Modern slavery “growing, adapting and embedding” across UK, warns watchdog

A new report from the UK’s Independent Anti-Slavery Commissioner, Eleanor Lyons, has warned that modern slavery is likely to become more complex, more hidden and more widespread over the next decade unless urgent action is taken.

The assessment, based on evidence from more than 50 experts and people with lived experience, sets out how modern slavery and human trafficking could evolve by 2036. It concludes that exploitation is becoming increasingly adaptive, transnational and embedded within legitimate systems, driven by global pressures such as conflict, climate change, economic instability and migration. These forces are expected to expand the number of people vulnerable to exploitation while creating new opportunities for criminal networks to operate across borders and within informal labour markets.

The report highlights the growing role of technology in reshaping the threat. Advances in artificial intelligence, digital platforms, cryptocurrencies and encrypted communications are enabling traffickers to recruit, groom and control victims with greater scale, speed and anonymity. This is contributing to the emergence of more concealed forms of exploitation, including online sexual exploitation, AI-enabled fraud and digitally mediated coercion, while lowering barriers to entry for offenders.

At the same time, the Commissioner warns that the UK’s safeguarding and enforcement systems are struggling to keep pace. Persistent resource constraints, fragmented coordination between agencies, inconsistent victim identification and low prosecution rates are described as a critical vulnerability. Without sustained reform and investment, the report suggests these weaknesses risk creating a more permissive environment in which exploitation can continue to evolve and become further embedded.

The analysis also points to an increasingly diverse exploitation landscape, with risks extending beyond more familiar forms of abuse. These include exploitation linked to immigration and visa systems, abuse within gig and hidden economies, reproductive exploitation, organ harvesting, state-enabled exploitation and the targeting of cognitively vulnerable adults. Taken together, these trends indicate that exploitation is becoming more varied, less visible and increasingly integrated into everyday economic and social activity.

A central finding of the report is the failure to act on insights from survivors. People with lived experience often identified emerging risks years before institutions responded, highlighting gaps in prevention, trust and access to support. The Commissioner argues that embedding survivor expertise more consistently into policymaking would help identify early warning signs and prevent harm from becoming normalised.

The report concludes that enforcement alone will not be enough to tackle the problem and calls for a fundamental shift towards prevention. This includes addressing the underlying conditions that make people vulnerable, building systems that victims trust and can access, ensuring enforcement tools keep pace with evolving criminal methods and holding organisations accountable where exploitation occurs. Without such a shift, it warns, modern slavery risks becoming harder to detect, more digital and more deeply embedded in everyday life.

In response to the findings, Lyons has urged the government to act with greater urgency and coordination, including placing survivors at the centre of policy development, publishing a forward-looking strategy, strengthening political leadership, improving support for victims and investing in law enforcement capabilities to tackle increasingly sophisticated and technology-enabled exploitation.

In her foreword, Lyons reflects on the tenth anniversary of the Modern Slavery Act 2015, which was once hailed as world-leading legislation. While acknowledging that it has helped thousands of victims escape abuse, she warns that the scale of the problem has grown significantly. “The uncomfortable truth is this: modern slavery has not receded, it has grown,” she writes.

She points to record referral numbers as evidence of the expanding threat, noting that cases are rising not only because of improved detection but because exploitation itself is increasing and becoming more deeply embedded in everyday life. Lyons also highlights the growing role of technology and the shift towards domestic vulnerability, with UK nationals now making up the largest group of victims.

“Ten years on,” she writes, “the question is no longer whether we recognise modern slavery as a serious crime. It is whether we are prepared to act with the urgency and ambition that the scale of the problem now demands.”