The UK’s referral system for survivors of trafficking and modern slavery could be damaging people’s asylum claims. Referrals not only delay the asylum claim process, but mistrust of asylum seekers whose referral claims are rejected, or who refuse to be referred in the first place, can also negatively impact asylum claims.
Government mistrust of asylum seekers is no secret. That scepticism bleeds into the modern slavery support system. Politicians, especially the Tory home ministers of the last several governments, have repeatedly claimed that the UK’s modern slavery system is being abused by irregular migrants.
In 2021, for example, the former home secretary, Priti Patel, claimed that “child rapists, people who pose a threat to our national security, serious criminals and failed asylum seekers” were taking advantage of the modern slavery system. She said people were “posing as victims in order to prevent their removal” and to “enable them [to] stay in the country”.
Such statements were quickly shown to be baseless; the government’s own Office of Statistics Regulation admonished the Home Office for repeating them. But they also demonstrated that the Home Office fundamentally misunderstands or is deliberately misrepresenting the system over which it presides.
The National Referral Mechanism (NRM), the official system for identifying and supporting victims of modern slavery, is not an open door into the UK. The NRM cannot grant asylum or residency. But it can cause serious problems for people who are applying for asylum at the same time.
The NRM is not being abused – there is nothing to take advantage of
The NRM’s decision-making process is unlike that of other crimes. Those suspected of being victims are referred into the system by officially recognised “first responders” – self-referral is not possible. Within five days they receive an initial “reasonable grounds” decision, which simply states whether the case officer agrees that there are reasonable grounds to believe that the individual may be a victim.
Once past that hurdle, the individual must then await a “conclusive grounds” decision. This states whether, on the “balance of probabilities”, it “is more likely than not” that the individual is a victim of human trafficking or modern slavery. This can take months, if not years to receive. Between the temporary and final decision, some support services are made available, which are outsourced to the third sector.
The number of people entering the NRM has grown nearly every year since its creation in 2009. In 2024, 19,125 people were referred into the mechanism.
Being found to have experienced human trafficking will alone not lead to leave to remain
The belief that the NRM is a pathway to stay in the UK is not only promoted by its detractors in the Home Office. I heard this assumption repeated in my research with practitioners working within and adjacent to the NRM as well. As one support worker in an NRM safehouse said, “I’ve come across it a lot, they’ve been told … this is here to help you stay in the country.” The support worker herself also believed that receiving a positive decision in the NRM could help in a person’s asylum claim.
But what is the basis of this belief? Generally speaking, the NRM has not even allowed for discretionary leave to remain, which is a temporary immigration status sometimes granted to individuals deemed ineligible for standard visa or asylum routes. Aside from slightly different rules for domestic workers, the Home Office has historically only described three circumstances in relation to which people with a positive conclusive grounds decision could also receive discretionary leave to remain:
- there are particularly compelling personal circumstances (e.g. the person is receiving a course of medical treatment in the UK); or
- they are pursuing a claim for compensation against their traffickers/modern slavery facilitators, and it would be unreasonable to expect them to pursue the claim from overseas; or
- they have agreed to cooperate with police enquiries and the investigating police force has requested a grant of discretionary leave.
All three can follow trafficking experiences, but they do not automatically follow positive conclusive decisions and are often not available in practice. Noticeably, a positive conclusive grounds decision is absent from this list. Being found to have experienced modern slavery or human trafficking will alone not lead to leave to remain.
In 2021, the High Court ruled that this guidance did not provide for a grant of leave to remain where a person had a pending asylum claim that was based on a fear of re-trafficking, but that it should. In 2023, the High Court also held that the Home Office operated a secret policy that frustrated this right for at least 1,500 people it had conclusively confirmed as victims of modern slavery.
But the Home Office’s flagrant disregard of High Court rulings aside, it’s important to understand that any of this actually happening was rare. Very few people managed to receive temporary discretionary leave to remain on this pathway, and never by virtue of receiving a positive conclusive grounds decision alone. Between 2020 and 2022, 5,578 adults were confirmed as victims by the NRM but only 364 of them were granted leave.
In 2022, the Nationality and Borders Act established a statutory basis for issuing leave to remain on similar grounds (“VTS leave”), but modified the wording. In doing so, it actually narrowed the scope of when leave to remain could be granted. This substantially reduced the number of adult victims granted leave to assist with their recovery in the following year. Grants of leave to remain continue to be commonly rejected on theoretical premises that do not relate to the practical realities people will encounter if removed from the country.
What is more, VTS leave is only ever issued for short periods of time. The Home Office is clear that, “This route is not a route to settlement.”
Despite longstanding calls for a positive conclusive grounds decision to trigger automatic leave to remain, the government has always refused, stating “[t]he Government believes that having a blanket policy of granting discretionary leave to all victims risks incentivising individuals to make false trafficking claims in an attempt to fraudulently obtain leave to remain or delay removal”.
The NRM’s existence can harm the asylum claims of those ‘identified as potential victims’
The existence of the NRM damages asylum claims. This is because the threshold for referring somebody as a “potential victim” is very low, with generic signs and indicators highlighted as grounds for a referral (like foreignness and poverty). Frontline staff are advised by government that if they have any concerns, it is best to make a referral.
In 2024, one person in five rejected entering the NRM
But if a potential victim’s case receives a negative decision later on because it does not meet the higher threshold required for a positive conclusive grounds decision, the asylum case officer can then view this as evidence of the claimant’s untrustworthiness. As one decision-maker put it:
“If you’re saying you’re a victim of sexual trafficking and that gets rejected, and then you’re claiming asylum because you believe that you’ll be killed and raped by someone in Afghanistan, then I’m going to be like, well you’re not really a victim of trafficking. If this proven all to be false, then how can I believe the rest of your story?”
Yet people are also threatened with negative consequences on their asylum applications if they refuse to enter the NRM. As one legal aid solicitor explained to me:
“So the Home Office would say, ‘Oh, well you’re a victim of trafficking…why don’t you want us to investigate that? Because you don’t want us to investigate that…why should we believe you?’ And that is generally the point that the Home Office takes…at the end of the day, if you don’t enter [the NRM], it will affect their credibility…and the Home Office will be less likely to take anything they say seriously.”
In short, they are damned if they do and damned if they don’t. If any element of their experience overlaps with the broad ‘indicators’ of modern slavery, they will be told to enter the NRM. But regardless of whether they agree to enter or refuse, the Home Office may now have a reason for suspicion that could negatively affect their future asylum decision.
For these people, having signs of trafficking in their histories is therefore potentially damaging. Referrals are largely filled out by the Home Office and frontline staff, but their existence can later be used to suggest deception on the part of the people seeking asylum. If the Home Office later fails to find evidence of the trafficking it or other frontline workers have raised alarms about, it is the applicant who will suffer.
As such, asylum seekers would be better off if the NRM did not exist.
Resisting the NRM
Abolishing the NRM sounds drastic, but believing that it should continue because more ‘genuine victims’ are being identified and supported each year is also misguided. The NRM is growing in spite of widespread resistance and harm.
Since 2015, public authorities in England and Wales have had a ‘duty to notify’ the Home Office of anyone who is suspected of being a victim of modern slavery but who refuses to enter the NRM. In 2024, 5,598 Duty to Notify reports were sent to the Home Office, alongside 19,125 referrals. That means that around one person in five rejected entering the NRM, and first responders don’t always fill out those forms when people refuse.
What’s more, not everybody who did end up entering the NRM did so of their own free will. My research shows that people are being referred into the NRM because they are not told about the referral (despite it requiring consent), or are misinformed about it, or are coerced into it.
This is what it takes to grow the NRM on this scale, because the NRM does more harm than just threatening to damage asylum claims. Thousands who enter receive no support at all, and people who do are subject to impoverishing conditions. By delaying asylum decisions for people inside the NRM, the NRM prolongs their impoverishment for months or years because asylum decisions are paused until NRM decisions are finalised. Thousands of people are referred into the NRM more than once, so many have experience of what they are refusing to enter.
Rather than protecting them from the brutalities of the immigration system, being identified as a potential victim of trafficking is causing serious harm to migrant people in the UK. Yes, some people in particular circumstances are currently better off consenting to the NRM. For instance, some have used positive NRM decisions to appeal a rejected asylum claim that was based on a fear of re-trafficking. While NRM decisions can carry weight in these scenarios, its input is not strictly necessary – judges can independently assess evidence and reach their own conclusions on whether a person has been trafficked. Regardless, if we step back and consider the NRM’s overall impact rather than its best possible impacts on a few, it becomes clear that the NRM needs to go.
This holds for UK nationals as well. Being identified as a victim of modern slavery does not provide meaningful support. But it can result in increased surveillance and control, as well as the splitting up of families and social networks. Here, as elsewhere, mechanisms for the oppression of migrant people with insecure status are being extended to the citizenry.
Contrary to the prevailing lens in which our eyes are fixed on the legal possibilities of the NRM, we must instead take seriously that the NRM can negatively affect people’s asylum claims (whether they enter or not) and perpetuate their impoverishment. This may come as a surprise to those invested in seeing the NRM as a pathway for emancipation. But it is nonetheless the case.
It is time to stop trying to reform the NRM bureaucracy, but to abolish it. Asylum seekers would be better off without it.
