The PEC aims to strengthen laws and policies, inform action and improve protection from harm relating to modern slavery, child exploitation, worker rights, and other related human rights issues.
We believe that prevention measures and responses to exploitation are better when shaped by what we know does and doesn’t work in the real world, based on evidence and the experiences of people most affected.
That’s why we bring together the expertise of people with lived experience of exploitation alongside researchers, practitioners, policymakers, civil society, businesses and human rights specialists.
- We focus on ensuring all our research is relevant, timely, trustworthy and accessible to decision-makers
- We translate the evidence produced by our research into practical recommendations and work to strengthen uptake by decision-makers
- We facilitate engagement between researchers and policymakers, people with lived experience, practitioners and businesses
We work to establish strong collaborative relationships with UK policymakers and officials within the international system.
We do this by building trusting and ongoing relationships with a wide variety of policymakers whom we have brought together to discuss research gaps and findings. These include officials at the Home Office, the Foreign and Commonwealth Development Office, the Ministry of Justice, the UK’s devolved Governments, and other policy actors across departments relevant to particular pieces of research.
Our policy impact approaches
We approach achieving policy impact in three different ways:
- Influencing the direct use of evidence in policy decisions and informing legislation and scrutiny of Government (instrumental impact);
- Supporting policymakers to access and understand evidence in relevant human rights policy areas and decision-making (conceptual impact);
- Building relationships between policymakers, the PEC and the wider human rights research sector (enduring connectivity).
Key attributes we strive for in our work are its accessibility and effectiveness in communicating key findings in a concise way. These include policy briefs and blogs which synthesise evidence on a topic, rate its quality and make recommendations for decision-makers.
Read our latest impact report: Modern Slavery PEC | Impact Report 2025
