Our Message to the New Prime Minister

Welcome to your new role! Your inbox must already be overflowing. Amongst your many priorities, we call on you to make modern slavery a priority. This might feel like a niche issue. But it isn’t. It goes to the very heart of a fair society and a functioning economy. 

As you arrive as Prime Minister, vowing to bring new and radical solutions to the table, Sophie Hayes Foundation has one to suggest – why not make 2026 the year in which survivors of modern slavery are given the Right to Work? 

For 15 years, the Sophie Hayes Foundation has supported hundreds of 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.  

The Government’s ‘Getting Britain Working’ agenda is designed to remove limits on people’s aspirations, making them the agenda of their own future achievements, as well as unleashing economic growth in the UK. 
During your leadership campaign, you stated your support for the Home Secretary’s push to limit legal and illegal migration. Does that include reclaiming £10,000 in support costs from asylum seekers? It would be a mistake to emphasise the cost, without recognising the value that asylum seekers, and amongst them modern slavery survivors bring to the UK.

There is another way. 

Granting the Right to Work to survivors of modern slavery in the asylum system could generate up to £36 million a year in tax revenue alone. As well as giving access to a brilliant, creative, resilient workforce. 
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 of empowerment, not exclusion.