Dr Caroline Emberson and Selim Yilmaz, academics at the University of Nottingham’s Rights Lab – the world’s largest group of modern slavery scholars - are conducting research to help provide a more accurate answer to the headline's question.

Working alongside Voice of Domestic Workers, the Filipinas domestic workers’ organisation Kanlungan and the Latin American Women’s Rights Service, Caroline and Selim are conducting the first, statistically generalisable estimate, of the nature and extent of labour exploitation experienced by domestic workers in the UK.

Here Dr Emberson explains what the study entails:

We are using a statistical estimation method called ‘Generalised Network Scale Up” which will allow us to provide for the first time an estimate of the scale of exploitation across various communities of domestic workers in the UK, including migrant workers.

Domestic workers are believed to be a group at risk of exploitation and abuse due to the isolated nature of their work and the possibility that some migrant workers may drop out of their legal migration status, due to current UK domestic worker visa regulations which limit the length of time that they can work legally in the UK as a domestic worker to no more than 6 months. This may tempt those who wish to continue to stay and work in the UK to continue in private employment without the legal right to work, leaving them vulnerable to labour abuses in the form of illegal wages, excessive working hours, unacceptable living conditions and, should they complain, deportation.

As Margaret Beels, the Director of Labour Market Enforcement, has tweeted earlier this month,

“Some high-risk sectors are well understood whilst others are less. [We need to better understand] what factors create the risks and how can they be addressed.”

While the online survey closes at the end of June 2023, the Rights Lab hope to publish a preliminary descriptive report in the autumn with the full result available later, subject to satisfactory peer review.

This, and other, Rights Lab research to help end modern slavery by 2030 can be found under the ‘Resources’ tab at the Rights Lab website: https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/research/beacons-of-excellence/rights-lab/resources/index.aspx.