by Mikhail Kolovangin
[REGNUM] Independent Anti-Slavery Commissioner, Eleanor Lyons, published a report with the telling title Anticipating Exploitation.
It was released exactly ten years after the passage of the landmark Modern Slavery Act 2015—a document that was once hailed as a "global model." The decade's results were disappointing: slavery in the UK hasn't retreated—it's actually growing. And its main driver is poverty.
The UK's National Relief and Support System (NRM) has been recording statistics since 2009. The dynamics of these data clearly demonstrate the alarming scale of what is happening.
In 2014, the system received 2,340 reports from victims. That was the starting point. By 2016, the number had grown to 3,805, and by 2019, to 10,627 (an increase of nearly threefold in five years). The 2020 pandemic only briefly slowed the curve: 10,613 cases were recorded that year—almost the same as in 2019. But as soon as the quarantine was lifted, the growth resumed with a vengeance.
In 2021, there were 12,727 requests (+20% compared to the previous year). In 2022, there were 16,938 (+33%). In 2023, there were 16,990. In 2024, there were 19,125 (+13%), another record. And finally, in 2025, there were 23,411 requests—a 22% increase in one year, the highest number since the NRM's founding in 2009. This represents a tenfold increase over the past ten years.
For a long time, the British public perceived slavery as something distant—stories of people brought from other countries, from conflict zones, from places of extreme need. This report shatters this stereotype.
As of 2025, British citizens account for the largest share of all victims of slavery in the country. This is a fundamental shift. Just a few years ago, migrants from Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia, and West Africa dominated the list of victims. Today, it is native-born people who are exploited due to debt, precarious employment, and rising costs of living.
These three factors create a fertile environment for exploitation. When a person can't pay their rent, they take a precarious job. But that turns into a trap, becoming increasingly difficult to escape. Thus, poverty gradually devolves into slavery.
One of the most illustrative examples is the social care sector. After the British government added carers and care home workers to its list of "shortage occupations" in 2022, granting them simplified visa access to the country, thousands of workers from India, Zimbabwe, and Nigeria flocked to the sector. Many of them paid agents up to £20,000 for paperwork and placement.
The results were immediate. In 2021, the charity Unseen recorded 15 cases of slavery related to the care sector (63 victims). In 2022, there will be 106 cases (708 victims). This represents a more than 1100% increase in one year. In 2023, there will be 918 potential victims in 140 recorded cases, an increase of another 30%.
The scheme was simple: people were brought into the country with promises of work and decent housing. Upon arrival, they were denied payment, relocated to overcrowded, cold rooms, and threatened with visa revocation.
The debt-slavery mechanism, whereby a person cannot leave because they owe their employer for their visa and housing, functioned without a hitch. By the first half of 2023, the average debt of a care worker who contacted the helpline was £11,800.
This is not an anomaly. It is a systemic pattern: where there are vulnerable people without language, without connections, without an understanding of their rights, with debt and an unstable migration status, slavery finds fertile ground.
Economic pressure is one of the key drivers of this dire problem in the UK, and poverty statistics confirm this.
According to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) data published in 2025, approximately 20% of the UK adult population lives in poverty, and 31% of children live below the poverty line. According to government data, by March 2025, 13.4 million people were in relative poverty. This is 500,000 more than the previous year.
The cost-of-living crisis that began after 2021 has primarily hit those already at risk: young people without permanent employment, migrants, single parents, and people with disabilities. These categories constitute the primary vulnerable group targeted by recruiters.
In 2021, the Global Slavery Index estimated that 122,000 people were living in slavery in the UK—1.8 people per 1,000 people. Other studies put the figure at 130,000 or higher. Most of them are invisible to official statistics: they work in car washes, nail salons, farmland, and construction.
The exploitation of minors deserves special attention. In the UK, there is a widespread network in which urban gangs use children and teenagers to deliver drugs to provincial towns. In 2025, police shut down 241 such networks and referred 3,200 people associated with this activity to emergency services.
Children involved in these schemes typically come from families living in poverty or in the foster care system. Lack of a stable home, financial pressure, and the search for belonging—all of this makes children targets for recruitment. Meanwhile, the sexual exploitation of girls in the UK has increased by 54% over the past five years.
Considerable attention is paid to the role of technology—artificial intelligence, encrypted messaging, deepfakes, and cryptocurrencies. These are all tools that recruiters and exploiters are using. But innovations in themselves don't create slavery; they only amplify existing weaknesses.
Artificial intelligence makes it possible to create credible fake job postings and recruit potential victims in large numbers. Digital platforms are moving recruitment online, making it less visible to law enforcement. However, a person doesn't become a victim simply because someone posts a convincing message online. More importantly, they're struggling to pay rent and food.
Ten years ago, the Modern Slavery Act was passed with optimism. Today, its authors are forced to admit that the legislation does not change the structural conditions in which this monstrous phenomenon is reproduced.
As long as millions of people live in debt and children from poor families become easy prey for recruiters, the horrific numbers will continue to rise.