For survivors of modern slavery, the right to work is the right to rebuild
(Cristian Storto / Alamy)
4 min read
Growth, according to the government, is Britain’s defining ambition. Work must pay, ministers insist, the benefits system must be fairer; labour laws must be enforced. Through these principles, the government hopes to restore prosperity and social cohesion under its Get Britain Working agenda.
Yet one question remains: why tens of thousands of people in Britain are denied the right to work altogether?
An estimated 122,000 people in the UK today live in conditions of modern slavery. Globally, the figure stands at 50 million. Hidden in plain sight, men and women are trapped in forced labour, sexual exploitation, and domestic servitude.
For fifteen years, the Sophie Hayes Foundation has supported women survivors of modern slavery as they rebuild their lives. Each has strength, skill, and aspiration, but many face one impossible barrier: the inability to work legally. Those trafficked into the UK often enter the asylum system, where they must wait months or years for a decision before being granted the right to work. In that time, dependence deepens, and vulnerability to re‑exploitation grows.
A new evaluation of the Sophie Hayes Foundation's Employability Programme has confirmed what survivors have long known: work is not a reward for recovery, it is the mechanism of it. Launched at the House of Lords in June by the University of Nottingham Rights Lab and King's College London, in partnership with the Modern Slavery and Human Rights Policy and Evidence Centre, the report found that safe, meaningful and supported employment is what allows survivors to live freely and independently.
Re-exploitation is all too little accounted for in the government response to modern slavery. The government does not even publish whether victims receiving support have been recognised as victims before. Re-exploitation, in other words, is invisible by design.
The Home Office has tendered an £800 million contract for victim support. Not a penny of it buys survivors the right to work. But without the cornerstone of financial independence, that support offers immediate safety without long-term opportunity. True rehabilitation requires not only safety from traffickers but the means to stand independently, through work.
This isn't just unjust. It's economically illiterate. Excluding survivors from work doesn't just fail them – it costs the country. Denying the right to work is estimated to cost the UK up to £36m a year in lost tax revenue alone. At the same time, ONS data show over 700,000 job vacancies across the country. The contradiction is obvious: a workforce in shortage, and thousands ready yet unable to contribute.
At the end of June, the Home Secretary announced that asylum seekers will have to repay up to £10,000 in support costs before they can settle – a debt triggered by the very act of finding work. A survivor who takes a job doesn't gain independence; she gains a bill. Nor does the policy even achieve its own stated aim: fewer than 15 per cent of refugees earn over £20,000 even five years after being granted asylum, meaning the scheme is unlikely to raise meaningful revenue, and may well cost more to administer than it recovers.
There is another way.
To grant the right to work to survivors would be an act not of leniency, but of leadership. It would bolster the workforce, strengthen the economy, and perhaps most importantly, uphold the principle that recovery depends on empowerment, not exclusion.
As Britain faces its seventh political leadership upheaval in a decade, and the Prime Minister apparent Andy Burnham vows to bring new and radical solutions to the table, we must ask why the government will not grant the right to work to survivors?
The government faces pressure to appear robust on migration, and fears that granting survivors the right to work would be seen as a backdoor route into the UK labour market. But this gets the causality backwards. It is the absence of the right to work, not its presence, that leaves survivors dependent on state support for years and vulnerable to being re-trafficked into the very exploitation the system exists to prevent. Modern slavery is not an immigration issue; it is a human one. People across the political spectrum agree that exploitation is a moral stain, not a partisan talking point.
Britain cannot claim to champion work while barring survivors of slavery from earning an honest living. The test of our growth agenda lies not only in GDP, but in whose futures it allows to grow.
Emily Death is CEO of the Sophie Hayes Foundation
