Part of 2. Questions to the Leader of the House and Chief Whip (in respect of her portfolio responsibilities) – in the Senedd at 3:01 pm on 6 December 2017.
Yes, indeed. The Member's quite right to describe it so. We're the first country in the UK to appoint an anti-slavery co-ordinator. We've established the Wales anti-slavery leadership group, as I was saying earlier in response to questions, to provide strategic leadership and guidance on how to tackle slavery in Wales, and also to provide the best possible support for survivors, which I think is a very important point as well. The leadership group does include a very large number of agencies, many of which are UK Government agencies, but also includes academia, a number of third sector organisations that are active in this area, and so on. The idea is to share the learning from Wales with other partners, including a range of UK Government departments, and we're starting to get some recognition for our work there, but it's a very complex crime to investigate and prosecute.
We need to do a lot more work with partners to develop joint training provision for senior investigating officers and Crown prosecutors, because a large part of this is (a) finding the people who are trapped in these things, and then getting a case together to actually prosecute—and then publicising the prosecution, because we do need to make sure that people who are engaged in this actually know that they will be caught and prosecuted. It's a very large part of that piece of deterrence.
We've delivered a consistent standard of anti-slavery training—that's actually quite hard to say, anti-slavery training—to 5,500 people across Wales, and there's an estimated 5,000 people benefiting again this year on that. And, of course, we've got the ethical employment in supply chains code of practice, which very much talks about all of our partners in public procurement, making sure that they ensure that their supply chains are free from these crimes. That will go a long way as well to driving some good practice into the supply chains to make sure that people are aware of how many of these things can actually be happening without them really realising. So, it will be very important for us to develop all of that learning in years to come, and I'll certainly be ensuring that we do so.