Prosecution data for offences under the Modern Slavery Act (2015) 2018-2023

Your Request

Please would you provide a breakdown for the last five years of the number of prosecutions and convictions for offences under Modern Slavery Act 2015 Section 1, and 2. Modern Slavery Act 2015 Section 2.

Please state how many of each relate to adult victims vs child victims, and how many of each relate to each type of exploitation (i.e. labour exploitation, sexual exploitation, domestic servitude, criminal exploitation, or organ harvesting).

Our Response

The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) does hold some recorded information falling within the scope of your request.

Please find attached an Excel spreadsheet labelled ‘11549- DATA’ and please note the data caveats therein when considering the disclosed information. The spreadsheet contains tables of prosecutions and convictions for Human Trafficking flagged cases, split by child abuse flagged and non-child abuse flagged, covering the last five full financial years, 2018 through to 2023.

The CPS does not hold prosecution outcomes data by specific offence or by circumstances of the offence (servitude, sexual exploitation etc.). To search for this information would require a manual review of CPS cases, at disproportionate cost.

Over the last five full financial years ending March 2023 there were 1,303 offences across 300 CPS cases under Sections 1 and 2 of the Modern Slavery Act 2015.

Section 12(1) of the FOI Act means public authorities are not obliged to comply with a request for information if it estimates the cost of complying would exceed the appropriate limit. The appropriate limit for central government is set at £600. This means that the appropriate limit will be exceeded if it would require more than 24 hours work in determining whether the CPS holds the information, and locating, retrieving and extracting the information.

We believe that the cost of reviewing the above volume of cases to identify what type of exploitation the prosecutions relate to would exceed the appropriate limit. Consequently, we are not obliged to comply with this part of your request.