By Samantha Jones-
A former immigration minister has criticised human rights lawyers for allegedly helping individuals make ‘bogus’ modern slavery claims and called for reform to stop the law being ‘exploited and abused’.
Chris Philp MP said there had been loopholes in the Modern Slavery Act 2015 which was passed by David Cameron’s Conservative government, describing it as one that has ‘inadvertently turned into one of the biggest loopholes in our immigration system’.
The Conservative MP, a Home Office minister between 2020 and 2021 and a former junior justice minister, criticised the application of the law. He said some lawyers ‘even submit copy-and-paste claims for different clients without bothering to change the details’. He also suggested modern slavery claims are often made by people ‘shortly after meeting an immigration lawyer for the first time’.
Writing in the Telegraph today, the former justice minister said that ‘the threshold of proof required for a successful modern slavery claim [has been lowered] to an absurdly low level – a vaguely plausible sounding claim with no supporting evidence whatsoever is now simply accepted’.
The Mps condemnation for the current system is one that calls for thorough review to ensure a reliable and credible system which is not open to exploitation. It is currently being examined by legal bodies to be analysed carefully for the establishment of fact.
Both the Law Society and the Ministry Of Justice are expected to contribute to a broader examination of those issues, widening the pool of ideas to strengthen the immigration system in the Uk and ensure it is not open to preventable exploitation .
The newspaper also reported that home secretary Priti Patel plans to legislate to ‘ensure thresholds are not set too low’. Immigration issues in the Uk has long been controversial, with multiple complaints over the years about a weak boarder and shabby rules which makes the Uk an easy target for illegal immigrants.
Immigrants make up an estimated 18% of the employed population (5.9 million) in the third quarter of 2021. The share of workers employed in the UK who were born abroad has steadily increased since 2004 (9.1% of the emp
Research shows a very small impact of overall immigration on employment and unemployment of UK-born workers, though this effect is stronger among those with lower levels of education. A dozen studies conducted between 2003 and 2018, MAC (2018) concluded that immigration had had little impact on average wages.
The MAC (2018) estimated that an increase in the number of EU migrants corresponding to 1% of the UK-born working-age population resulted in a 0.8% decrease in UK-born wages at the 5th and 10th percentiles (people in the bottom 5-10% of earners), and a 0.6% increase at the 90th percentile (high earners).
The implication is that between 1993 and 2017, the total effect of EU migration on the wages of UK-born workers was estimated to be a 4.9% reduction in wages for those at the 10th earnings percentile, a 1.6% reduction at the 25th percentile, a 1.6% increase at the 50th percentile, and a 4.4% increase at the 90th percentile.
Researchers also found that any adverse wage effects of immigration are likely to be greatest for resident workers who are themselves migrants. This is because the skills of new migrants are likely to be closer substitutes for the skills of migrants already employed in the UK than for those of UK-born workers.