SLAVERY is a thing of the past, right? It couldn’t possibly be happening here, right under our noses, in modern, decent, liberal Britain?

Wrong. Shocking new figures released by the National Crime Agency reveal that last year alone, almost 4,000 potential victims of modern slavery in the UK contacted the authorities to seek help.

Even more appalling, seven of them were in North Yorkshire. That’s right. Seven people last year in North Yorkshire - two of them children - sought help to escape from a life of slavery. It doesn’t bear thinking about.

So who are these people? And how did they end up getting trapped, degraded and abused in this way?

Most victims of modern slavery have been brought here by people traffickers. Most commonly, they are smuggled here from countries such as Albania, Romania, Poland, Vietnam or Nigeria.

Often they will have been lured here by the promise of a good job and decent wages. But once here, knowing no-one and often barely able to speak the language, they are easy victims. They’re used as unpaid domestic servants, forced labour on cannabis farms - and worst of all, perhaps, sex slaves.

Tragically, those 4,000 slavery victims identified last year may be just the tip of the iceberg. Anti-Slavery International reckons there could be as many as 13,000 people living in modern slavery in the UK today. The lesson of today’s report is that these slaves could be anywhere. Today in this newspaper we publish details of a 24-hour slavery helpline. The signs won’t be easy to spot. But if you have any reason to suspect that something is not right, please for the sake of humanity use it.