The Metropolitan Police told an all-party parliamentary group in July that 70 of the survivors who reported sexual abuse by Mohamed Al Fayed bore the hallmarks of human trafficking. That is almost half of the 165 victims the force is investigating directly. The Home Office has so far confirmed exactly five as trafficking victims. The gap between 70 and 5 is not a backlog. It is a system operating as designed. The mechanism is straightforward. The National Referral Mechanism — the official pathway for recognising trafficking victims — requires the person to be resident in the UK. The Home Office's statutory guidance says so explicitly, because the process is tied to support services like safe houses and counselling. The independent anti-slavery commissioner Eleanor Lyons confirms this reading. So when the Met tried to refer survivors living abroad, the Home Office rejected them. The Met has now paused all such referrals. This would be a narrow procedural issue if the survivor population were mostly domestic. It is not. KP Law, which represents 278 alleged survivors, says nearly a quarter now live overseas. The trafficking itself crossed borders — women were moved between Harrods, Fayed's Park Lane offices, his Surrey estate, and the Ritz in Paris. A system designed for domestic support has been applied to a fundamentally international pattern of abuse, and the mismatch is not accidental. The case of Amy illustrates the contradiction precisely. She wrote to the safeguarding minister in June raising concerns about the exclusion of overseas residents. The Home Office replied in August saying residence was not a requirement for referral. A month later, her Met contact officer told her the Home Office had confirmed it would reject referrals for international residents. Two directly contradictory statements from the same department within weeks. Liberal Democrat MP Wendy Chamberlain and Labour MP Dave Robertson, co-chairs of the APPG, both argue the confirmed trafficking numbers will climb significantly. More than 500 women have come forward about abuse allegedly spanning Harrods, Park Lane, Fulham FC, the Ritz, and other Fayed properties. The scale comparison to Jimmy Savile is not hyperbolic — it is structural. Both cases involve a wealthy man using institutional infrastructure to move victims to locations he controlled. The Home Office response follows a familiar pattern: tribute to survivor bravery, commitment to support, zero structural concession. The anti-slavery commissioner is calling for the residency requirement to be dropped, arguing that many survivors simply want formal recognition, not access to UK safe houses. The government is, in her words, "doing directly the opposite" of making identification easier. What is operating here is not a policy gap but an extraction pattern. The NRM was built for a different kind of trafficking case — domestic, discovered in-country, victim present. When applied to a case involving a billionaire who moved women across borders using private transport, corporate infrastructure, and institutional complicity, the system filters out exactly the people it should be catching. The bureaucratic friction is not neutral. It systematically favours institutional convenience over survivor recognition.
