Policy paper
Draft Modern Slavery Bill
Introduces legislation to expose the hidden crime of slavery, bring more perpetrators to justice and protect and support victims.
Documents
Details
The bill will:
- consolidate existing human trafficking and slavery offences to make the options available to law enforcement, when investigating and pursuing trafficking related charges, administratively simpler and operationally clearer
- increase the maximum sentence for human trafficking to life imprisonment, to ensure that modern-day slave drivers face the full force of the law
- introduce an anti-slavery commissioner to galvanise efforts in the UK to challenge modern slavery by working with government and law-enforcement agencies to realise more investigations, prosecutions and convictions of human traffickers
- introduce slavery and trafficking prevention orders and slavery and trafficking risk orders to restrict movements or impose other prohibitions on convicted or suspected traffickers to reduce the risk they pose
- create a new requirement for ‘first responders’ to report all suspected cases of human trafficking to the national referral mechanism (NRM). This will improve our understanding of the nature and scale of this crime and help improve our response
Attached are the draft bill, the ECHR memorandum and the impact assessment.