HUMAN TRAFFICKING WATCH · DISPATCH
A Decade to Rebuild Protection
UK anti-slavery coalition maps a 2036 roadmap to reset law, policing, and support.
A consortium of UK anti-slavery organisations sets a 2036 vision, urging a new due diligence law, policing as a core priority, and survivor-centered support, arguing the 2015 framework faltered and national security is at stake.
On 29 April 2026, a consortium of leading anti-slavery organisations in the United Kingdom set out a joint strategic vision, a document measured in years not weeks, aiming to steady the response through 2036. They wrote from a clear diagnosis: despite the Modern Slavery Act 2015, the national effort had faltered, its prevention thin, business regulation ineffective, policing fragmented, support siloed, and immigration policy actively harmful. The vision pulled the issue out of the margins of safeguarding and into the centre of security, calling modern slavery a serious economic crime that corrodes legitimate markets and strains national resilience. That reframing mattered, because budgets, tasking, and professional attention followed priorities, and priorities followed how harms were categorized within the machinery of government and policing. The authors paired rhetoric with a buildable plan, sequencing legislative change, operational capacity, and survivor support so interventions reinforced each other rather than competed for air. The measure of success, they argued, would be prevention at scale and credible protection when exploitation occurred, not simply louder statements of concern from podiums (Bowen, n.d.).
Central to the plan was statute, specifically a new standalone Mandatory Human Rights Due Diligence and Forced Labour Act to arrive within two years, supplanting the 2015 Act’s Section 54 transparency provisions that left too much to voluntary disclosure. The proposal would compel companies to map risks across operations and supply chains, act to prevent and remediate forced labour, and demonstrate results through upgraded reporting requirements subject to independent scrutiny. It would close the gap between paper commitments and practice by attaching meaningful, enforceable penalties for noncompliance, calibrated to deter evasion rather than treat violations as reputational costs. Alongside due diligence, the Act would prohibit goods linked to forced labour from entering or circulating in UK markets, aligning border and market surveillance with labour rights rather than treating them as separate domains. The drafters argued that clearer duties and stronger sanctions would also level the field for compliant firms that currently compete against suppliers discounting costs onto coerced workers. The test, as always, would lie in enforcement capacity and political resolve, which the roadmap sought to secure through phased adoption and cross-departmental ownership (Bowen, n.d.).
The vision pressed policing to move decisively, designating modern slavery as a core priority and, crucially, resourcing that designation with specialist modern slavery and human trafficking teams embedded across forces and regional structures. Financial investigators, the plan emphasized, must be positioned to follow money as rigorously as they follow people, with data analytics scaled to fuse intelligence from safeguarding, labour inspection, and economic crime datasets. Advanced analytical tools are only as good as the inputs and workflows that sustain them, so the document called for standardized data models, investigative templates, and real-time feedback loops between front line officers and analysts. Prosecutorial outcomes also depend on early, joint case building, and the authors urged deeper collaboration between police and the Crown Prosecution Service to align evidential strategies before victims are retraumatized by repeated retellings. If modern slavery is treated as an economic crime threatening national security as well as individual safety, it will command comparative attention in tasking meetings that currently privilege drugs, firearms, and fraud. Without that shift, the report warned, tactical wins will remain episodic, and networks will simply reconstitute around the same profit models under less scrutiny (Bowen, n.d.).
At the centre of any credible response, the consortium placed survivors, insisting on a safeguarding-led, survivor-centric system that provides needs-based assistance for as long as is necessary rather than as long as funding cycles permit. A trauma-informed approach would be embedded at every point of contact — first encounter, referral, investigation, and court — to reduce harm and increase the likelihood that people feel safe enough to participate in justice processes. Specialist roles mattered in their design: access to Independent Modern Slavery Advocates and Victim Navigators to guide choices, culturally appropriate therapy to stabilize recovery, and the right to work to rebuild autonomy. Civil remedies, often overlooked beside criminal prosecutions, should be enhanced and accessible, delivering compensation and accountability where the criminal threshold is not met or proceedings would compound distress. Casework should be coherent rather than siloed, so that housing, healthcare, benefits, and legal advice are not separate battles but an integrated plan sequenced to the survivor’s priorities. The authors viewed these supports not as charity but as infrastructure that strengthens evidence, stabilizes lives, and ultimately reduces demand for criminal exploitation (Bowen, n.d.).
The report was blunt about immigration, urging the repeal of harmful legislation and practice that deterred exploited people from seeking help and that exposed survivors to detention, unsafe accommodation, or summary removal. It proposed guarantees of safe accommodation, timely and high-quality legal advice, routes to compensation, and a clear pathway to settlement, premised on protection rather than conditionality tied to cooperation. Support, the drafters said, must be available regardless of immigration status or type of exploitation, because traffickers exploit fear of the state as effectively as they exploit labour and vulnerability. When people believe disclosure will place them at risk, police and prosecutors lose witnesses, service providers lose trust, and exploiters gain time to adapt their methods and relocate victims. When protection is dependable, by contrast, identification happens earlier, evidence is stronger, and safeguarding plans can be executed before threats escalate or people disappear. The choice is therefore not only moral but operational, with direct effects on public safety and the credibility of the wider system (Bowen, n.d.).
For children, the consortium called for a cross-government, UK-wide Child Exploitation Strategy that would create a unified framework and align existing policies that have developed piecemeal across agencies and geographies. Early identification was the core ambition, paired with consistent safeguarding standards applied regardless of location, immigration status, or exploitation type, so that access to help does not depend on postcode or paperwork. Delivering that would require clear referral pathways, shared definitions, interoperable data systems, and training for educators, health professionals, and local authority staff to recognize indicators and respond without delay. The strategy would also tighten accountability by specifying roles, timelines, and outcomes, making it harder for cases to drift between desks or be dismissed as another service’s remit. Children’s experiences do not map neatly onto departmental mandates, the authors noted, so the structure must be designed around the child rather than the convenience of institutions. Such a framework, executed faithfully, would reduce avoidable harm and build public confidence that protection is a shared, reliable function of the state (Bowen, n.d.).
The report insisted that survivor inclusion be meaningful and ethical at every stage — design, implementation, and evaluation — not symbolic consultation after decisions are settled. That means recruiting, training, and paying survivors for advisory and leadership roles, resourcing participation so it is not extractive, and safeguarding against retraumatization through clear boundaries and optionality. Governance structures should formalize these commitments, with transparent terms of reference, conflict-of-interest standards, and feedback loops that demonstrate how input changed policy or practice. Measurement matters here too; the document urged indicators for participation quality and outcomes, not merely counts of meetings held or surveys completed. Inclusion done well, they argued, improves design fidelity, sharpens risk assessments, and surfaces unintended consequences earlier, protecting both people and programs. Inclusion done poorly breeds cynicism and weakens compliance, an avoidable cost in a field that depends on trust for its basic functions (Bowen, n.d.).
To turn principle into practice, the consortium presented a phased, evidence-based roadmap for the next decade, sequencing legislation, operational build-out, and support services while leveraging resources already sitting in government departments. Milestones were sketched for the new due diligence law, the creation or expansion of specialist teams, the roll-out of analytics capacity, and the establishment of survivor-centered supports with stable, multi-year funding. Oversight mechanisms, including transparent reporting and cross-government coordination, would track progress and surface bottlenecks early enough to correct course rather than excuse failure after the fact. The underlying admission was sober: the Modern Slavery Act 2015, while foundational, was never sufficient on its own, and the response has drifted as threats evolved and attention fragmented. A course correction is available, the authors argued, but time habits harden quickly, and the window for coherent action narrows when systems settle back into familiar grooves. The question they placed before ministers and officials was practical rather than rhetorical — whether the United Kingdom will build the capability the problem demands, and do so now (Bowen, n.d.).
Locations: United Kingdom
Tags: policy, research, international, training