The UK has launched an operation targeting human trafficking as part of efforts to cut down illegal migration and exploitation on British shores.
For the first time, the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) has revealed details of the project with Romanian authorities to crack down on trafficking gangs – and policymakers believe it could provide a model for tackling exploitative migration before it reaches the UK.
More than 1,000 Romanian healthcare professionals and social workers have been trained to identify and support modern slavery victims under the scheme, which began in 2022, details shared exclusively with The i Paper show.
Police from the country have also been seconded to UK forces to assist investigations into Romanian gangs operating on British soil as part of the scheme, and supplied with technology for investigations into trafficking networks and victim identification.
Romanian police, border officials, and prosecutors have received specialist instruction on “engaging sensitively” with survivors.
The project has so far cost £1.7m, making it more than 400 times cheaper than the botched Rwanda deportation scheme, which also aimed to crack down on people smuggling to the UK.
The Foreign Office, which is leading the project, said its efforts are helping to smash the business model of smuggling networks and reduce trafficking attempts, a key political issue and one fuelling the rise of Reform UK.
Minister for Europe, Stephen Doughty, told The i Paper that the project would help prevent exploitation and “tackle this deadly trade in human lives”.
“UK-supported experts are working with the Romanian authorities and civil society to give law enforcement, medical professionals, and potential victims more tools to stop this vile crime, preventing young women from being trafficked into modern slavery before they ever reach our borders,” he said.
Safeguarding minister, Jess Phillips, said collaboration with Romania was “ saving lives and disrupting crime at its source”.
Early indications of success
The UK is one of the main destination countries for Romanian victims trafficked abroad, according to the most recent report by the Council of Europe.
The Gangmasters and Labour Abuse Authority (GLAA) said that Romanians had historically accounted for the highest number of potential victims of labour exploitation across many sectors including car wash, construction and food processing.
But in the past year, policymakers have seen a marked drop in the number of Romanians being referred to the UK’s modern slavery support system, and say they believe the project has contributed.
In the first three quarters of 2025, there was a 18 per cent drop in referrals of Romanians to the modern slavery referral scheme compared to the same window in 2024.
After a three-year joint investigation between Romanian and British authorities, a criminal network suspected of trafficking vulnerable women for sexual exploitation was dismantled this month.
However, Dr Peter Walsh, senior researcher at the University of Oxford’s Migration Observatory, said it was too early to draw any conclusions about the efficacy of the project from the National Referral Mechanism (NRM) stats alone, warning that the number can fluctuate for a range of reasons.
The project is not specifically designed to reduce small boat crossings, but modern slavery is linked to illegal migration, with some arrivals forced to cross to the UK or sold false promises such as legal employment.
More than one in ten small boat arrivals were referred to the NRM for possible modern slavery between 2018 and 2024, government statistics show.
Project could be pilot to stop trafficking
Walsh said that the Government was likely to be treating the project as a “pilot” for other countries, because Romania is not the worst offender for trafficking modern slavery to the UK.
“The number of Romanian nationals in the NRM is actually quite modest in absolute terms; its a few hundred each year. In 2024, it wasn’t even in the top 10 nationality referrals to the NRM,” he said.
“We have data on the location of exploitation in the modern slavery statistics, and from 2014 to the end of September 2025, Romania actually ranks 22nd in terms of source countries, so it’s not that high up.”
How Romanians are trafficked to the UK
In 2021, nearly a quarter of the potential victims of slavery, servitude and forced labour encountered by the GLAA were Romanian.
Criminals frequently use social media sites to search for victims, a UK government report on trafficking from Romania found.
Female victims are usually transported to the UK via budget airlines, posing as a friend or partner of their trafficker, while larger male groups are often transported by car, coach or minibus, it found.
In November, a car wash owner was jailed for trafficking and exploiting eight Romanians – including a 15-year-old boy – after a five-year investigation by the Met Police.
The group had been trafficked to the UK under false promises of legal work, accommodation and food, but on arrival had their IDs seized and were forced to work at a car wash, while living in a small room on-site, and were abused, the Met said.
Walsh suggested that Romania had been chosen in part for operational reasons, and may provide a testing ground for the project in an allied country.
“This is a modest sum of money, and so even though it doesn’t say this explicitly, it may very well be something like a pilot; testing to see how far that £1.7m goes in terms of identification [of victims], provision of support, and whether there’s actionable intelligence that could facilitate actually disrupting trafficking gangs.”
The UK is home to a large community of Romanians with the legal right to live here. Romanians received the highest number of grants of settled status – allowing them to permanently reside and work in the UK – of any European country in the year ending October 2025.
The FCDO may now try to open up similar projects in countries that rank higher for modern slavery referrals, such as Albania or Vietnam.
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In 2024, the last year for which there is complete data, 74 per cent of those referred to the NRM were from foreign countries.
Of the foreign nationals referred to the system, 59 per cent were thought to have been exploited overseas, rather than in the UK, most commonly in Libya.
The most common nationality for referrals from 2014 to 2024 was Albanian, followed by Vietnamese, Eritrean and Sudanese.
The UK Government has taken a different approach to Albanian exploitation, which “focused specifically on the accelerated return of Albanian nationals identified as victims of modern slavery or trafficking”, said Marija Jovanović, a human rights lawyer and co-investigator at the Modern Slavery and Human Rights Policy and Evidence Centre, at the University of Oxford.
Jovanović said that the FCDO project with Romania “seems to me like a better approach to international co-operation and partnerships, which is grounded in the ECAT”, the Council of Europe’s Convention on Action against Trafficking, to which the UK is also a party.
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