Services for survivors of human trafficking and modern slavery

This report reflects the findings from a programme of inspections of safehouse and outreach support for people who are survivors of human trafficking and/or modern slavery, as part of the Modern Slavery Victim Care Contract (MSVCC). We carried out the inspections between January 2021 and June 2022.

The programme was commissioned by the Home Office under a memorandum of understanding (MoU) as advice and assistance under paragraph 9 of Schedule 4 of the Health and Social Care Act 2008.

The Salvation Army (TSA) is the Prime Contractor (contract holder) responsible for delivering the MSVCC. As Prime Contractor, TSA subcontract 12 providers across England and Wales, to provide safehouse and outreach support to survivors within the National Referral Mechanism (NRM). We assessed the available provision of MSVCC service providers as part of the inspection programme.

We did not inspect TSA's role as Prime Contractor of the overall MSVCC service within this inspection programme.

CQC does not register or regulate these services, so we could not use our powers of enforcement. For this programme, a team of our specialist inspectors looked at the quality of support for survivors who use the services.

People who have been identified as survivors of human trafficking and modern slavery have been illegally exploited and either forced to work in the sex trade, used as domestic slaves, exploited for labour or exploited for criminal activity. Those in vulnerable situations are more at risk and many survivors are recovering from traumatic experiences. We use the term survivor throughout this report, although we acknowledge that these people and those that work with them may use different terms during their time in the NRM process.