery is second to none across Europe, which we can all be extremely proud of.
However, we should also be clear that someone being recognised as a victim of modern slavery does not and should not automatically result in their being given immigration status in the UK, or in their being exempted from immigration proceedings. There are protections granted by the modern slavery provisions. My hon. Friend mentioned the reflection and recovery period, which is 45 days. Of course, if there is a recovery need that can only be met by the person remaining, that is obviously respected as well. However, it does not follow that every single potential victim of modern slavery should be exempted from immigration proceedings or indeed from detention.
Therefore, it is very important that we have a proper way of weighing up the various considerations that come before decision makers: on the one hand, there are questions of vulnerability, or potential vulnerability; and on the other hand, there is the need to operate a proper immigration system. That is an important balance to strike. Both those things are important; we are not minimising the importance of either one of them.
It is worth observing that the reasonable grounds threshold for a modern slavery decision is, by design, extremely low. At the moment, it is set out as “suspects but cannot prove”, which is an extremely low threshold. We are looking to make adjustments to that, as set out in the policy statement a few weeks ago, consistent, of course, with our ECAT treaty obligations. However, once the reasonable grounds decision is made, that does not mean that the person involved is a victim of modern slavery. It means that there are reasons to suspect, but without proof, that they might be a victim of modern slavery, which is extremely important to bear in mind.
There has been some evidence recently—I am talking about the last 12 months in particular—that for some cohorts in particular, including some foreign national offenders, it appears that modern slavery claims are increasingly being used as a means of disrupting immigration proceedings. We need to be mindful of that,
and mindful that we should do everything to protect genuine victims of modern slavery, many of whom will have suffered appalling trauma and mistreatment. It is in the spirit of achieving that balance that the changes we are discussing today and will discuss again tomorrow are being made.
The change that my hon. Friend outlined so eloquently, enshrined in the statutory instrument laid on 25 February this year and coming into force, if passed, in a few weeks’ time, to make the release decision in relation to people with a positive reasonable grounds decision if they might be a victim of modern slavery is inside the ambit of the existing adults at risk policy. That is not to say that their potential vulnerability will be ignored, but the issue will be considered in the round and a balancing exercise will be performed, as it is with other forms of vulnerability in the existing scope of the adults at risk policy to make sure that everything is being properly accounted for in the round.
Having done that exercise, release decisions might, and in many cases will, still be made. An adults at risk policy, as my hon. Friend said, was introduced in 2016. It has had time to bed in and is being continuously improved upon, but it has a well-defined grading scale—level 1, level 2, level 3—and the more serious the evidence of vulnerability or potential harm, some of which my hon. Friend laid out in his speech, the higher the balancing factors have to be in order not to release.
Viewing the matter in the round and considering everything is an appropriate thing to do. It is a balancing exercise that we are trying to achieve. The caseworker guidance that will be published in due course will address the specific situation of potential victims of modern slavery. My hon. Friend laid out some of the unique circumstances associated with them, and the caseworker guidance will take into account the particular vulnerabilities that my hon. Friend drew attention to in his speech.
I hope that gives some reassurance about the approach that will be taken. The detention decision making process will of course include an assessment of the individual’s recovery needs. That will ensure that detention is maintained where the balancing criteria are met, and also where those needs can be provided from within detention. If those needs cannot be met from within detention, that would obviously argue very strongly and persuasively, probably decisively, in favour of a release decision being made.
It is also worth saying by way of context—I know my hon. Friend has a wider interest in detention; we have discussed it on many occasions—that detention is used sparingly. At any one time, 95% of people who might be eligible for detention are in fact in the community. The numbers being detained are relatively small by historical standards. If I take the figure from 31 December 2019, before coronavirus, because coronavirus has caused the number to go down even further, there were 1,637 people in immigration detention, which is a pretty small number when we measure that against the number of people who probably do not have the right to be in the country.
The 1,637 number approximately halved in the two-year period preceding. From 30 September 2017 to 31 December 2019, the number of people in immigration detention roughly halved. The vast majority of people—we have debated this previously—are in detention for relatively short periods of time. Some 74% are detained for 28 days or less, so detention is not being used on a widespread,
indiscriminate basis, but it is an essential component of running a proper immigration system. Where someone does not have the right to be here, or where they have committed a serious criminal offence and they are a foreign national, it is right that we take steps to remove them. Without having immigration detention available, it is extremely difficult to do that, so it is an important thing to be able to do.
As I have set out, we accept that modern slavery is a truly despicable crime. We take our responsibility to identify victims very seriously. We also take our responsibilities in using immigration detention very seriously as well. Our focus as we take forward these changes will be to make sure that the right balance is struck and that potential victims with genuine vulnerabilities are protected. We are determined not only to protect those vulnerable individuals, but to bring the perpetrators of modern slavery to justice. It is in that spirit that we have introduced the changes that will be debated in the main Chamber tomorrow.