Expert Comment: The Modern Slavery Act at 10 – what have we learnt for human rights?

Former Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May, who can justifiably take the political credit for the passage of the UK’s ground-breaking  Modern Slavery Act 10 years ago today, famously described modern slavery as ‘the greatest human rights issue of our time.’

Our experience of modern slavery research for policy teaches us that the patient and systematic resort to properly resourced, independent and expert policy-relevant research, evidence and data, which is the product of a genuinely collaborative process of co-creation, can help transcend political division and provide a firm foundation for more durable and resilient policy responses.

Murray Hunt, Director of Oxford University’s Modern Slavery and Human Rights Policy and Evidence Centre

We are at a time in history when the very idea of human rights has become increasingly politically contested. There have been repeated calls in the UK for repeal of the Human Rights Act and withdrawal from the European Convention on Human Rights is now part of the political mainstream across the political spectrum; meanwhile the international multilateral human rights framework is under increasing strain worldwide.

Independent research and evidence have a crucial role to play in building cross-party political consensus about how best to tackle global human rights challenges like modern slavery.

The Policy and Evidence Centre’s raison d’etre is to bridge the divide between research and policy in the particular area of modern slavery, generating actionable and evidence-based policy recommendations, taking a human rights-based approach.  It recently convened two events to take stock of the operation of the Modern Slavery Act and consider the future of UK modern slavery policy, one in Parliament with parliamentarians and the other at the British Library with a much wider group of stakeholders. 

It is clear from the rich discussion at these events that, thanks largely to research, there is an emerging evidence-based consensus about how the policy and legal framework for tackling modern slavery can be improved in the light of what we now know both about the drivers of modern slavery, and how the UK’s legal and policy framework has worked in practice to tackle it.  The evidence clearly shows, for example:

• Effectively addressing modern slavery requires a systemic, long-term and holistic cross-Government response, given the complexity of the drivers of vulnerability to exploitation, which can be exacerbated by the Government’s own policies in other areas, such as migration and special educational needs.
• There needs to be much more emphasis on prevention, learning lessons from public health approaches, both to pre-empt modern slavery happening in the first place and to reduce the risk of re-trafficking. 
• Effective systems of identification and support for victims of modern slavery must be adequately resourced, kept separate from immigration control, and brought back into line with the UK’s international legal obligations for there to be any prospect of victims participating in the criminal justice system on the scale required to bring exploiters and traffickers to justice.
• The expert voices of people with lived experience of modern slavery must be central to both research and the formation of policy on modern slavery, and innovative institutional ways of doing this must be created and sustained.
• Legal enforcement of the criminal law on modern slavery is woefully inadequate and will remain so until ways are found of removing the obstacles to victims trusting the criminal justice system.
• The legal requirement on businesses over a certain size to publish a report on their efforts to address modern slavery in their supply chain is inadequate, and the law should now go further in requiring businesses to demonstrate due diligence in relation to their value chains.

The maturing evidence base also suggests a number of other more specific improvements, such as the strengthening of public procurement measures, forced labour import bans, stronger regional and local collaborative partnerships and others referred to in the Centre’s Report Modern Slavery policy in the UK: evidence-informed priorities for the UK Government. The above is a sample of some of the most significant policy and legal changes to which the research and evidence base most clearly points.

Murray Hunt, Director of the Policy and Evidence Centre on Modern Slavery and Human Rights

As these milestones in the national and international protection of human rights approach, researchers, policymakers, universities and funders would do well to reflect on the lessons learned from the particular human rights policy area of modern slavery.

Several years of sustained research and knowledge production, transparently funded by the Research Councils and involving a genuinely co-creative and iterative process directly involving policymakers, people with lived experience and civil society, and a diverse range of researchers working collaboratively across different institutions, has generated an increasingly mature and reliable evidence base. This evidence is now directly informing a healthy political debate about whether the legal framework has achieved its objectives, and how it can be improved to make better progress towards tackling this global human rights challenge.

In our troubled times, this gives some cause for optimism that wider debates about human rights and democracy can yet be depolarised and detoxified, and the currently disturbing direction of travel reversed.   

Our experience of modern slavery research for policy teaches us that the patient and systematic resort to properly resourced, independent and expert policy-relevant research, evidence and data, which is the product of a genuinely collaborative process of co-creation, can help transcend political division and provide a firm foundation for more durable and resilient policy responses.