Sir John Randall – 2014 Parliamentary Question to the Home Office

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Sir John Randall on 2014-04-09.

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, if she will make a comparative assessment of the sources, reliability and mutual compatibility of the statistics on the number of human trafficking victims from Albania given in parliamentary written answers and in the annual reports of the National Crime Agency.

Karen Bradley

A comparative assessment has been made.

Parliamentary questions regularly ask for specific details about suspected
victims of trafficking referred to the trafficking victim support service
operated by The Salvation Army.

The source of this data is The Salvation Army records.

The National Crime Agency (NCA) publishes statistics each year on the number of
potential victims who have been referred to the National Referral Mechanism.

The source of this data is the NCA records.

The two sets of figures measure slightly different things but are mutually
compatible.

Not all of the potential victims who are referred to the National Referral
Mechanism will then be referred to The Salvation Army for victim support. Some
might not receive a positive reasonable grounds decision and others might not
want Government-funded support.

We would therefore expect the number of cases referred to the National Referral
Mechanism, reported by the NCA, to be higher than the number of cases referred
to The Salvation Army for victim support, reported by the regular Parliamentary
questions.

This is borne out by our comparative assessment. The table below lists the PQs
that have requested data about the numbers of potential victims referred to The
Salvation Army, and lists the number of Albanian victims supported each month.

In total, this data indicates that there were 139 Albanian adult victims
referred to The Salvation Army for victim support in 2013 in England and Wales.

This is lower than the 208 potential adult Albanian victims who were originally
referred to the National Referral Mechanism in 2013 from England and Wales, as
reported in the NCA’s annual report.