Forced Labour in UK Law

Where "forced or compulsory labour" is concerned, the menace of a penalty can be exerted in various ways. Constraint can be mental or physical. Where it is alleged that one person has been compulsorily employed by another, the level of pay he or she has received, if any, may have evidential importance. It may point to coercion; it may bear on an employee's ability to escape from his or her employer's control. On its own, however, a derisory level of wages is not tantamount to coercion.

The problem has been with us for some time, and has been growing. Unhappily different forms of exploitation are found in the sex industry, the construction industry, agriculture and residential care. Nevertheless, this legislation, too did not address the entire problem. The end result was that many men and women continued to remain vulnerable to exploitation without any counter-balancing protection against exploitation.

Exploitation of fellow human beings in any of the ways criminalised by the legislation represents deliberate degrading of a fellow human being or human beings. It is far from straight forward for them even to complain about the way they are being treated, let alone to report their plight to the authorities so that the offenders might be brought to justice.

This decision could be said to be questionable in that Ms Farrell appears to have accepted AS's account of what actually happened to him namely that he was kept captive and required to work until "the debt" was repaid. Although this appears on any view to be "forced labour", Ms Farrell seems to think that it would only be forced labour if suffered by someone under 18.

(56) In addition, in its assessment that the Appellant worked due to economic necessity, the Authority failed to recognise that this was not inconsistent with continuing exploitation, manipulation and forced labour. Further, the Authority placed disproportional weight on the failure of this frightened, isolated mid-teenager recently exposed to the culture and language of an alien country to make a formal complaint to the police.