Modern Slavery (854A/23)
Request
Please could I request the following information about the number of offences recorded under the Modern Slavery Act from 26 March 2015 to 26 March 2023.
- How many offences were recorded that fall under the Modern Slavery Act 2015?* Could you please break these down by section.
- Of these offences, how many went to court?
- Of the offences that went to court, what were the outcomes? E.g. no charges were brought, a conviction was secured, etc.
I have included a list of the offences under the 2015 Act:
- Section 1 – Slavery, Servitude, Forced and Compulsory Behaviour
- Section 2 – Arranging or facilitating the travel of another person with a view to exploitation
- Section 4 – Committing an offence with intent to commit an offence under section 2 of the Act
Response
Please find attached our response and be advised that we are unable to provide prosecution data for questions 2 and 3 because this information is not routinely fed back into our systems, and we do not have access to magistrates’ court data. Therefore, we have instead provided a breakdown by outcome.
In addition to the attached response West Midlands Police can neither confirm nor deny that it holds any other information relevant to this request as the duty in Section 1(1)(a) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 does not apply by virtue of the following exemption:
Section 23(5) – Information supplied by, or concerning, certain Security Bodies
Section 23 is a class based absolute exemption and there is no requirement to consider the public interest in this case.
Confirming or denying the existence of whether any other information is held would contravene the constrictions laid out within Section 23 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 in that this stipulates a generic bar on disclosure of any information applied by, or concerning, certain Security Bodies.
This exemption and explanatory notes are shown here:
No inference can be taken from this refusal that any further information relevant to your request does or does not exist.
Every effort is made to ensure that the figures presented are accurate and complete. However, it is important to note that these data have been extracted from a number of data sources used by forces for police purposes. The detail collected to respond specifically to your request is subject to the inaccuracies inherent in any large scale recording system. As a consequence, care should be taken to ensure data collection processes and their inevitable limitations are taken into account when interpreting those data.
If you decide to write an article / use the enclosed data we would ask you to take into consideration the factors highlighted in this document so as to not mislead members of the public or official bodies, or misrepresent the relevance of the whole or any part of this disclosed material.