I am writing to you under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 to request the following information from your local authority. This Freedom of Information request is made to access to data in relation to children referred by your local authority to the National Referral Mechanism (NRM) for children who were identified as potential victims of modern slavery. Therefore, I would like you to provide me with:
What was the location of the exploitation in the UK for children referred to NRM as potential victims of modern slavery by your local authority in 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023? Please state how many of exploitations referred in 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023 happened in England and Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland.
We cannot provide any data or information prior to January 2023 as we did not collate this and we therefore do not hold this.
Since January 2023, we do not hold a central record and we now do it manually whilst we work on a solution to basic data collection via MASH (which is currently in progress). This would require a manual trawl to try and work out the locations which only then would be a vague location. The manual work to review our records would take longer than 18 hours and therefore, pursuant to section 12 of the Freedom of Information Act 200, we are not obliged to provide this information.