FactCheck: human trafficking cuts
Updated on 21 November 2008
Women's minister Harriet Harman claims a specialist people trafficking unit is not being cut. FactCheck's not so sure.
The claim
"There's nothing being closed down because of lack of funds - in fact there's increasing funds going in to [trafficking]... Let me assure you there's not a reduction in the amount of money going in to help police work, prosecution work, and the work to protect people against trafficking. That has been increasing because of the increased problem of this serious and organised crime."
Harriet Harman, women's minister and deputy Labour party leader, Channel 4 News, 19 November 2008
The background
The home office is cracking down on prostitution. This week it announced new measures to criminalise having sex with a prostitute who is controlled by a pimp, or who has been trafficked into the country.
The government says it is keen to protect vulnerable women, but is it putting its money where its legislative mouth is?
It was announced earlier this month that the Metropolitan police's dedicated human trafficking unit - which targets criminal networks who force victims into prostitution or other forced labour - was being scrapped, something about which women's minister Harriet Harman was questioned on Channel 4 News.
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Interviewer Krishnan Guru-Murthy asked: "Why did you - the government - allow the one police unit specifically set up to target trafficking to be closed down because of lack of funds?"
Harman replied: "There's nothing being closed down because of lack of funds - in fact there's increasing funds going in to this."
Guru-Murthy pushed the minister, saying: "There was one police unit set up to target trafficking, it had a budget of about £2m within the Metropolitan police, and that budget went - the unit's gone."
She responded: "Let me assure you there's not a reduction in the amount of money going in to help police work, prosecution work, and the work to protect people against trafficking. That has been increasing because of the increased problem of this serious and organised crime."
Is she right?
The analysis
There are two parts to Harman's claim - the fate of the individual Met Police unit, and a wider increase in anti-trafficking budgets.
Her insistence that "nothing [is] being closed down because of a lack to funds" is pretty hard to square up with reports earlier this month.
At its launch, the home office described the Met's human trafficking team as a "specialist unit dedicated to targeting the global criminal networks that profit from [a] modern day slave trade"; earlier this month, its investigations saw six members of two linked trafficking networks sentenced to more than 52 years in jail.
But it was revealed on 10 November that the team was to cease after just two years in operation, much to the disappointment of anti-trafficking campaigners.
The Met said yesterday that the team "was launched in March 2007 as a result of being fully funded by money from the home office Reflex project".
A spokesperson confirmed the money "to keep the team in its current format will no longer be available from April 2009" - although the force is currently reviewing and will "maintain our response to human trafficking".
The loss of the money amounts to a reported £2.3m reduction in the Met's home office grant, which directly contradicts Harman's insistence of "nothing being closed down because of lack of funds".
The Met couldn't provide central figures for its anti-trafficking spend: the work can come under a number of different areas.
But is there a bureaucratic quirk at work: could the Met somehow magic up funding from other sources to increase its anti-trafficking spend overall?
The Met couldn't provide central figures for its anti-trafficking spend: the work can come under a number of different areas, such as investigations or borough policing, along with the force's other smuggling and illegal immigration crime work.
Right now the whole thing is under review, anyway, so the force couldn't say what was likely to happen next year.
What about funding for anti-trafficking work across the country?
As might, perhaps, be expected from the difficulty in pinpointing the Met's anti-trafficking spend, the government does not hold any figures for the total police spend on anti-trafficking across the UK; neither does the Association of Chief Police Officers.
The home office said £30m had been given to police forces since 2003; the issue should also be "part of core police business" - so it would come under forces' individual spends as well. Still, this isn't the same as having earmarked funding to tackle the issue.
Last year, the UK-wide anti-trafficking Operation Pentameter 2 was launched to some fanfare. However, this was funded out of police forces' existing budget streams.
The £30m-figure doesn't really tell us that much in itself, but the government could not be any more specific.
"The fund of £30m covered the spending review periods from 2003 and was used to fund many projects across the financial and calendar years. For this reason we can't provide a year on year breakdown," the home office told FactCheck.
So what could Harman's claim have been based on?
Last year, the UK-wide anti-trafficking Operation Pentameter 2 was launched to some fanfare. However, this was funded out of police forces' existing budget streams rather than by extra government money.
The government did give Eaves Housing for Women, a London-based charity which provides support for trafficking victims, a £100,000 top-up to its £2.4m annual grant last year in anticipation of Pentameter 2.
There is one place where spending is definitely increasing: the multi-agency UK Human Trafficking Centre, which was set up in 2006 to share best practice across the country.
The Home Office puts its budget at £1.7m; according to figures released in July 2008, its first full-year budget, in 2007, was £834,084. This increased to £1,712,000 in 2008 and appears to drop to £1,602,000 in 2009 - although this is slightly misleading as the 2008 figure also included a one-off lump sum for IT spending.
The verdict
Funding has been cut for the Met's specialist anti-trafficking team, hence it won't continue in its current form. So it's not true to say, as Harman does, that nothing is being shut down.
The force is currently reviewing its anti-trafficking operations, so it's too soon to say what will take the unit's place.
It's also hard to confirm whether anti-trafficking funding is increasing more widely. Although one initiative - the Human Trafficking Centre - has had its budget doubled since 2006, more comprehensive figures for the country as a whole weren't available.
FactCheck rating: 4
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The sources
Human trafficking: Hansard written answers for 22 November 2007
United Kingdom Human Trafficking Centre: Hansard
Home office
Metropolitan police
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