Services for survivors of human trafficking and modern slavery

The Home Office has recently extended the memorandum of understanding with CQC to inspect safehouse and outreach support provision in England and Wales, up to the end of March 2023.

Our inspectors will be moving to a risk and intelligence-based approach, which will include revisiting some services where we have made previous recommendations to see if improvements have been made and responding to new and emerging risks. We will continue to report on our findings and make improvement recommendations where needed.

We will also continue to develop the inspection programme, including reviewing our current inspection framework and engaging more with providers to help how we share information about how to improve.

In the meantime, based on what we found from our first inspection programme, we make the following recommendations to encourage all organisations involved in commissioning and providing safehouse and outreach services to improve the experiences of the people who use them:

• Safehouse providers need to consider how to provide out-of-hours support, particularly night-time admissions, to minimise risks to both survivors and staff.
• In conjunction with The Salvation Army (TSA) as the Prime Contractor, providers need to review records and case management systems to clearly identify and record the needs of children and any associated risks.
• Providers and TSA should consider ways to share good practice and innovation. Inspection reports from this programme are not public documents but demonstrate some excellent work within this field that could drive improvements across the sector (we note that some good practice and innovation has been delivered outside of the Modern Slavery Victim Care Contract (MSVCC)).