A former immigration minister has said a law on modern slavery introduced by David Cameron’s government in 2015 has been used thousands of times by illegal immigrants to escape deportation.
Chris Philp, who was immigration minister between September 2019 and September 2021, said the Modern Slavery Act had “inadvertently turned into one of the biggest loopholes in our immigration system, allowing illegal immigrants and foreign criminals to remain in the UK.”
The legislation was the brainchild of the then-Home Secretary Theresa May—who later became prime minister—who thought it would protect vulnerable people from exploitation by unscrupulous gangmasters and pimps, as well as people like Saeeda Khan, who was convicted in 2011 of exploiting a Tanzanian woman who she brought to London and made work around-the-clock as a servant for £10 a month….