Modern slavery & human trafficking (FOI ref: 1888A/25)

Request

1. Please provide the number of cases of modern slavery and human trafficking reported to the force for each calendar year between January 1st 2019 and December 31st 2024.

2. Please disaggregate data according to the following information:

The crime outcome of the offences (for example, this includes but is not limited to outcomes such as 'cautioned', 'charged/summonsed', evidential difficulties (victim does not support investigation), no suspect identified, 'Not in public interest (police), Not in public interest (CPS)' and any other outcomes recorded),

3. The age of victims recorded, either adult (18 years or older) or child (17 years old or younger).

For the purposes of this request, 'victim' is a person who has reported having been a victim of this crime.

Response

Please provide the number of cases of modern slavery and human trafficking reported to the force for each calendar year between January 1st 2019 and December 31st 2024.

Please see following table, but note – due to system changes/issues, data is currently not retrievable prior to 2021 and therefore we are unable to provide it at this time:

Table1. Modern Slavery/Human Trafficking offences:

2. Please disaggregate data according to the following information:

The crime outcome of the offences (for example, this includes but is not limited to outcomes such as 'cautioned', 'charged/summonsed', evidential difficulties (victim does not support investigation), no suspect identified, 'Not in public interest (police), Not in public interest (CPS)' and any other outcomes recorded).

Table2. Breakdown of offences in table 1 above by Outcome:

3. The age of victims recorded, either adult (18 years or older) or child (17 years old or younger).

Table3. Breakdown of offences in table 1 above by Victim Age:

In addition to the information above, West Midlands Police can neither confirm nor deny that it holds any other information relevant to this request by virtue of the following exemption:

Section 23(5) - Information supplied by or relating to, bodies dealing with security matters

Section 23 is a class based absolute exemption and there is no requirement to consider the public interest.

No inference should be taken from this that any other information relevant to this request is or is not held.

Every effort is made to ensure that the figures in the tables above are accurate and complete. However, it is important to note that this data has been extracted from a number of data sources used by forces for police purposes. The detail collected to respond specifically to your request may be 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 the data.

The figures provided therefore are our best interpretation of data which has relevance to your request, but you should be aware that the collation of figures for ad hoc requests may have limitations and this should be taken into account when those data are used.

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.