Ex-justice minister criticises lawyers over modern slavery claims

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 that the Modern Slavery Act 2015 – which was passed by David Cameron’s Conservative government – 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, claimed that 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 newspaper also reported that home secretary Priti Patel plans to legislate to ‘ensure thresholds are not set too low’, quoting a spokesperson for Liz Truss – the favourite to succeed Boris Johnson as prime minister – who said: ‘It is right that Priti has started to overhaul our abused modern slavery laws.’

But Stephen Davies, a criminal defence solicitor at Tuckers, responded on Twitter: ‘Former justice minister [Chris Philp] talks about “absurdly low levels of proof” in one breath and then in another – with an absurdly low level of proof – tarnishes immigration lawyers with the same brush. Not happy? Don’t blame the application of the law, blame the law itself.’

Philp is the third former holder of a government justice portfolio two contribute a Telegraph article in the past week, following Robert Buckland and Lucy Frazer. 

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