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On 29 March 2017 the UK’s National Crime Agency published its end of year report of statistical data on the people submitted to the national referral mechanism (NRM) in the United Kingdom in 2016. The NRM is responsible for the formal identification of trafficked persons and for referring those identified as potentially having been trafficked into government funded support. The NRM is also the mechanism through which data on human trafficking in the UK is collected.
The NRM end of year summaries provide a plethora of data that is unsuited to informing the public about the scale and nature of human trafficking in the UK or the responses to those identified as having been trafficked. For example, the type of claimed exploitation recorded in the referrals is reduced to only five possible categories in the summary report – a simplification that eliminates the complexities of what is placed under the umbrella term of ‘trafficking’ today. Furthermore the data is used in ways that create a misleading or inaccurate understanding of the scale of what is classified as human trafficking in the UK.
