The Nationality and Borders Bill1 includes damaging proposals which will impact all child victims of trafficking, including those subject to immigration control. The government’s stated intention is to improve support for child victims, but this is incompatible with their plans as set out. This is particularly important in light of official National Referral Mechanism (NRM) data that shows that more children than ever before were identified as potential victims of trafficking in 2021.
There are widespread calls for Part 5 of the Bill to be removed because it conflates responses to modern slavery and trafficking with immigration, will reduce identification and protection of all victims of trafficking including British nationals and will create a damaging two-tier discriminatory system for responses to modern slavery based on immigration status.