To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many Potential Victim of Trafficking cases have been received by her Department in each of the last 5 years.
This answer is the replacement for a previous holding answer.
Answered on
25 October 2021
The Home Office publishes quarterly and annual statistics regarding the National Referral Mechanism (NRM). These include how many Potential Victim of Trafficking cases have been received each year. The latest published NRM statistics can be found here:
https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/national-referral-mechanism-statistics.
Statistics prior to Q2 2019 were produced by the National Crime Agency (NCA) and can be found here: Publications - National Crime Agency
There is no target timeframe in which to make conclusive grounds decisions in the National Referral Mechanism (NRM). A decision can only be made fairly and reasonably once sufficient information has been made available to the competent authority for it to complete the decision. When the competent authority has received sufficient information for it to complete a decision it should seek to do so.
This is done as soon as possible once a potential victim has been provided with a minimum of 45 calendar days of the recovery period they are eligible for, during which they may access the support and protections of the NRM. Timescales on individual decisions can vary according to the relative complexity of each case and on sufficient information being made available to the competent authority by the parties involved.
In the course of the last year the Single Competent Authority has been recruiting a significant number of new decision makers across the UK to increase capacity for NRM decision-making and bring down decision making timescales.