Lyons Warns UK Slavery Reached 23,411 Referrals
Slavery in the UK has reached record levels, and Eleanor Lyons warned it is likely to worsen over the next decade. The government’s independent anti-slavery commissioner published her report on Tuesday with 23,411 referrals to the national referral mechanism in 2025, the highest ever number.
Lyons said the increase was not only about better detection. In her report, she said worsening conditions in the UK and across the world are widening the pool of people traffickers can reach.
Eleanor Lyons and 23,411 referrals
The referral figure rose from 12,691 in 2021 to 23,411 in 2025. Lyons said the scale of the rise points to a deeper problem than improved reporting alone. She wrote: "Poverty, global instability, conflict, global displacement of people and the breakdown of safe migration routes are creating a growing pipeline of vulnerability that traffickers are quick to exploit".
She also said: "Slavery and the most harrowing forms of exploitation are becoming more widespread in this country and evolving faster than we can respond". The report, Anticipating Exploitation: A Futures-Based Analysis, is presented as the first comprehensive forward-looking analysis of how modern slavery and human trafficking are likely to evolve in the UK over the next decade.
Technology, fraud and coercion
The report warned that AI could be used to scale up and professionalise exploitation. It also pointed to the increased use of digital labour in scam compounds, including entrapment into investor and romance fraud, and the integration of cryptocurrencies into trafficking models.
Lyons said: "As exploitation becomes more complex and more hidden, driven by technology and global instability, it will spread further and become harder to stop unless we act now." The report also raised concerns about the continued growth of gig economy platforms, coercive labour in agriculture, construction and mining, and an increase in reproductive slavery such as enforced egg harvesting and surrogacy.
UK ministers and GRETA
Lyons called on ministers to increase funding for specialist police units, prosecute more businesses exploiting or enslaving workers, launch a national campaign to help the public recognise and report exploitation, and improve victim care. Her warning came alongside a separate evaluation on Tuesday from the Council of Europe’s GRETA group, which highlighted a steep rise in potential trafficking victims.
GRETA welcomed steps taken by UK authorities in recent years, including not holding victims responsible for criminal acts they were forced to carry out by traffickers. The group urged the UK to adopt further measures to bring anti-trafficking laws, policies and practices fully into line with the convention on action against trafficking in human beings, with more resources, higher prioritisation, better coordination between law enforcement and other agencies, and reinforced financial investigations.
For the UK, the immediate test is whether ministers back Lyons’s funding and enforcement calls quickly enough to keep pace with traffickers already adapting to poverty, displacement and digital tools.
