Notes on methods and sources

Ayushman Bhagat and Joel Quirk

We have compiled two databases as part of a research project in which we investigate how funding streams prioritising 'modern slavery' as a foundational category have influenced the language, methodologies, partnerships, and outputs of individuals and institutions working on systems of vulnerability and exploitation. In this piece, we highlight the methods and sources used to create both databases, followed by a discussion of some of the current limitations of the data. In an appendix, we also provide the names of the organisations that have funded (or disbursed funds for) modern slavery-related projects from/within the United Kingdom.

This version of the database was finalised on February 28, 2024 date. We anticipate updating and expanding the current versions in the future. 

Methods

The first database explores the changing landscape of modern slavery funding in the United Kingdom from 2013 to 2024. It provides a glimpse of financial transactions between various organisations aimed at addressing or understanding modern slavery related phenomena over the last decade. Information is coded to include details such as funders, recipient organisation, project title, funding amount (in GBP), award/start date, reference number, charity number, company number, as well as the names of both the principal investigator and the student involved (where applicable). We have selected 2013 as our chronological starting point because this was the year when the initial draft of the Modern Slavery Bill was first introduced to the UK Parliament.

The second database attempts to calculate the income and expenditure of UK-based registered charities that have modern slavery related terms in their objectives (or names) over the past two financial years. The information has been coded to include data on Charity Number, Charity Name, Last Recorded Financial Year, Last Recorded Income, Last Recorded Expenditure, Charity Objects, and Website. The information has been compiled for both 2022/2023 and 2023/2024. This aims to address some of the limitations associated with the lack of transparency regarding funding details in the previous database which highlights the landscape of modern slavery funding in the United Kingdom. The first database focuses on multiple funders and various types of recipient organisations. This can be contrasted with the second database, which only focuses on registered charities.

To compile both databases, we collected data and information from multiple sources: 360 Giving (GrantNav), Charity Commission, UKRI gateway, DevTracker, government annual reports, evaluation reports, Freedom of Information (FOI) reports, website scanning, email exchanges between administrative staff, official estimates, parliamentary briefings, and newspaper reports. We used keywords such as "Modern Slavery," "Human Trafficking," "Forced Labour," "Child Labour," "Forced Marriage," "Domestic Servitude," "Sex Trafficking," "Unfree Labour," "Anti-slavery," "Anti-Slavery," and "Anti-trafficking" to identify research projects that used these terminologies in their project title, abstract, or references. We initially developed separate databases originating from these keywords and then merged them before removing any duplicate files. Subsequently, we manually reviewed each record and retained only those that matched the selected keywords. Finally, we cross-checked the data by locating the projects on hosting websites, research portals, government documents, and other relevant sources.

Projects exclusively focused on the historical perspective of slavery and/or anti-slavery were not included. However, we did include some projects with a historical component that also had direct applications to contemporary framings of slavery or trafficking. Several projects included some of our keywords (especially 'forced marriage' and 'forced labour') in their abstracts, but upon closer examination, we determined that their primary focus was on other topics. To resolve these boundary cases, we used a 'tiebreaker' method by examining their core objectives and final project outputs to determine whether they were concerned with modern slavery or human trafficking related issues. Only projects with this focus were included, which meant omitting charitable organisations working on historical slave systems and their legacies (e.g., Holocaust Memorial Day Trust). Projects dealing with the application of historical experiences to contemporary issues were included (e.g., The Antislavery Usable Past).

Limitations

In this section, we provide an overview of the limitations to ensure that users have a clear understanding of the databases' strengths and areas for interpretation.

1. We have not included organisations that do not have modern slavery in their objectives in the second charities database. This has resulted in the omission of the largest charity, The Salvation Army, which holds a £379 million worth MSVCC contract. The Salvation Army works on many issues, not just modern slavery and trafficking. If we included their overall revenue figures within the database, it would have skewed the data. Additionally, we could not determine how much of the overall value of the MSVCCC contract goes to The Salvation Army (which implements the project across 3.5 locations in the UK) and how much goes to its various subcontractors (Causeway, City Hearts, Snowdrop Project, BAWSO, Black Country Women’s Aid, Hestia, Migrant Help, and Unseen). There are other projects such as the Responsible Accountable and Transparent Enterprise (RATE) which have components covering modern slavery, but we don’t know how much funding has been allocated for modern slavery alone.
   
   
2. We encountered significant challenges in gathering the exact contributions from the UK government to the Global Fund to End Modern Slavery (GFEMS). Nevertheless, it is evident that this fund constitutes a substantial pool of resources. For example, by the end of 2018, total donations to the Fund were reported to have surpassed US$110 million, as highlighted by U.S. Senator Bob Corker, chairman of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, during a hearing on progress in the global fight to end modern slavery.
   
   
3. We have relied on literature-informed estimates for certain contracts, such as the Human Trafficking Victim Care and Coordination Contract received by The Salvation Army from the Home Office. While only one audit report initially provided budget figures of £40 million, which were later adjusted to £43.2 million and then to £53.2 million by the Home Office, it was suggested in the report that the Home Office forecasts the cost to be around £90 million.
   
   
4. Faced with the uncertainty surrounding the exact figures, we eventually included the Home Office's forecast. Additionally, we estimated the current budget of the Independent Anti-Slavery Commissioner (IASC) for two years based on recent newspaper testimonials on funding cuts.
5. The Home Office has spent over £40.4 million through the Modern Slavery Fund. However, we could only retrieve information on 12 specific projects, which were mostly channelled through organisations like UNICEF, International Organisation for Migration (IOM). We decided to present only the overall total, following the latest parliamentary report, since the project information wasn’t complete.
   
   
6. Navigating the start and end dates of modern slavery-related projects posed a significant challenge, often leading to difficulty in pinpointing this information. To address this issue and ensure clarity within our databases, we adopted a pragmatic approach by using the marker of the 1st of April to signify the commencement of a project when specific start dates were unavailable. However, we encountered substantial hurdles in retrieving accurate data the end dates of many modern slavery-related projects. As a result, we made the decision not to provide end dates within our databases. 
   
   
7. Corporate consultancies are a major source of funding and income for many organisations within the anti-slavery sector, but we are not yet able to accurately capture these funding streams. Notable examples of modern slavery-related consultancies include Modern Slavery Consultants, FiftyEight, and Ardea International alongside numerous dedicated consultancies and other job opportunities in corporate sectors. Many of these funding streams are not subject to public disclosure requirements, so we are not able to include them at this stage in the project. We hope to address this gap in the future.
   
   
8. There are many university-based research projects where we were not able to identify funding information. For example, the University of Nottingham's Rights Lab website showcases over 150 research projects related to modern slavery, yet it does not provide funding numbers. It takes time to try to fill in these gaps via Freedom of Information requests, so we hope to provide further updates in the future.
   
   
9. We found it challenging to detect the money channelled to the UN Special Rapporteur (SR) on contemporary forms of slavery for visits and meetings.
   
   
10. It is hard to pin down external funders from outside the UK. This category includes funding from bilateral or multilateral organisations, state governments, trusts, charities, and corporations. These entities regularly fund UK based academics to conduct a wide range of activities, such as research projects (e.g., the US Department of State's $19.75 million Africa Programming and Research Initiative to End Slavery, the European Commission's DemandAT project - 3 million euros, VANGUARD - 4 million euros, Modern Marronage - 1.8 million euros), project evaluations (e.g., ILO/DFID's SWiFT - approximately 1 million pounds), and consultancies. Many of these projects are collaborative in nature, leading to ambiguity in tracking external funding sources and recipients. We have decided not to exclude external funding unless specifically mentioned in existing databases.
    
    
11. The database includes PhD projects focusing on modern slavery-related issues, but we have not included specific financial totals and have instead assigned each a budget of £0. We have identified at least 39 such projects, which could potentially be worth between £1.5 million to £4 million, but we don’t have firm totals due to the monetary variation in the value of different PhD projects. Similarly, we lack financial data on foundations and trusts that regularly fund PhD research projects. For instance, Ayushman Bhagat had his PhD project funded by the 'Christopher Moyes Memorial Foundation' to investigate the politics of anti-trafficking and emigration control in Nepal. As an international student, the expenditure on this project was much higher than that of domestic students conducting similar kinds of research.
    
    
12. There are a number of government-funded initiatives aimed at combating modern slavery where we have not been able to assign a financial value due to a lack of exact data. Various agencies and funding streams within the UK government prioritise 'modern slavery,' yet there isn’t sufficient financial information available on their operations. These include the Met Trafficking Team, the European Union Asylum, Migration and Integration Fund, Funding for Adult Asylum Seeker Victims of Modern Slavery Care and Coordination Services, UK Visas and Immigration's national referral processing hub, UK Human Trafficking Centre, and NCA. Each of these has reportedly been allocated budgets exceeding £1 million per year, but we could not obtain accurate financial details. Sometimes, fragments of data emerge, such as the National Audit Report for 2017, which points to substantial funding allocations, such as £1.5 million awarded to the Home Office's Modern Slavery Fund for 2017-18 and a £2 million increase in UKVI's staff training budget for its NRM hub, but we don’t feel like we have enough information to include these fragments at this time.
    
    
13. We could not retrieve information on all the modern slavery-related projects funded by British universities using their internal resources.
    
    
14. The amount of private donations received by universities to combat/understand modern slavery-related issues is not available. One Freedom of Information (FOI) request to a leading university disclosed that they received £35K in donations until 2023 for this purpose. However, due to the lack of reliable sector-wide data, this information has not been included.
    
    
15. There are also a number of discrepancies which need to be flagged:

(a) There were multiple versions of the value of MSVCC contracts. In some government spaces the value of the contract was mentioned at £281 million, however the latest parliamentary report highlighted that its now £379 million.

(b) Similarly, there were confusions regarding financial information concerning the Modern Slavery Fund. According to the government’s website, the initial promise was to spend £33.5 million. However, in the latest report presented in parliament, the government suggested that expenditure had increased to £40.4 million.

(c) There are significant discrepancies between amounts reported by individual universities and those listed on the UKRI website. For example, an FOI request to a UK university reported that approximately £95K was spent on a research project, whereas the UKRI website stated around £250K was spent on the same project. In such cases, we have relied on the information provided by the UKRI website, which may lead to inconsistencies in the reported financial data.

(d) There were inconsistencies in the financing of the Gangmasters and Labour Abuse Authority as well. Hence, we have used data from various sources: supplementary estimates, reports, and planning documents.

(e) There were ambiguities relating to the Modern Slavery and Human Rights Evidence Centre (MSPEC). During its launch, it was announced that the UK government’s Strategic Priority Fund (SPF) would invest £10 million in the establishment of MSPEC. The UKRI gateway reports that over £6.8 million of SPF money was given to Murray Hunt, the Director of MSPEC. However, there is no breakdown of the money spent by Hunt on the UKRI website. It is likely that multiple projects funded through UKRI allocation to Hunt were channelled to MSPEC (details are available on the website). In response to a Freedom of Information (FOI) request, Aberystwyth University reported on an Artificial Intelligence-related project entitled "RESTART: Reporting Experiences of Survivors To Analyze in Real Time." It seems that this project is funded by the 'Modern Slavery & Human Rights PEV-AHRC', but there is no information about this on the UKRI gateway. The precise process for distributing the funds remains uncertain. In addition to that, we know that the Foreign, Commonwealth, and Development Office directly supported the MSPEC consortium several times for different projects (e.g., survivor engagement and scoping study which led to the establishment of the global commission), but we don’t know how much funding was involved in these cases.

It should be clear from the above remarks that the funds recorded in these two databases are just the tip of the iceberg. They offer a glimpse of investments targeting modern slavery made in the UK since the Modern Slavery Bill was introduced in 2013, but they can only provide a partial picture. We plan to continuously work on it and release future versions of both databases at regular intervals. We invite scholars and practitioners not only to help us update this database, provide comments, and ask questions but also to question, analyse, compare, and even critique the business of anti-slavery in the United Kingdom.

References

1. Bhagat, Ayushman; Quirk, Joel (2024). Modern Slavery Funding Landscape in the United Kingdom (2013-2024). Brunel University London. Dataset. https://doi.org/10.17633/rd.brunel.25291315.v3
2. Bhagat, Ayushman; Quirk, Joel (2024). Modern Slavery Charity Earnings in the United Kingdom (2022&2023). Brunel University London. Dataset. https://doi.org/10.17633/rd.brunel.25292329.v2

Appendix

Names of the organisations that have funded (or disbursed funds for) modern slavery-related projects from/within the United Kingdom

The Home Office, Department for International Development (DFID), UK AID, UK Aid Horizon Europe Guarantee, Foreign Commonwealth Development Office (FCDO), Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs, Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport, Global Fund to End Modern Slavery (GEEMS), Strategic Priorities Fund (SPF), Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), Innovate UK, Future Leader Fellowship (FLF), Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF), Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), The Medical Research Council's (MRC) COVID Fund, UK Space Agency, Impact Accelerator Funds, UKRI PhD Studentships, the British Academy (BA), the British Academy Global Professorship, National Institute for Health Research (NIHR), Innovation to Commercialisation of University Research (ICURe), Capabilities in Academic Policy Engagement (CAPE), QR Policy Support Fund (QR PSF), the International Labour Organization (ILO), US Army, United States Department of State Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons Women, Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition, Yale University.

The National Lottery Community Fund, Comic Relief, Anti-Slavery International, World Childhood Foundation (Sweden), The Nuffield Foundation, Samworth Foundation, Hope at Home, Humanity United, International Justice Mission, Heart Of England, Catholic Agency for Overseas Development (CAFOD), London Mathematical Society, The Nippon Foundation, Stanford University, World Wildlife Fund, World Charity Foundation, Universitas 21, Borough Council, Public Works and Government Services Canada, Anti-Slavery International, The Co-op, The Freedom Fund, Research England, Chartered Institute for Logistics Transport and Supply Arts, European Regional Development Fund, Leicester Garment and Textile Workers Trust, Partnership for Conflict, Crime and Security Research (PaCCS), Transparentem, Verité, FLOCERT, Hermes, Minderoo Foundation, Office of the United High Commissioner for Human Rights, , NASUWT - The Teachers' Union, The Legal Education Foundation, Magna Carta Fund, The Henry Smith Charity, Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, The Tempeltation Foundation, The London Community Foundation, Trust for London, Paul Hamlyn Foundation, City Bridge Trust, John Ellerman Foundation, Lloyds Bank Foundation for England and Wales, The Baring Foundation, The Pilgrim Trust, Trust for London, The Rayne Foundation, Access to Justice Foundation, Smallwood Trust, Sam and Bella Sebba Charitable Foundation, Crisis UK, The Bell Foundation, A B Charitable Trust, The Clothworkers' Foundation, Barrow Cadbury Trust, Garfield Weston Foundation, The Tudor Trust, Mayor's Office for Policing and Crime, The Bromley Trust, Foundation Scotland, Hertfordshire Community Foundation, The Joseph Rank Trust, People's Health Trust, GMSP Foundation, The Fore, Community Foundation in Wales Charles Hayward Foundation, The Segelman Trust, Bedfordshire and Luton Community Foundation, Quartet Community Foundation, Essex Community Foundation, Suffolk Community Foundation, Rosa UK, Scottish Government, Oxfordshire Community Foundation, Cumbria Community Foundation, Community Foundation for Surrey, Scottish Council For Voluntary Organisations, London Legal Support Trust, Allen Lane Foundation, Community Foundation for Northern Ireland, London Borough of Hounslow, Greater London Authority, Imperial Health Charity, Trusthouse Charitable Foundation, Sussex Community Foundation, The Childhood Trust, Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust, Devon Community Foundation, Co-operative Group, The Grocers' Charity, Northamptonshire Community Foundation, Cambridgeshire Community Foundation, Woodward Charitable Trust, Leeds Community Foundation, The National Lottery Heritage Fund, Cheshire Community Foundation, Community Foundations for Lancashire & Merseyside, Herefordshire Community Foundation, London Catalyst Halifax Foundation for Northern Ireland, Somerset Community Foundation, The Bishop Radford Trust, Two Ridings Community Foundation, Virgin Money Foundation, Women's Fund for Scotland, and the Salvation Army.