Our CEO, Elysia McCaffrey shares her thoughts on our 2024-25 performance.

The GLAA is moving into the third and final year of our three year strategy, and we are delighted with everything that we have achieved so far to make sure that the GLAA is an organisation that keeps vulnerable people and their safety at the heart of our decision making.

While the GLAA is small in terms of people and budget, we achieve a huge amount to the benefit of workers and modern slavery victims by working efficiently and in partnership with a range of excellent partners.

Colleagues at the GLAA achieved excellent outcomes through the last year, exceeding the organisation's previous performance. We reduced the time it takes to award a new licence to a labour provider by 70%. This important improvement means that businesses in the regulated sector are able to trade sooner. We are now making decisions in around 42 days. We increased the number of inspections that we undertook in the regulated sector by 121%, ensuring that standards for workers are high and that licensing standards are complied with.

We had a 24% increase in enforcement referrals which led to a 10% increase in enforcement cases. Each year the profile of where we see reports about modern slavery changes a little, and in the last year the highest reported sectors were the adult social care sector, agriculture, and food processing and packaging.

The GLAA has a dedicated Victim Navigator through our partnership with Justice and Care. This fantastic programme allows us to give the best possible support to victims who need specialist help. This programme provides a trusted bridge between enforcement and victim support to improve victim engagement and drive higher conviction rates. Last year 98% of victims remained engaged with us because of the excellent work of our Victim Navigator.

We are finalising our business plan for the final year of this strategy, and intend to build on the success of last year. We will be using all of the tools and intelligence at our disposal to target unlicensed gangmasters, to disrupt criminals who abuse and exploit very vulnerable people, and we will bring them to justice.

I am incredibly grateful to our partners and all of my wonderful colleagues at the GLAA who bring passion and enthusiasm to everything that we do in our bid to stop worker exploitation.